Savas Patsalidis

Each day I wonder with what or with whom can I co-exist in a true union.
Adrienne Kennedy, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White.

It is always right
to name the place you move in.
to name these people now.
wherever you are
they come upon you like an image. Jay Wright, "The Master of Names."

Black American culture is a very fragmented thing. We're all trying to
come up with some definition of what we are.
My absolute definition of me is the schizophrenia, the contradiction.
George Wolfe ( 1986).

Heterotopias, for Michel Foucault, are "real places--places that do exist and
that are formed in the very founding of society which are something like
counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the
other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously
represented, contested, and inverted." Because hoterotopias are "capable of
juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in
themselves incompatible," Foucault likens these cultural counter-sites to an
epistemological mirror where "I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal,
virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I
am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables
me to see myself there where I am absent. ... From the standpoint of the mirror
I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there.
Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground
of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward
myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute
myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect:
It makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the
glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and
absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this

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