ABSTRACT
Strange and mediated geographies may thus belong both to the street level and the top level of an edice, to exteriors and interiors. When the urban script is interrupted, when codes are lost, and cognitive mappings are confounded social subjects are left to emotionally fare as they might and to grapple with strangeness. Such a situation is portrayed in ‘Beside Myself with Looking: The Provincial, Female Spectator as Out of Place at the Stockholm Exhibition 1897’ where Ylva Habel discusses the journalistic burlesque representations of a pastoral woman, Lovisa Petterkvist, who ‘detourns’ space by plunging herself into the modernist space of the Stockholm exposition of 1897. Alienation is the upshot for someone who does not possess the proper socio-spatial codes and distinctions, the proper training to observe and look, but equally important, space is also rendered strange through Petterkvist’s injudicious strategies.
