Wandering shards: image as meeting place^*

* An earlier version of this text presented as a live performative reading accompanied by video projection can be seen at: ‘Headstone to Hard Drive III. Spolia, Relic, Data’, The British School at Rome, Italy, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UVzFzJXHVk.

ABSTRACT

This essay takes as its point of reference the foreshore of the River Thames at Greenwich in order to develop a series of reflections upon the transformative potential of ‘waste’ material (bone) associated with the site. Things with past origins can be understood not as a repository of secrets to be unearthed, but as material energies exercising power in the present, part of a dynamic of forces and flows. These energies combine with the powers of river tides, foreshore environs and camera to constitute a relational assemblage which through the writing of the text becomes a ‘meeting place’. The ‘image’ rather than representational object can then be considered as the figurative in Ranciere’s terms as, ‘the intertwining of several regimes of expression and the work of several arts and several media’ (Ranciere, Jaques. 2009. ‘The Pensive Image.’ In The Emancipated Spectator., 131. London: Verso). The figurative here becomes the sum of performative powers of material elements as a durational practice of place. This is a question both of aesthetics and ethics, a question of not only how we are situated with regard to the past, but also how we are immersed in an ongoing present.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural phenomenology
• practice of place
• expanded field of image
• relational materiality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Susan Trangmar is an artist working with image, sound and text exploring the material production and practice of landscape, site and place. She has exhibited internationally for many years, most recently showing ‘Lunar Tides’ at ‘Solstice’ Poetry/Film screening, ICA London and Kosmopolis Amplified Literature Festival, Barcelona 2015. She is currently working on a commission concerning the landscape of the Somme for the centenary of the Battle of the Somme in 2016. She is currently Reader in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and co-convenor of the research forum sensingsite at Central Saint Martins, www.sensingsite.blogspot.co.uk, www.susantrangmar.com.

Notes

* An earlier version of this text presented as a live performative reading accompanied by video projection can be seen at: ‘Headstone to Hard Drive III. Spolia, Relic, Data’, The British School at Rome, Italy, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UVzFzJXHVk.