On translucency

‘On Translucency’ is a mythopoetic memo about the space between the shore and the tide, the translucent shallow, visible and invisible, dense and sheer. It departs from Glissant’s right to opacity, which offers a transcultural world in which difference exists and is celebrated without a need to totally comprehend, or reduce the other. Translucency imagines the life of those in places where frosted windows keep the heat of the sun out, soften the detailed edges of bodies, yet holds on to the relational, lets the light through, does not shut out the other. Translucency argues for a kind of not-knowing that allows for the private world of thought and gregarious world of friendship, as island to archipelago. It is filtered through the translucent lenses of air, ice, skin, oil and film. Translucency is the right to illegibility and the desire for interpretation both. Translucency is an erotic way back into our new-natural.