On being a dreaming vessel: Site-writing and embodied Denkräume

Abstract

This creative-critical paper attempts to plot the sensitive connections between shared and personal history, and the way these reverberate in space. It does so by combining site-writing (Rendell), hagiography, and cultural theory (Didi-Huberman, de Certeau), and applying performative, iconological, and ekphrastic devices. Together, these become a sort of written atlas (a term borrowed and bastardised from art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929)) that helps navigate several different reflective spaces (Denkräume, another Warburgian term). These spaces are at times pictorial (the frescoes by Fra Angelico in San Marco in Florence, a dimly lit room in a Kendrick Lamar music video), architectural (San Marco itself, Warburg’s library, a church in Senegal), bodily (the representations of Mary as the Church), or even, oneiric, connecting them with the red thread of intimate, embodied experience.