Of Shadow Portraits and Heterotopias
Image by Linda Armstrong
Shadow Portraits, Sanskriti Kendra by Linda Armstrong
Here are two shadow portraits of the trees at Sanskriti Kendra. They are taken by Linda Armstrong, from Emory college in Atlanta, whose process of art making begins as a response to the natural world. Linda and I were residents at Kendra in December and January: read more about her work here http://visualarts.emory.edu/faculty/index.html#armstrong
Winter mornings in New Delhi are misty and chill. Outside the studios where we slept, the gardeners and potters were wrapped in shawls, their breath turning to vapour. Peacocks scratched about in the gardens, pecking at windows, roofs, disturbing our morning dreams, the peahens always the most elusive. They left their feathers scattered like souvenirs, which I collected. Floating petals in clay bowls were an offering to the birds and to the wanton gods, who might, by accident, bless or curse my words. By eleven, the sun was at its warmest; by noon, the fields of mustard were coloured in a golden hue. The sweeper and the washer would arrive to clean our rooms. We’d sit outside to read or write or to draw, falling into the shadows and the silence as squirrels skipped across the lawns, climbing the neem trees, the cassias and jacarandas.
The shadow is what Foucault might call a heterotopia, a mirror image that captures dispersal and juxtapostion, the near and the far, when our experience of the world is not unlike a network, that connects, points, and intersects with its own skein.
The shadow is a space where light can’t reach because of obstruction by someone or something; it’s the space behind the subject or object, and in front of which there is light; the reverse projection of a person or thing. For the shadow gives visibility to the self, or to the thing beyond the surface of the same, while exerting a counteraction to the space it reflects. In our own shadow we discover an absence from the place where we are. And it is from our shadow that we direct our gaze back towards our self, almost as if we were made new.
I’ve been reading about heterotopias for an essay that I’m writing about Poetry and Space. Though sometimes shocked, I’m also inspired by Vito Acconci’s aesthetics, his transgressive approaches to space. And I’ve been reading again The Natural House, by Frank Lloyd Wright, in which he writes so beautifully about plasticity and simplicity, about form and function. He writes,
“In any final result there can be no separation between our architecture and our culture. Nor any separation of either from our happiness. Nor any separation from our work.” (44)
I should get back to my work, though it’s much nicer, right now, to draft this here, in the white space.
see Foucault essay: “Of Other Spaces” 1967
