There are abandoned places and things once used; they seem to be everywhere. They can conjure all kinds of thoughts, and with imagination, things can become a kind of wild, like an abandoned modern city centuries old; maybe there’s an apparition that resides in our world and other worlds that can’t be seen, all of this is left to the imagination. The imagination has no limits in an abandoned place; it can be made into something that wasn’t intended, an old warehouse could be partially submerged underwater, sphere-like structures reside in the water as places to live in, or an oasis for plant life, parts of the warehouse not underwater becomes a repository of learning.

As if there is fear, maybe something is angry in an abandoned place, the building is feeling alone, betrayed, and it could be saying why was it left. Or could it be the feelings of the observer that are being transferred to the scene, or feeling stimulated by the abandoned place could be influencing the observer? Every abandoned site creates its own feelings. Perhaps every observer will have their own thoughts that could be cultivated in a variety of ways that makes individual responses.

Imagine a broken toy left in an abandoned house, what would it say if it had a voice? There are feelings that are possibly ascribed to a toy, the limitation is the imagination; the toy could be described as forlorn, asking itself what happened to it perhaps there are other feelings of confusion and anger. Without imagination, there are no possibility of making sense of an abandoned place. An imaginary feeling that takes off creates stories of power, maybe not be possible with hard logic. The rational and irrational are part of what creates a story.

A weathered stain on a floor in an abandoned building, the imagination runs with this, a strange centuries-old building partially dome-shaped, a sand-strewn landscape with some flowers, the natural sound that almost resembles music.

Robert J. Matsunaga