“Sojourner”
Kit Wise
6 May → 21 May 2005

Diderot’s Enlightenment concept of the encyclopaedia, as interpreted by Umberto Eco, is considered in the light of the equally horizontal, osmotic movements characteristic of the post-colonial condition. The ‘non-colour’ or void associated with white, the default screen of the internet, is used as a test-site for Eco’s notion of language organized as an encyclopaedia rather than a dictionary – dependent on rhizomatic cross-reference, rather than static, hierarchical structures.

Drawing on current communications and photographic technology, the artist/photographic author as ‘sojourner’, in reference to the news-reporter of Carson McCuller’s short story of 1954, becomes a medium for assessing the increasingly fluid or plastic experience of both geographical and cultural space, as well as contemporary identity.