CONSTELLATIONS
Joining the dots … constructing constellations … finding patterns where perhaps there is only chaos. Recently every square inch of my body was surveyed, mapped, photographed, as though a kind of terrain. The photographer announced a configuration of freckles on my arm forms the Southern Cross. Like a free tattoo. A gift. The connection to the process of representation, of the three-dimensions being compressed into only two, unfolds into thoughts of body patterning, encoded messages … Christopher Nolan’s Memento, the tattoos as a means of tracing back, of recalling a past, a reconstructed past. Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, the calligrapher’s caress. The corporeal wallpaper, the textual advances.
Memento
The PillowBook
And to the thought of the forming of constellations, the combinations of things which begin to form new meanings through juxtaposition. Giorgio Agamben uses the term ‘constellation’ to describe the sense of a set of fixed co-ordinates within an ever-moving background of melancholy. Guiding stars. Walter Benjamin, too, tracks constellations, configurations which could be diachronous, from different times, yet “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (The Arcades Project).
