In our contemporary Western reality of mass mediation and distant origins—where nostalgia emanates not from the warmth of an ancestral hearth, but from the flicker of an electric fireplace—how might the deliberate collapse of the real and simulated open space for narratives of heritage, authenticity, and identity to reemerge?

Using the logic of familiar, domestic objects, my work finds resonance between symbolic origins and contemporary simulacra. In collapsing the “authentic” and “inauthentic,” I open a Third space for viewing the mediation of reality, memory, ritual, and heritage within the contemporary Western context. Drawing on Charles Peirce’s semiotic notion of “thirdness” as the realm of interpretation and symbolization, Baudrillard’s simulacra as copies of distant origins, bell hooks’ “margins” as a generative space, and Jane Bennett’s vitality emerging from assemblage, I developed my concept of Thirdness as a vitalized dimension that opens in the collapse of the real and unreal, or the primordial and simulated.

As inhabitants of this contemporary landscape, we now experience nostalgia through artifice. The electric fireplace, the artificial Christmas tree—these are no longer hollow imitations, but sites of hearth and nostalgia by association. I conceive of this phenomenon as a kind of Aura, reimagined from Walter Benjamin’s definition, that flows in the Third space. Through hooks’ notion of margins and Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, I explore how Thirdness can also serve as a metaphor for intangible cultural identifications—in the way heritage, in contemporary Western reality, exists as an apparition rather than a fixed origin.

I use autoethnography to situate my Azerbaijani heritage within this context and draw motifs from my memories and dreams.  I was particularly influenced by Laura Marks’ “Ten Years of Dreams About Art”, in her book Touch, where she braids her recounted dreams with relevant film criticism and semiotic theory. Her structure reinforced my belief in the intuitive and primordial truth to be drawn from autoethnographic reflection, especially when stabilized alongside critical inquiry. In my research, I slip between dream logic and childhood memories—none left unaffected by the universe of contemporary media I grew up in. This notion, alongside theories of traumatic imagination, has formed the core speculation of my work: how the meaning of a personal experience is deeply conflated with a mass-produced one, like a twenty-first-century magical realism. Here, I offer a space in limbo, where the compelling and disturbing can be described in metaphors drawn from mass media and culture, akin to the intangible Third space.