11 Quotes by Alastair Bonnett

When the world has been fully codified and collated, when ambivalences and ambiguities have been so sponged away that we know exactly and objectively where everything is and what it is called, a sense of loss arises.

The rise of placelessness, on top of the sense that the whole planet is now minutely known and surveilled, has given this dissatisfaction a radical edge, creating an appetite to find places that are off the map and that are somehow secret, or at least have the power to surprise us.

The most fascinating places are often also the most disturbing, entrapping, and appalling. They are also often temporary. In ten years’ time most of the places we will be exploring will look very different; many will not be there at all.

Modern places are made up of layers of incomplete visions of the future, and the result is a permanent state of impermanence.

As a result, Hobyo is as good an example as any of a “feral city.” It’s a term that is used in military circles to describe regions that have no effective government but sustain an internationally networked criminal economy. Feral cities are the ragged end of spaces of exception: they are not the product of governments or ideologies but show what happens when such structures fall away.

Borders are about claims to land, but as soon as you draw one you limit yourself. Every border is also an act of denial, an acknowledgment of another’s rights. By contrast, the claim to want no borders, much prized by corporate executives and anticapitalist activists alike, is a claim to the whole world. Borders have a far more ambivalent and complex relationship to territory; they combine both arrogance and modesty, both demand and denial.

Place is the fabric of our lives, memory and identity are stitched through it. Without having somewhere of one’s own, a place that is home, freedom is an empty word.

The destruction of old Mecca goes hand in hand with the ban on non-Muslims entering the city, as well as the center of Medina. Both are attempts to cleanse the city of historical complexity. The road signs on the freeway into Mecca spell it out: “Muslims Only.

The city is a place where nature is excised and then mourned, killed off then raised from the dead, only to be entombed in caged-off spaces of floral tribute.