ELSEWHERE NO. 03
The third edition of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, published March 2016.
Places...
Yangon, Myanmar by Alex Cochrane
“A hazy golden light pours over the city, the prelude to another beautiful sunset in Myanmar. It is the social hour. Yangonites sit on the lines, chatting away as the train lumbers past them. The stations, sometimes no more than a sign and a concrete strip, have become playgrounds for children and pecking grounds for hens.”
Lapland, Sweden by Saskia Vogel
“When I woke, I stood at the window of the bunk-room and stared out. I no longer saw the landscape, I saw treachery. On a snow-free shore of the half-frozen lake was a Sami summer village, still empty. There was nothing up here for the reindeer to eat, so they hadn’t made their way up, and so the Sami had not yet followed either.”
Berlin, Germany by Paul Scraton
“We walk through a dead zone, an edgeland cityscape populated by car showrooms and industrial estates devoted to niche businesses. China Tours offer us “YOUR WAY TO THE MIDDLE KINGDOM”. A furniture workshop tantalises us with the promise to transform our living room. A karate club will allow us to walk these very streets with an increased sense of serenity.”
Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada by Knut Tjensvoll Kirching
“Language is at the heart of understanding a place, and hearing how a place is described by those who live there is to hear the sound of a place – the hushed sibilance of wind across heather, and the sounds of people singing into being their ancestors, giants, unseen beings and journeys across huge expanses of ice and tundra."
Belfast, Ireland by Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh
“The mountain now took on even greater significance, a place to reflect and remember. A place to find space and solace, to grieve… with beauty and pain present everyday thereafter. And in memory of Terry Óg, on its highest point was placed a cairn: a permanent stone landmark, used by native peoples for millennia to declare their right to remember, honour and defend their shared land.”
Faversham Creek, England by Caroline Millar
“What is it about these liminal places that attracts us? That draw in the writer, photographer, poet, psychogeographer? Places that once had a very deliberate function (a boatyard); objects that were built for a practical use (boats, train carriages); all stripped of their meaning. Maybe this inbetween state, where decay creeps in but hasn’t rendered a place completely unfamiliar, gives us the hope that they could be recovered.”
Honshū, Japan by Laurence Mitchell
“The temple here is considered to be the sacred centre of all the Kumano Kodō routes. The large fluttering banners that flank its entrance bear the temple’s distinctive emblem, the yatagarasu, a supernatural figure in the form of a three-footed crow with raised wings.”
Trieste, Italy by Paul Scraton
“Like the best port towns, Trieste was an appealing jumble of contradictions and difference, built by many hands from many different lands, and yet tinged with a melancholy of what had been lost that I sensed even then, on my first exploration of its streets.”
Plus…
An interview with Darran Anderson on Imaginary Cities
Photographer Kate Seabrook on her Endbahnhof project
Illustration from Dylan White and the Maunsell Sea Forts
Reviews…
The Outer Cologne Green Belt
The Edge of the World by Michael Pye
The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth
