Sharon Kivland
L’esprit d’escalier
A revised version of a paper given in ‘Outside/In: architecture, psychoanalysis, and spaces in-between’ at the Freud Museum, London, in June 2006, during ‘Architecture Week' (Arts Council of England).
The text ostensibly pursues the references to domestic architecture in the dreams of Sigmund Freud as a narrative, while the subtext expresses anxiety, loss, and the revisiting of a subjective past – oh, and the forgetting of a lovely pair of shoes, as the author and Freud miss a collision on the stairs of 19 Bergasse, Vienna. The text is punctuated by a series of black and white photographs, taken on the stairs of the same apartment block, as the author searched for her title, her shoes, and her subject.
