DisOrientations: Thinking through Lines of Desire in the Visual Artwork of Jordache A. Ellapen

Abstract

This article examines the artwork series Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy (2011–2016) by South African Indian film studies scholar Jordache A. Ellapen. Ellapen’s work stages intimate photographic portrayals of queer bodies-of-colour, overlaid on family album photographs and Indenture and apartheid documents categorising bodies, along with images of objects and landscapes. This visual cartography speaks of bodies at the intersection of race-gender-sexuality-class-nationalism-(religio-)ethnicities and the complicated subjectivities it renders. The work looks at Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation and José Estaban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” to follow the lines of Ellapen’s work and the ways its stagings make one aware of one’s own disOrientations, as well as how it disidentifies with the naturalised performativities of dominant identity constructions. The article proposes that allowing oneself to follow such lines of desire permits one to find proximity to identities that are positioned as Othered and rather reflect the complex formations of the everyday.

Keywords:

• Jordache A. Ellapen
• South African Indian
• Queering the Archive
• queer bodies-of-colour
• sexual orientation
• desire
• performative photographic stagings
• disOrientation