Avant-nostalgia

By John Baldacchino

Subjects: art, memory, knowledge, Nostalgia in art, Art and philosophy, anamnesis, aporia, involution, education, touch, Nostalgia, time

Description: *Avant-nostalgia* brings together textual and visual narratives scattered around four themes: knowledge, memory, touch, and return. The text starts where the image ends. The image originates where the text is fulfilled. These are after-images of a reading of art and literature on the grounds of polity, history and geography. The narratives that emerge within the visual arts and literature chart the grounds of polity. Such grounds manifest a history that is ‘contemporary’ — in that it takes serious account of ‘our’ time — where democracy and freedom must be regarded as moral imperatives. Equally, grounds express a geography that is specific to physical and ontological spaces, where: (a) location emerges from the choices that are intended to facilitate a visitation of art; and which (b) provide grounds for a discussion of matters like *anamnesis*, nostalgia and *aporia*. The discussion retains a ‘fragmentary’ format by way of excusing the discussant from epistemological compartments.