Undeniably the notion of distance is marked by a degree of scientific exactitude: it accounts for the measured gap between one thing and another; it indicates the criticality of the objective glance. Yet it is also, by contrast, a term riddled with ambiguity, an imprecise concept that has spatial, temporal and psychological connotations. Distance is an illusionary place that is always beyond reach. It describes an imaginary elsewhere that hovers at the point of the horizon; it draws forward faint recollections from a faraway past. Distance is a term that is conceptually brought into play in proverbial and anthropological accounts of both individual and collective social behaviour. It might function as a marker by which all human interactions are coded and defined. The social dynamic between oneself and an acquaintance, accomplice, or authority figure; a soul mate, sibling, or stranger, has designated spatial and emotional properties that might flutter between affinity and difference; between proximity and separation.

The act of distancing oneself can be viewed as a gesture of both critical and cathartic intention, indicating the desire for a neutral position free from the influence of emotion or subjectivity; or signalling a psychological retreat, a defensive move of introspective withdrawal and recuperation. It is an action performed perhaps in search of clarity, marked by the need to rationalise and order; or by a wish to exclude unwanted or undesirable elements from one’s thought processes or field of vision. Keeping at a distance is a reactive solution to a perceived threat, where dangerous or pollutant substances are kept at arm’s length, beyond reach. Here, preserving a sense of distance or separation might be plagued by the fear of boundaries being transgressed; of one’s personal space becoming invaded; and of the possibility of letting down one’s guard. It might also be marked by the wish for things to remain unchanged: building barriers and sealing points of entry arguably reduces the risk of infiltration or contamination, whilst classificatory logic prevents disorder and confusion by keeping things in their place. At its extreme, the desire to preserve a condition of separation has significant political connotations. For here, the idea of maintaining distance harbours conservative intentions that are intolerant of social change and of cultural difference; or else reflects the impossible quest for a social hiatus in which things perpetually remain the same. It might evoke a sense of nostalgia or longing for times more certain and stable, for the historical glance is often one of restoring balance and continuity in response to the temporal and existential disorientation of the present moment.

However, the hermetically sealed system is ironically the greatest threat to such stability: stasis soon becomes stagnation; gestures of protection might serve to smother or suffocate; and the suspended moment will inevitably begin to jade. Without the possibility of development and renewal, all social systems collapse and cease to be nothing more than museum relics or empty shells. Medically speaking, the notion of stasis occurs when all life has vanished, once the pulse has stopped and the blood has stilled. The sealed body becomes the monstrous symbol of the waking dead. The closed system or city space becomes a lifeless vacuum that promises to implode.

In some senses the tourist or heritage site is at risk of becoming a sealed system, where a culture industry of conservationists, preservationists, capitalists and public relations departments, work tirelessly to maintain and market a packaged version of some chosen reality. A certain moment of history is selected; a specific eco-culture is deemed worthy; one singular or particular viewpoint or panorama is designated as a signature motif. For many, the experience of the tourist site is a distant and mediated encounter in which experiences are collectively processed through the perspective of a guidebook; and where memories are validated and controlled by the purchase of the postcard or souvenir. For others, however, there will always remain the desire to rupture the surface of a place in search of its beating heart, the urge to dislodge its façade to reveal an alternative reality beneath.

The cultural activities of any city are vital in maintaining a sense of dynamism within the social system; where the exchange and flow of ideas and influences operate as a pulsional force providing civic spaces with potentiality and possibility. By inviting a group of Sheffield based artists to make new work in response to Salzburg, the city’s boundaries are offered as permeable and an exchange of ideas and practices is set in motion. The act of exchange itself is a means by which thresholds are crossed and borders made porous: it suggests a mutual bind in which something has been given but also gained, reciprocally offered and received. An exchange between Sheffield and Salzburg might be understood as an attempt to bridge the distance between the two spaces and to enable a dialogue or conversation to emerge between these geographically separated zones of lived experience. In becoming a host, the city subjects itself to interrogation and investigation; it is offered as a space to be explored and inhabited. The work in the exhibition reflects different individual’s attempts to negotiate and navigate a relationship with the city; a place that would seem to be more accustomed to the enamoured gaze of the visiting tourist. Attempting to disrupt the sleek veneer of the city, diverse tactics are employed in order to attempt to resurrect or resuscitate a latent or buried reality with which to enter into meaningful exchange: to create gaps and fissures in order that the city may begin to breathe. The work might in some ways attempt to subvert or bypass, challenge or critique the glossy image of Salzburg which is experienced through the guidebooks and tourist sites; in search of an alternative or unauthorised version of the city which might feel more analogous to the lived reality of Sheffield.

