The Aesthetics of Indirection Intermittent Adjacencies and Subaltern Presences at the Borders of Europe

Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2015), I argue, produces a sensorial registration of the presence of scattered subalterns. More importantly, an ‘aesthetics of indirection’ (con)figures the disturbing island-space between Italy and North Africa, where the intermittent appearance of subaltern subjects disturbs normative understandings of place and produces counter-intuitive understandings of relationality. The filmic construction of ‘intermittent adjacencies’ between subaltern presences and narrative protagonists produces figurations of disturbing relationalities between privilege and destitution, pleasure and pain, life and death. The logic of intermittent adjacencies left conspicuously un-integrated by the plot provide a sensorial and political provocation for thinking through the geopolitics of globalization in the context of the displacement of people.