‘STRANDED OBJECTS’
Left overs, remainders, hold within them small universes of loss. The departure of things, of wholes, of lives, of loves, leaves the pain of residual stains, ‘stranded objects’. [1] Inhering within remnants these are the phantom presences that prevent closure. The phenomenon of the ‘phantom limb’ is one well-documented within psychology, the ache that resides in an absent arm or leg, an amputation. An existential conundrum if ever there was, begging the question, am I, after all? The remains bear the loss, with bear as both witness and burden. The phantom limbs of landscapes ache in all places of departures, of lands abandoned, aftermaths, downfalls.
Such strandings serve to exhibit the familiar, making them strange, amplifying a melancholic out-of-placeness, where their awkwardness induces pangs of poignancy. The paradox is thus that it is absence which becomes palpable, echoing Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky’s statement on art, that it serves to undo habituation such that we might again feel the sensation of life, a heightened, phenomenological, encounter.
Above: The Australian Monument to the Great Potato Famine, at Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney. Designed by Hossein and Angela Valamanesh. 1999. Photographs, Jacky Bowring, 2006.
[1] ‘Stranded objects’ is Eric Santner’s term, who in turn attributes it to a colleague who provided it unknowingly. Eric L. Santner. (1990). Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany. Cornell University Press.
