During my secondment in London (5th November–7th December), I conducted a month of ethnographic fieldwork through walking, conversations, observations, and collecting ephemera across public transport, cultural centres, and key urban spaces. My exploration centred on:
• How does in/visibility shape socio-cultural identities and spatial narratives?
• What forms of affective agency and creative resistance arise at liminal edges?
• How is empathetic exchange experienced amidst shifting social and spectral borders?
Collage as Method: Encountering the Unseen
Collage emerged as both a research method and an analytical framework, allowing for unexpected discoveries rather than predetermined conclusions. Encounters with zines at Freedom Bookshop became ephemeral traces of urban narratives, brutalist architecture of the Barbican winked back as though visceral traces of historical violence made tangible through architecture, rental ads in Southall offering box rooms, underscored the stark realities of urban precarity, creative shop signs in Kilburn became revealing layers of displacement and creative tactics of everyday.
With Whom Do We Share a Seat? Empathy as affect
I looked for embodied traces of empathy in urban settings, considering how they manifest in everyday encounters. Empathy, in this context, emerged as an affective sense of being in space with others. Small, transient moments—a fleeting glance, an overheard conversation, the subtle adjustment of bodies in response to proximity—revealed the ways in which people navigate shared spaces, balancing presence, avoidance, and unconscious biases. These visceral and sensorial exchanges exposed the underlying dynamics of being together in collective space.
Public transport also provided a lens to explore relational dynamics and exchanges of what I call enforced empathy. The contradictory messages within public transport—warnings against suspicious behaviour juxtaposed with posters advocating kindness—illustrate the complexity of spatial negotiations in public space. Transport for London’s posters urging people to “take care of each other” seemed to contrast with conventional safety notices like “Mind the gap.”
Unlike functional warnings aimed at physical safety, these appeals introduce a moral dimension, an enforced empathy that raises its own unsettling questions. The constant surveillance in public spaces, particularly on public transport through CCTV, seems to create an almost panoptic state of being watched. This perpetual monitoring seems to establish an in/visible boundary, raising fundamental questions about the entanglement of agency, empathy and power that is felt close to the skin in Begona Aretxaga’s terms.
J’existe: In/visibility and the Uncanny
A simple sticker reading “J’existe.” (I exist)—bold, direct, and unmissable—appeared repeatedly across London, affixed to street signs, electricity boxes, and other urban surfaces. Created by graffiti artist Thierry Jaspart, these stickers encapsulate his vision:
“Some graffiti artists want their work to make people think; some bring color to neglected streets to brighten them up. But for most writers, it’s about proving they exist—leaving their mark, their name, their presence behind. I wanted to sum that up in the simplest way possible, so I created a sticker that says J’existe. in bold letters.”
Can these stickers function as both wounds and illuminations, echoing Anne Carson’s words: “A wound gives off its own light, surgeons say. If all the lamps in the house were turned out, you could dress this wound by what shines from it.”
Do these small declarations of existence emit their own light—an insistence on having a presence in the public space? More than just personal affirmations, do they carve out a space for themselves, negotiating a liminal space between visibility and invisibility?
Returning with Echoes of Kilburn}
My secondment culminated in Walking on Spectral Waters: Creative Borderscapes and In/Visibility in Kilburn, tracing the buried Kilburn River as a phantasmatic border. Much like Nicosia’s hidden waterways, Kilburn’s in/visible river holds histories of migration, transience, and creativity. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s margins as transformative spaces and Svetlana Boym’s “edginess,” the walk invited reflections on how spectral borders shape identity and public exchange. Conversations with local residents, archival research, and sensory engagement revealed how communities reclaim and redefine urban space amidst shifting power structures.
Utopic Aspirations
Moving through London’s public spaces is ultimately an act of reflection—on what it means to exist within them, to be seen, to be heard, and to carve out space for alternative subjectivities within dominant structures. These spaces, both contested and generative, reveal the tensions between power and agency, visibility and invisibility. A fleeting glance on the Tube, a handwritten message on a wall, or the imaginary boundaries of a forgotten river beneath the city—all serve as ephemeral yet affective markers of spatial negotiation and creative resistance. In this constant interplay, public space becomes a site where power is confronted, empathy is experienced affectively, and spatial ontology is renegotiated. As a street art scrawled on the Dalston Kingsland Tube station wall suggests, the promise of democracy hovers between utopic ideals and the precarious realities of everyday life.
