The Erratic Marbles V, part of an ongoing series, comprises eighteen collages featuring colorful marbled endpapers sourced from late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury travelogues, atlases, and other manuscripts, in combination with photographs of erratic boulders from assorted geological image banks. Erratic boulders appear unrelated to their environmental surroundings and are believed to originate from vast distances away, having been transported by glacial action. Damiani’s juxtaposition of these images sheds light on arbitrary perceptions of nature, territory, and landscape as fixed concepts, as well as nonhuman forces at play in movements that become obscured by the act of mapping. This work suggests that the irregular patterns of wandering bodies, both human and nonhuman, cannot be traced by cartographic and geographic techniques alone. The Erratic Marbles V foregrounds the ways in which mapping inherently leaves behind an incomplete and fragmented history, arguing that such enigmatic topographic displacements belonging to a geological past must also contain the future of the planet.
