OF ISLANDS AND THE IN-BETWEEN: Essays On The Geopoetics of art
Michael Arcega, Walnut Traverse, 2008
It is first of all the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago. Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines – for Truth has always has ‘jagged edges.’” Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or The Formula,” in Essays: Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 86.
Of Islands and the In-between muses on the importance of contemporary art about islands, straits, and oceans as useful “geopoetic imaginaries of the possible (and impossible) conditions of global coexistence in the twenty-first century. Inspired by the work of Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Édouard Glissant, and others, Hamilton Faris explores current artistic allegorizations of islands as “isolated and floating relations” (Deleuze). This collection of essays gathers artists who posit the environment, and specifically islands and oceans as non-human witnesses to historical ebbs and flows of habitation, colonization, resource extraction, development and more. In highlighting geologic alterity, the artists explore, as we all must, a new common, if unstable and moving, ground of the earth as island.
It is first of all the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago. Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines – for Truth has always has ‘jagged edges.’” Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or The Formula,” in Essays: Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 86.
Of Islands and the In-between muses on the importance of contemporary art about islands, straits, and oceans as useful “geopoetic imaginaries of the possible (and impossible) conditions of global coexistence in the twenty-first century. Inspired by the work of Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Édouard Glissant, and others, Hamilton Faris explores current artistic allegorizations of islands as “isolated and floating relations” (Deleuze). This collection of essays gathers artists who posit the environment, and specifically islands and oceans as non-human witnesses to historical ebbs and flows of habitation, colonization, resource extraction, development and more. In highlighting geologic alterity, the artists explore, as we all must, a new common, if unstable and moving, ground of the earth as island.