Material Melancholia 1
Evocative objects and memories of the past in touching them arises a “narcissistic ego-identification” and a “hallucinatory oneness with the past” creating a sense of belonging and home but also an otherness and dreamscape that is strangely familiar. They possess a valedictory role with the object and image as eulogy for the dead. Old photographs and evocative objects connect with the gaze as items of contemplation identifying with the pleasure principle as physical phenomena transformed from subject into objects of desire in what Barthes calls the ‘punctum’-“the power to astonish, amaze and disconcert” (Samuel 2012, p.374).