A Story To Tell: Seeing Through the Minds of Two Admirals

The main reason why Propen developed her own methodological framework to understand visual artifacts is to connect them to space, place, and body. With Foucault’s theory of heterotopias, Propen manages to maintain the importance of cultural and social contexts, history, and memory practices and how these elements shape the meaning of heterotopias. By bringing in Blair’s material rhetoric, she reveals how individual, bodily experiences have an impact on the meaning of heterotopias. However, it is also important to understand how social and cultural contexts, history, and memory practices connect with individual, bodily experiences and how this connection shapes heterotopias. Ryden’s approach to the connection between space and place provides the missing link in the visual-material rhetoric of heterotopias.

 

Ryden (1993) focuses on the connection between the concepts of space and place in his work Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and Sense of Place. By explaining how geographical space and experienced place work together, Ryden supports Propen’s visual-material rhetoric of heterotopias. Foucault provides the idea that heterotopias, as spaces which can be found in every culture and civilization, carry the mark of the cultural context in which they were produced. In this sense, they become more than geographical spaces on earth; they also carry meaning. Blair brings in how individual, bodily experiences have a consequence on the meaning of heterotopias, which reveals the idea that spaces are experiences by people and are given a different level of meaning through these experiences. Ryden helps us to connect Foucault’s heterotopias and Blair’s experienced heterotopias and to understand both cultural context and individual experiences as significant parts of creating places filled with different levels of meaning.