Approaching the Archipelago in-between: Archipelagicity, Scale and Comparativism

Abstract

This essay proposes a conceptual reading of the archipelagic applied to three different objects: The Song of Songs ; Gilles Deleuze’s Desert Islands, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s large-scale installation Surrounded Islands, analyzing them through the lens of the comparativist method. We will demonstrate how specific modes of reading the fluid spaces in-between the constitutive elements of these works and their respective compound forms can be transversely applied. Our attention will focus primarily on the nature of the archipelagic, which we will understand to be fragmentary, contingent and fluid. By thinking with the archipelago, we will question the mechanics by which the archipelagic facilitates mediation between different intra and extra-textual dimensions, effectively changing the scales at which reading occurs, fluidly, in the viscous spaces between what is social and what is geological.