Heydt presents an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past, but built on it. If utopia or dystopia can be conceptualized as a reflection in the mirror, an unreal ‘placeless place’, the concept of heterotopia can be understood as both the reflection and the mirror itself, simultaneously real and relating to the space surrounding it, and unreal in the virtual image it reflects. A world within a world, heterotopias creates a space of illusion that exposes every real space. It is both an inverted analogy of society and a parallel space to reality, an approximation of (dys)(u)topia and a space of radical difference transparent to, or of indifference to, their inhabitants. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces that are in themselves incompatible.
