A Dust Atlas: Memory, Image, Metamorphosis

Abstract

Based on the textual and fragmentary work of Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, Poeira da Vida – páginas de um livro de memórias, published sparsely in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Correio da Manhã in 1967 and 1968, this paper seeks to think Martins’ attempt as a Warburgian Atlas (or a Borgesian Encyclopedia). His effort builds a constellation between the literary and the imagistic: Duchamp and Man Ray's photography Criações de poeira (1920); the short story Ser poeira (1933) by Santiago Dabove; the short story Viagem à semente (1954) by Alejo Carpentier; the fictional character in the book Emigrantes (1992) by W.G. Sebald; the photographs Nomes ausentes (2013), taken on the empty and dusty shelves of the former Biblioteca Nacional of Buenos Aires by Patricia Osses; the Alexandre Orion’s drawings collected in Ossário and Polugrafias (2009-2011); philosophical and conceptual reverberations in Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Georges Didi-Huberman, Elio Graziolli, Pedro Salinas, and Rosalind Krauss, etc.