Wandering Shards: Image as Meeting Place

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 2009, 131). 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.

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