Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Kent Symposiums II: City and Cinema, İstanbul, Türkiye, 18 Nisan 2026, ss.1, (Özet Bildiri)
Contemporary urban existence unfolds increasingly within transient architectures, yet traumatic memory inscribes itself most persistently onto precisely the constructed spaces designed to resist memorialization. This paper examines Aftersun (2022) by Charlotte Welles at the intersection of the spatial theory and temporality, arguing that the movie constructs a counter-logic to the idea of the non-place by Marc Augé. Rather than remaining anonymous and affectively neutral, the holiday resort that is the main setting of the film embodies a locus where absence, grief and traumatic remembrance accumulate against the grain of the space itself.
According to Augé, non-places are supermodern spaces of anonymity, circulation, and the temporality of their occupants. Aftersun situates its characters within a Mediterranean summer resort complex, characterising it as a transient environment. Nevertheless, the film systematically disrupts the neutrality of these spaces through fragmented recollection and intimate observation. The spatiality of the resort emerges less as a stable and self-contained place than as a fragile vessel of memory, retrospectively assembled through Sophie's subjective recollection. The transformation is formally produced by the discontinuous visual language of the film, specifically, by the camcorder shots and non-linear editing, which makes the anonymous surfaces of the resort permeable to affective inscription and makes visible the antagonism between the impermanence of space and the clinging to it. This emotional imbuing of anonymous space in this context is perceived in the context of traumatic remembrance, where Cathy Caruth developed the concept of trauma as an experience that can never be assimilated and therefore persistently returns.
Reading Augé through a Bergsonian lens, this paper argues that Sophie's recollective gaze enacts a form of durée that works against the spatialized, transient temporality that the resort is actually meant to generate. With that regard, past and present do not simply alternate but fold into one another as affective fragments, transforming the non-place into a paradoxical site of traumatic remembrance and longing. The paper thus demonstrates that cinematographic space in Aftersun represents not a sense of place but a sense of space as a devastating failure to reconcile the anonymous spaces of supermodernity and the irreconcilable heaviness of personal loss. In foregrounding this tension, the film suggests that non-places are never truly neutral; nevertheless, they remain at risk of the insistence of memory and the power of grief to transform them.