Happening at the Brett Whiteley Studio in Sydney, this paper will present a concept of opacitic-geography to foreground how our thinking takes place in situ during events like gallery visits and how this illuminates the practical aspects of thinking as an activity which we can intervene in to do differently. Opacity is Édouard Glissant’s concept for that which lacks the Western will-to-transparency and which respects difference without needing to reduce it through comprehension. Crucially, this takes place in what Glissant calls the One-World, in which singularities meet, colliding and connecting without their assimilation or conflation into a totalitarian whole. I am developing this through my conceptualisation of the opacitic, to refer to the taking-place of this opacity, highlighting the opportunity which this brings to colour our thinking differently.
The Brett Whiteley Studio is a small art museum and gallery dedicated to the work and life of the eponymous Australian 20th century painter, showing his works as well as studio set-up and personal items. During my first visit, this alternative way of presenting his biography piqued my interest as it aligned with geographic work interested in alternative conceptions of the subject, and ways of working with these. Over subsequent visits, this connection with geographic thought also became apparent in aspects of Whiteley’s work. Beyond just identifying points of connection between the gallery and geographic thought, however, this paper begins with these connections to impress how the creation of such connections in our thinking is an opportunity to bring about change in geographic thought. Glissant’s thought is tantamount here in insisting that while we think from place, this place is never parochial and isolated, but is always connected: “I see the One-World as diffracted, a whirlwind of encounters, of everything colliding, and which, without conflating, without dissolving, projects a new light.”