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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 August 2023
Perched on what appears to be an uncomfortable grey cube, Doreen Massey is shown on grainy CCTV footage being interviewed by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist (H.U.O.) and architect Rem Koolhaas, as part of the Serpentine Gallery’s first 24-hour interview marathon in 2006 (Obrist & Koolhaas 2006). It is an art celebrity event and among those being interviewed are Damien Hirst, Doris Lessing, Brian Eno and Zaha Hadid. H.U.O. notes that Doreen’s text, “London Inside-Out”, was key to their preparations of “this whole marathon. It’s a text that we always came back to.” As the interview progresses, H.U.O. returns to her influence: “You are, as a professor of geography, in terms of influence, venturing into all kinds of other fields. Many of my artist friends are unusually inspired by your books.” And then he asks, “I was wondering what are your inspirations. What are your … I mean heroes is kind of a big word.” She ventures that she does not have heroes. Rather, there are lives that she finds fascinating:
Tina Modotti, a photographer who mixed art, politics: a weird life of continual commitment and travelling everywhere. And died in a taxi on the way home from a party at a rather early age [age 45]. As lives go, that seemed to me to be pretty impressive. She was in Spain for the civil war. She was in Mexico for the revolution. And so on and so forth. But I don’t have heroes.
Asked more explicitly about her disciplinary influences, she turns instead to her geographical preoccupations, foremost that of reconceptualizing space. When Rem Koolhaas asks her “Is this space you are talking about the same space that architects work in?”, she replies, “I’ve wondered about that for donkey’s years because I have worked with architects a lot.” She concedes that her preoccupation is more abstract. Perhaps
the way it relates to architectural practice is thinking of space as the intersection of stories, as socially produced, as always moving. And one of the essential contradictions with architecture is that you are essentially enclosing it, pinning it down, carving off bits of it. And that’s just a tension.
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