Tamia Dellinger MFA

"The thesis Poetics of Passage is about how time, place and storytelling, and how this concepts are intertwined. By exploring one of these concepts you will somehow end up exploring one of the other two. The starting point of the research, was the book The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, Chatwin’s book explores the labyrinth of invisible path- ways which cover the whole Australian Country, known to Europeans as Song-lines or Dreaming-tracks and to the aboriginals as the Footprints of the Ancestors or the Way of the Law. “One might see a songline as a set of directions, but it is also a trading counter, a form of genealogy, an inalienable possession, and a fragment of an entire mythic structure that takes different forms across Australia.” (Chatwin, 2012, p.xiv) The first chapter Time and time and time and time explores different aspects of the passage of time, how we perceive it (memory), how we see it in the landscape and how it is present in the way we talk. The second chapter Place (worlds of meaning) is about the land and the meanings we give to it, be it by attaching stories to landscapes or by the materials we extract from it. The last chapter In betweenness (poetics) is about walking, and how Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta and Richard Long have used the ideas talked previously in their work. The core of the text is the relation between man and land, through storytelling, using the Songlines as a conceptual starting point."