The attempt to subvert or collapse fixed meanings and stable identities is at the heart of George Bataille’s concept of informe, an operation in which the conditions of horizontality, base materialism, entropy and pulse, set in motion a process of declassification or categorical slippage. A number of artists in the exhibition employ a similar gesture of disturbance within their work, in order to blur the distinction or reduce the distance between the categories of past and present; here and there; self and other; interiority and exteriority. Bev Stout’s etched glass postcards pivot and rotate to reveal a mutable or fluid interpretation of the city as a space for individual reverie. Amanda Lane proposes a temporal portal or threshold through which moments of the past may be re-imagined in the present. Heidi Schaefer’s work, by contrast, extends beyond individual geographies in order to reflect upon the political positions adopted by the two countries in response to war. Digitally altering maps of the two cities is a means of redefining their borders and offering new spatial configurations, whilst the presence of granite enables a wider exploration of the notion of history and distance. In other works, artists endeavour to reintroduce a pulse or vibration, through which the city’s Baroque folds and drapes may be coaxed back into life. Silvia Champion searches for the heart of each city in coffee houses and local newspapers, presenting an audio work in which a conversation between the atmospheres of Sheffield and Salzburg is played out across a café table. For Lorna Knowles the contrasting psychological resonance of each place is visualised as a specific vibration that sets in motion a projection of drapery, which beats and tremors intermittently to the rhythm of each city. The throb of a wind turbine in Sheffield has been rendered virtually in Julie Westerman’s work, generating both an illusionary breeze and an electrical current, which appears to cause the fluttering of a heartbeat in the city of Salzburg. An electrical charge or current; a transfusion or exchange; the giving of gifts or a gesture of romantic intent, are all tactics employed in these works in order to stir a pulse, or broker a relationship with another.

Other artists in the exhibition draw attention to various approaches through which the city’s present has been suspended, in order perhaps that its past may be preserved. Helen de Main draws reference from the protective canopies and scaffolding that adorn the city’s architectural fountains and monuments during the off-peak months of the year, in sculptures that reveal a sense of the absurd, inherent in cloaking or wrapping a civic monument. Her shrouds and covers are empty; the objects of attention have disappeared. For Conroy/Sanderson the shroud or hood is emblematic of the divide between privilege, class and history. Their hooded figures seem uncomfortably out of place in their surroundings; they offer a gesture of mute critique in response to repressive or conservative regimes. Andrew Tebbs also focuses upon individuals who are often marginalised or displaced by society. He is interested in exploring the boundaries or distance that exists between people, creating a gap or pause in which to contemplate the realities of others.

At the heart of all social encounter and exchange exists a moment of pause; of reflection or reservation; of criticality even. The desire to enter into dialogue with another is arguably built upon the search for affinity, an attempt to reduce the gap or distance between oneself and another. Yet ironically, it is also a gesture in which cultural and social differences or particularities become pronounced: for the process of exchange offers a moment of illumination or clarity through which to reconsider one’s own beliefs and values as well as those of others. When exchange involves travelling to another place, the specificity of the newly occupied landscape becomes a focus of contrast and comparison with the familiarity of one’s everyday surroundings. Being in a different place however, also serves to distance the familiar and the known, such that a fresh and perhaps more critical vantage point may be developed through this geographically displaced perspective. The sense of distance experienced by being elsewhere subjects the commonplace or unnoticed elements of one’s habitual environment to the scrutiny of the objective glance. Cultural distance thus encourages the development of different positions and experiences in order that new social meanings and perspectives might be negotiated, constructed or contested. Rather than striving to dissolve or assimilate difference, a notion of cultural distance enables a more complex dialogic or empathetic relationship with other’s pasts and presents, as well as with one’s own.

This text was commissioned as an exhibition essay for Distance, an exhibition of work emerging from an exchange between artists from S1 Artspace, Sheffield and Galerie5020, Salzburg, which took place in Salzburg from 21.09.06 - 07.10.06.