The Last Day of March

Testing a new Zeiss lens on an old Pentax body, it began as a coastline. Sweden, seen from Hellerup.

For a while the file sat there, titled Last Day of March. Then, reading Derrida’s Specters of Marx, I came across Hamlet again, filtered through a philosopher chasing specters in Marx’s prose.

Act I, Scene 5: “The time is out of joint.” A copula holding stability and dislocation together. A bone knocked from its socket. Painful, structural, perhaps repairable.

Working back through the editions, the 1623 Folio’s ioynt, the ragged 1603 Quarto, the more settled 1604 text,I found the metaphor was already old when Shakespeare used it.

Psalm 22, in Myles Coverdale’s 1535 Bible, decades before Shakespeare was born: bones out of joint, a heart like melting wax.

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Pigment print. Copenhagen coastline, 2026. First plate in the Time Is Out of Joint series.