In Michael Newman’s critique of Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, he writes that one may mourn the subject of whom nothing remains but ash through recourse to the trace whose nature is always defined by it’s propensity to complete erasure, interpreting Derrida as perceiving in such a trace the revelation of life’s metaphysical origin. Through the trace left by the ash, a black hole emerges in which the void left by the other is made evident, questioning the photograph as a sublime object where the limits of our imagination are revealed.
In July 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will fly past Pluto, carrying the cremated remains of astronomer and discoverer of Pluto Clyde Tombaugh. In Roman mythology, Pluto was considered the ruler of the underworld and lord of the dead whilst for Plato, the departed soul rose to the night sky in death. My project seeks to further contextualize this rich ongoing tradition of viewing in the sublime cosmic landscape a final resting place for the dead.
