Movement and Immobility: The Two Faces of Representation

Abstract

If images were invented to try and replicate human vision and freeze time, then representation seems to have a lot in common with the way a person uses his eyes while taking a walk or when he stops to rest. This paper examines whether it is possible to associate walking and standing still with the two basic representation methods in order to see if, in history, drawing with contour lines can be associated with movement, and luminist, chiaroscuro and coloured drawings with standing still and reflection. Actually this game of linking movement-line and idleness-colour/surface/light/matter is not new: probably rooted in antiquity, it has been taken into consideration in the last hundred and fifty years when it was approached by exploding representation limits and trying to put pieces together in a different context, where dimensions where added or reduced: let’s think about Abbot’s Flatland and of Dewdney’s Planiverse. Both operations seem to be strictly linked to the course of non-euclidean geometries, which where indicating new horizons for geometry and representation science since Euclidean space was put under discussion. In fact, it doesn’t look so uncommon to relate representation codes to the way we move in space and occupying space is not really far from an aesthetic experience. In his Walkscapes, Careri writes: “apart from being an action, walking is also a sign […]. The world becomes a vast aesthetic land, an enormous canvas on which we draw when we walk”. Clearly, the aesthetics considered in this context involves the creation of space and architectures rather than representation. But if this distinction between full and empty spaces associated respectively either with being sedentary or with erratic wanderings holds true, then perhaps representation itself may be considered rooted in this duality. Even if we mean to limit our discussion to the dynamics of bodies in space, avoiding to afford dynamic representations, literature leads today to new and wider borders spacing from territory to fashion and the issue is not limited to representation but involves visual approaches in a broader meaning.