L’esprit d’escalier

Sharon Kivland

Price £7.50+pp
ISBN 9780955309243
Year 2007
Edition 500
Pages 32
Binding softback
Illustration 14 BW illustrations
Dimensions 170 x 100 mm

L’espirit d’escalier is a revised version of a seminar paper delivered for ‘Outside/In: architecture, psychoanalysis, and spaces in-between’ at the Freud Museum, London, in June 2006, during the Arts Council of England’s ‘Architecture Week’.

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 Berggasse, Vienna. The text is punctuated by a series of black and white photographs, taken on the stairs of that same apartment block as the author searched for her title, her shoes and her subject.