Both Webster's and common usage inscribe the term 'vacancy' with connotations of being empty, without use or occupant, a void. Yet the declaration of something as 'vacant' becomes more an ideological mirror reflecting what we consider to be full, useful, and valuable than a description of the thing itself at hand. More often than not, the word 'vacant' becomes a catch basin for all conditions existing outside dominant sociocultural paradigms, beyond current faculties of measurement, or resistant to current modes of categorization and representation. In fact, it is perhaps this resistance to a singular framing that creates the vacuum which gathers the stuff of vacancy: the marginal, the obsolete, the indeterminate. Within sites of vacancy, a place is established beneath the threshold of 'public' vision which supports that which has no place within the contemporary milieu.
For the purposes of this research an expanded definition of vacancy is therefore required, one which begins with the disassociation of vacancy from emptiness:
VACANCY: a condition in which a dominant occupant is absent [whereby this 'occupant' may be a person or group of people, a program or use, an event, a boundary, a code or law, a legible expression or gesture...]