The Latin word limina—plural neuter of limes—comprises more than one meaning. It primarily indicates thresholds, doors, entrances, barriers, beginnings and/or ends. This term can also mean homes or dwellings. (Closely related is the word limes—limites in the plural form—which means boundary or limit, but also passage or trail.) 

In a broad sense, limina convey the precise or blurry lines that mark physical, social, religious, or even emotional space. Limina establish distances or proximities. Limina divide but also join together. Limina enable and empower spaces, but also abolish and even desecrate them. Limina pave ways and point towards directions. Limina secure order, but also stimulate dialogue which can lead to tension, and, ultimately, dissent.

When reviewing the scholarly studies on Erieta Attali’s visual exploration of the dialectic negotiations between τέχνη and φύσις, one inevitably comes across terminology that resonates contemporary conceptualizations of limina. We read about boundaries, barriers, interstices, demarcations, margins, extremities, journeys, breaches, isolation, impenetrability, periphery and sacrality. Indeed, most of her oeuvre challenges the viewer to detect patterns of interpenetration between architecture and nature.

In the 2010 volume In Extremis: Landscape in Architecture, Attali mapped mostly domestic structures that are ensconced in arid, lunar landscapes, cast away in barren deserts, or nestled in impenetrable brush. While mapping these environments in extremis, she increasingly became attracted to buildings that integrate themselves with uncompromising surroundings; struggle desperately to retain a modicum of formal identity; emerge triumphantly from nature’s viscera; and are overwhelmed by the elements.  In some cases, these dwellingsfunction as asylums from the landscape’s austerity: final markers of human intervention before crossing the point of no return. In other instances, they remind us of pilgrims’ stations during strenuous wayfaring. Whether situated in the Atacama Desert (Chile) or on the Aurlandsfjord (Norway), Attali carefully charts these geographies and retraces the itinerary of this contemporary pilgrimage. However, unlike the linear trajectory of El Camino towards Santiago de Compostela (or towards Finisterrae), many of sites that delineate this journey seem to be propelled by centrifugal forces, moving outwards, away from a center, and scattered into the ends of the Earth.

During the course of her extended research, Attali also reflects upon the distances that separate peripheries from their focal points. In many ways, this constitutes her νόστος: a homeward journey towards a personal and cultural center, one that makes reference to her early work as a photographer of archaeological sites. She monumentalizes this personal and cultural debt by fashioning Bernard Tschumi’s New Acropolis Museum into a basilica nave. The Periclean citadel—just like a church altar—is sublimized by a perspectival fuga, punctuated by the sculpture from the west pediment on the right and by parallel shadows etched on the pavement. Effectively, this becomes a space of mediation between the urgency of contemporaneity and the memory of tradition.

The theme of the pilgrimage—of a journey towards sites of personal enlightenment—is very much present in her study of domesticity. Rather than distancing herself from the site, she enters the premises and experiences the intimacy of the hearth. While her previous modus operandi has been to allow landscape to mediate between—or even interfere with—the viewer and architecture, Attali turns inwards, providing a different interpretation of her research on landscape into architecture, one that frustrates conventional viewpoints. Glass becomes the rigorous protagonist. It reassesses the function of limina by filtering (and allowing) light. One is confronted with spaces galvanized by their own internal glow, silencing the landscape whose enveloping presence looms in the background. Elsewhere, square and rectangular window partitions deconstruct an alpine landscape and remind us of the fragility of divisions. The open-glass walls become canvases, onto which and through which reflections, glares, deflections, and transparencies are carefully indexed.

Effectively, Attali is a taxonomist of limina.  She understands their protean nature, tries to unlock their stratigraphies, and ultimately archive their multifaceted incarnations. As such, they become her personal unit of measure with which she redefines the rules of engagement of the “spaces in between spaces.” LIMINA – Spaces in between Spaces, text by Alessio Assonitis

source -https://www.archdaily.com/964563/limia-erieta-attalis-latest-photograph-exhibition

https://www.archdaily.com/964563/limia-erieta-attalis-latest-photograph-exhibition