Sharon Kivland
L’Esprit d’escalier
information as material, 2007
A revised version of a paper
given in ‘Outside/In: architecture, psychoanalysis, and spaces in-between’ at
the Freud Museum, London, in June 2007, during ‘Architecture Week (Arts Council
of England), the text ostensibly pursues the references to domestic
architecture in he 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 Berggasse, 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.