Dwelling in Liminality by Eduardo Hall Abreu

I remember arriving at UCU for the first time. It was an uncomfortably hot summer’s day, and I had missed my bus on the way to Utrecht and gotten lost meandering the streets of that overwhelmingly new, fantastical land. For the Southern European, the organization was uncanny, and the beauty was so grand that it edged on artificial. And there I was, amidst it all, drenched in sweat, carrying my huge bag with all my belongings. A fringe skinny figure, towered by the blonde Dutch men. Like a smudge in one of those grand romantic paintings. 

I climbed three flights of Kromhout stairs, hugging my nearly bursting suitcase. And finally, I arrived at what would be my room for the next year. But it wasn’t really a room. There was no furniture, no decoration, no memories, no associations. It was even too neutral, too meaningless for me to call it a prison cell. It was pure empty greyness. 

And there I sat in unadulterated betweenness. I had left my past self, but had not yet arrived at my future one. That Kromhout room was not my home; it was a waiting room. Waiting for the arrival of meaning, of ownership and connection. But at that moment, there was utter nothingness. I was not even an official UCU student. Trapped in the infinite web of bureaucratic purgatory, my documents had not yet been accepted. Even administratively, I occupied the nebulous territory of transition. I lay in between space, rootless. This overflowing nothingness engulfed me completely, and as the ground broke beneath me, I entered the vast emptiness of liminal space. 

The crumbling of the earth gave rise to the untamed stream of anxiety, despair, impotence and all names I can name for the unnamed phenomenality of emotional chaos. While sitting in that empty Kromhout room, I was not in any physical place, but I wasn't really nowhere either; I was being sludged around powerless in the violent, unbounded sea of my own mental creations. 

But the vacuity of liminal spaces allows them to be filled with all kinds of colours, not just despair. As I’ve come to see, the liminal space is defined not by any particular characteristic shape or feature, but by an ambiguous cluster of open properties or feelings. It is transiency, betweenness, ambiguity, movement, and disorientation. There’s no inherent quality, no inherent value to the liminal expanse. Thus, it can take on a vast array of wildly different flavours. In fact, I don’t even think liminality is definable. Its whole purpose (and perhaps the reason why it fascinates me so much) is to be between definitions. And so, I’ll say about liminal spaces what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography: ‘I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced... but I know it when I see it...’. Knowing when to see liminality requires practice, however. Though once you get to know its quirks, it begins to greet you everywhere, in all its majestic plurality. 

The morning after my little liminal breakdown, I too was greeted with new forms of liminality. A knock from my unit-mate awoke me from my neurotic slumber. I discreetly wiped the tears from my cheeks as she invited me to a cute little unit lunch to get to know each other. Ah, the first step into new ground. I was no longer alone; I could even begin to see the sprouts of new territory. And suddenly all became tangible again; smaller, calmer, less scary. Space slowly rebuilt itself, and my sea of despair sank into the newly formed earth. I could stand again, I could even walk. And so I did, around the now less terrifying, but still plenty fantastic campus. 

The ruffling disorder of arrival days had settled into a strangely quiet weekend. The brutal heat turned into a cool, pleasant breeze, and so did my mind settle back into my body as I walked purposelessly around the empty campus lanes. I surveyed every corner I could find, slowly birthing new perceptions. As I met a new building, a new tree, I would stay with it for a while, absorbing it, making it real. My betweenness wasn’t so overwhelming anymore. In fact, I began to enjoy the disorientation, to enjoy the liminality. 

As I headed further toward the campus’ southwest bound, space became ever so emptier, eerier. Each step brought me further down the liminal corridor. Bike parks without bikes, tables without people, classrooms without students. And I, an equally empty observer, a student without classes, a tenant without furniture. 

