Re-membering desire: Visual tracings of a billboard

Chapter 11 explores desire through photographs of a billboard on a construction site in a gentrifying neighbourhood in Copenhagen. Dormant, and inscribed in a gentrification temporality, the district’s construction sites were concurrently overflowing with ambiguous matter, meaning and affectivity. The photographs were taken over a period of ten months after I danced with the billboard in August 2015. The relationality emerging from the dance carries over into the images and the text, performing desire through embodied re-membering: a re-configuring of space, time and matter. I examine how desire operates as a medium through which time comes to matter in rhizomatic, multi-fold ways. I unpack how desire circulates in the haunted space of absence. It re-members what seems to be absent and lost, while simultaneously yearning for ways of being and becoming otherwise. I use the photographs as affective and knowledge-producing devices. They work as refrains, re-configurations of patterns of difference, highlighting the heterogeneous multiplicity of desire. The chapter draws on and contributes to feminist new materialist conceptualisations of affect, embodiment, time and space.