Place

   

Eduardo Chilllida asked himself if “place” is not some sort of unmoving energy. Then, he went on and asked a further question: “to occupy a place and have no measure: would not be that space?”

   Our intuition of space is based on the movements that we make within a cloud of gas that we call air on the surface of a quasi-sphere, our home planet. Upon that we have built a conceptual web for composing those intuitions into a set of consistent statements, geometry. But geometry uses ideal objects which are not part of our intuitions: points, entities without physical dimension and that unlike numbers have no-individuation. We cannot expect geometry to shed any light on our intuition of space, for space for us is the result of our vital action, the energy that we project around creating an image of the world. We can easily understand what a place is: a scenario for a particular action. But space is not the set of all places, for there is not a set of all actions outside our conceptual imagination. Space functions in our talking as an unnoticed hypostasis. For Chillida, space is the non-performed action, which of course has no measure. But then again, that would only be a geometrical intuition of space, the mathematical dream of existence beyond the life that thought about it.