Oral anglais Spaces and exchanges

Spaces and exchanges

INTRODUCTION :

Today, I’m going to talk about the idea of spaces and exchanges that I associated with the city of New York.

First of all, I would like to give a definition of this notion: a space it’s an empty territory, an area for a particular purpose. And exchange it’s an act of giving one thing and receiving another in return. You can exchange cultures, ideas, languages.

We may wonder if NY city is a place of meeting or a place of loneliness?

To illustrate the notion I have chosen three different documents.

Firstly, a majority of NewYorkers feel lonely in there city. Indeed, the cities keep getting bigger, more and more people are leaving their family and finding themselves alone. Edward Hopper an American painter of the 20th century underlines this fact and condemns the impersonal urban life. The first document I have chosen is one of his paintings that is called Morning Sun. It was painted in 1952. The scene takes place in a bedroom. In the foreground, we can see a blond woman wearing a short pink dress. Her hair is tied back into a bun and she is seating up a bed. Her knees are pulled up to her chest. The colors of the wall, the dress and the sky are water colors. There is no decoration in the room. Besides, there is a contrast between the straight lines and the woman. The window takes up a large part. The woman is looking out through the window and faces the sun. The room is bathed in light and there is a sunny rectangle in one of the wall.

Moreover, the painting is very gripping. The light and the simplicity also because of marked features from the shadow of the bed. However, the curves of the woman body and the water colors bring some softness to the painting. With her empty gaze, she seems enclosed on her even delivers the feeling of solitude. Hopper gives us the impression that the time has stopped and abound the loneliness of this woman. The message of this painting is still valid today.

Secondly, New York is a place of meeting like Richard Sennet said “A city is a place where people meet”. Indeed, NY wouldn’t be NY if they weren’t all the different cultures and the exchange allowed NY to become a big city.

To illustrate this fact I have chosen the document Diversity in NY which is the street interview of several NewYorkers talking about their city.

This video showed the positive aspect of being a New Yorker. NewYorkers give their point of view. A man says that NY is made of neighborhoods that are the reflection of the various cultures. He explains that the NewYorkers became open-minded because they learned to live together. Moreover, they are hard-worker and outspoken. If you are honest and fighters, NY can change your life. In fact, NewYorkers do great things because they take the opportunities.

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