archaeography

The landscape appears as a form that has been predetermined prior to our encountering it; however it is by no means resistant to transformation. It captures the experiences of the past, malleable to its haptic relation to that which passes through it, leaves it, or is left within it. What Richard Bradley calls a “natural place” (An Archaeology of Natural Places. 2000) would be that which is untouched; but the existence of a place in the landscape is contingent on what it has encountered, deeming no place “natural” in this way. The landscape evolves, memorializing that which has formed it.
With this photo I would like to argue that my body is in this way a landscape.
My life is inscribed on and within my body; my emotion is read from the wrinkles on my brow and the gap of my lips; my collarbone that I injured several years ago still stands higher on the left; my hair falls down past my chin when last year it barely breached my earlobes; the food I just ate is pressing my belly out and may soon dissolve into a thin layer of fat under my right armpit. The body develops as we age and holds with it remembrances of the past. The bellybutton clearly expresses this embodied nostalgia. It is a mark of something we have lost. The knot is itself a break; a tying-off from our first dwelling place, a true representation of nostalgia, a longing for home. The photograph marks an excavation to acknowledge that nostalgia. Like the landscape, the body evolves, memorializing that which has formed it.