Eduardo Noriega's transnational projections

This chapter brings together two established but powerful conceptualisations of the idea of motion: movement away as a paradoxical consolidator of cultural expression (in an anthropological sense of deterritorialisation) and motion as the transport and pull of emotion (in a psychogeographical sense as elaborated by Bruno 2002). It relates them to a further more or less standard coupling, acting and embodiment, in order to ask or re-ask the questions: what if a screen actor’s meaning is in major part a believable affective embodiment of their home culture’s or first language’s core configuration of desires? and what if they take that embodiment elsewhere? is it still present? can an actor on screen translate desire? I shall be exploring the resonance of these questions for an un-mapping of “world cinema” (1) by exploring some transnational performances by the Spanish actor Eduardo Noriega and (2) by tracing the ways in which images of Noriega are mobilized on the internet, transnationalizing themselves and his professional personality but also creating virtual and haptic intimacies.