There’s an intriguing displacement to the liminal aesthetic, a certain matter out of place. Functionality ripped off its material habitat. The classic abandoned mall, the empty hallway or the deserted parking lot you’d find on r/liminalspaces: the place is there, but its function is missing, its dynamic life-force sucked out. The structure holds upright, but is empty and stagnant. It’s not even a place anymore. No, a place requires aliveness, both the space and the function that fills it, matter and the form that actualizes it! Now, only the ruins of what it once was remain, or the unfulfilled potential of what it could be. Only space is left, deserted of character. It is as if you grabbed the unified scene and ripped off its essence, doubly displacing it as you took the place out of matter. 

And there I was, a displaced wanderer moving through a displaced scenery. Suddenly, amidst all this liminal spectacle, I was taken aback by a vague, distant sound, a coming and going, chaotic but stable with sparse emergent patterns. I was nearing the edge of campus, and the sound became louder and clearer. Slowly, it started to depart from the nebulous terrain of noise and ambiguity into the differentiated land of meaning and concepts. And then, like magic, in a single thought-moment, my mind finally left its cognitive liminality and ascended to a fully fledged perception: cars bustling down the highway. Of course! Oh, the highway! Juxtaposed on a university campus, what beautiful displacement! And the highway of all things, the classic locus of transition, sitting at the core of betweenness, its sole essence being to move those who come upon it. I’d done it, I had finally done it! I had reached peak liminality. 

Since then, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the liminal feeling. I don’t quite understand why it seduces me so much. Perhaps it is the strange relief of lying between my habitual categories, breaching out of bounds. While I abide in this null, undefined space, I briefly escape the ongoing cacophony of daily life. The solidity and unquestioned realness of my anxieties dissolves away into the mist of liminality. An airy mystical peace settles in, a mysterious wonder, a disoriented beauty. 

Yet, much like learning to know how to see the liminal, it takes practice to know how to dwell in it safely. The breaking away of the habitual chains which hold reality together can just as easily manifest a peaceful freedom as release an uncontrollable concoction of emotional turmoil (of the kind I was overtaken by when I arrived at UCU). Emotions float free in the liminal dimension, thoughts collide with each other violently, unconstrained. And so, one must carefully practice searching for the spaces in between, and one must carefully practice staying there, dwelling in the liminal feeling. Letting one’s self be taken away with it, an empty ‘I’ in an empty space. 

Liminality lies everywhere, but it takes some effort to absorb it. One of my favorite ways to find it is to look at a familiar object from an unfamiliar perspective. Throughout the past year, I’ve found myself spending countless hours contorting my neck in weird configurations to try and capture liminal trees. A weird, magical angle, where you can tell it's a tree, but you don’t know where it ends, where it begins: a perfect framing which ignites the characteristic displacement element of liminality. The branches subdivide infinitely in a fractal manner; you lose track of perspective and fall in between perceptual categories. Familiar enough not to be noise, but ambiguous enough not to be concrete. Therein lies liminal liberation. 

It’s been almost two years since the day I arrived at UCU for the first time. Since then, I have filled that room with the meanings and memories it deserved. And just as I had broken down at my arrival in reaction to my unborn room, so did I break down again at my departure in reaction to its meaning-stained emptiness. And I’ve come and gone many times by now, playing with the betweenness of space. 

Another year has gone by, and I’ve spent the past four days abiding in liminality, as I packed away my memory-drenched possessions and emptied yet a different room, no object immune to meaning. I was no longer living there anymore - packing is not living, it’s departing, but I had not yet come back home, either. Without a physical space to stand on, I dwelled in the land of memory, reopening half-healed wounds, reliving the times with those who made me, yet are no longer a part of my life. 

And as I eventually left that murky land of memory and landed back into the safe path of earth I call home, I realized: all space is liminal. Always in transition, always in between what it was and what it will be. Only sometimes, it moves so slowly we think it stopped changing, so we deem it stable; or it moves so fast, we can’t even perceive it anymore. I’m guessing that the beauty of the liminal aesthetic is that it shows us spaces just at the right scale, in order for us to breach the bounds of perception and take a peek at the underlying betweenness of all things. In reality, all space is liminal. Always departing. Always returning.