There are places that do not belong to where we have been, nor to where we are going. They exist only in the crossing, sulla soglia, the threshold where one step has ended and the next has not yet begun.
A liminal space is a place of suspension: not the room you have left, not the one that awaits beyond the door, but the stretch in between. It is the airport lounge at night, the quiet corridor between galleries, the hand hovering just before the handshake.
These are the spaces where identity loosens, time blurs, and certainty falters. They are thresholds: train stations and stairwells, dusk and dawn, adolescence and age. In these intervals, the world tilt, feeling both familiar and strange, as if it were quietly slipping out of itself, as though reality had shifted a fraction out of place.
Artists have long lingered here: Edward Hopper painting the silence of hotel lobbies, Andrei Tarkovsky filming the eerie terrain of Stalker’s Zone, Francesca Woodman dissolving herself into walls and shadows. Their works remind us that the in-between is not neutral, but always a site of haunting, of beauty, of transformation.
Moments and spaces of transit, whether between trains or flights, reveal a suspension in which no one fully belongs. The silence before a curtain rises, the pause before a decisive word is spoken. These are the moments that refuse to be owned, but shape us all the same.
Liminality unsettles, but it also creates possibility. In art, it appears in unfinished canvases, in transitional scenes, in mirrors and doorways that refuse to decide what they frame. In fashion, it flickers in sheer fabrics that veil and reveal at once, or in garments caught between costume and sculpture, like Rei Kawakubo’s impossible silhouettes. In life, it is every pause before transformation, the quietude that precedes change, the long inhale before the leap. To enter liminality is to surrender control, to stand in the between and allow it to work upon you.
This season, we invite you to linger in the thresholds. To explore the hallways, waiting rooms, and dreamscapes that resist resolution. To ask what becomes visible when we stop rushing to the other side. And to discover, perhaps, that liminal spaces are not emptiness at all, but a field alive with its own strange energy.
To dwell in liminality is to dwell in becoming. And it is often in these pauses, these corridors of not-yet, that we discover who we are, and who we might still be.
Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow
Between the conception / And the creation / Between the emotion / And the response / Falls the Shadow
Between the desire / And the spasm / Between the potency / And the existence / Between the essence / And the descent / Falls the Shadow
