"Haunted Tropicality: Gothic Motifs and Melancholic Imagery toward an Aesthetics of Darkness" is a practice-based research on the language of the Gothic in an intercultural perspective, and on its application in the specific visual artistic context. The theoretical part of this dissertation focuses on an analysis of dark imagery in Thailand and how it is manifest in contemporary culture through its most representative expressions: the haunted aesthetics of urban and natural space; oral tradition; and contemporary horror cinema. Through living, narrating and representing the dark side, the peculiar imagery of Thai Gothic takes on a precise shape in which the three elements coexist and merge, each indissolubly linked to the other, all of them pervaded by a peculiar mood of melancholy. Melancholy indeed seems to be the key to access Thai Gothic and to understand a series of topics, images and feelings that repeatedly occur in approaching this theme. The exploration of the concepts of Gothic and melancholy - in their wider meanings and in a transcultural perspective - thus constitute the first chapter of this work, introducing the following three chapters devoted to space, myth and cinema, The rich lexicon of motifs resulting from the theoretical analysis of Thai Gothic has then been extrapolated, transformed, experienced and elaborated in a purely aesthetic and symbolic manner, as a tool for creating a specific visual language materializing in the artistic work that constitutes the practice part of the thesis. Employing as visual media a combination of photography, video and performance, the artwork resulting from this research - and presented in the last chapter of the work - is a reflection on the complexity of the real and unreal, on the coexistence of different layers of reality - some visible, others only guessed at - and on the idea of melancholy as ephemeral (in bodies and places), as a reversal, as a matrix of desire in the extreme loneliness of loss.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:577317 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Campoli, Alessandra |
| Publisher | University of the West of Scotland |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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