Author: dig

small and real

dig

The Post keeps standing, filling space emptied out by more ethical actors. It’s just one example of a larger American problem. The people who insist on making sense speak in small, prim voices, trusting their listeners to understand subtleties of tone. After all, everybody’s off carving out his own personal city, made up of small but real impressions. Why try? The Post screams on, and—by the evidence of our last national election, in which almost every demographic in the city veered right, toward Donald Trump, whose profile was created, in part, in Murdoch’s pages—New York keeps hearing it out.

Maybe I read the Post because, as Ramona Garnes said, it leaves its malice naked and, therefore, shows me a more complete picture of where I and people like me really stand.

Vinson Cunningham enjoys The Post

Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” from 1973, is the greatest artistic exploration of the vicissitudes of marital loneliness. It consists of six roughly hour-long episodes, in which a married couple—Johan and Marianne—try and mostly fail to connect to each other.

[…]

It is a profound insight on Bergman’s part to notice that loneliness involves a detachment not only from other people but from reality in general.

[…]

It is a profound insight on Bergman’s part to notice that loneliness involves a detachment not only from other people but from reality in general.

[…]

Can any marriage survive an honest reckoning with itself? Can you get close enough to any person for life to feel real? These are Bergman’s questions

New Yorker, 2021.

To watch: “Summer in the City” (1969, Christian Blackwood and Robert Leacock).

Evelyn Sosa

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Mahara+Co is pleased to present No Place is Far Away , a solo exhibition by Cuban photographer Evelyn Sosa, on view from May 10 – June 6, 2025. In this deeply intimate and political series, Sosa constructs a living archive of the migratory experience. The exhibition emerges from a project supported by the Cuban Migrant Artists Resilience Fellowship, granted by Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) and PEN International.

Rooted in a seemingly simple question — “What object did you take with you when you emigrated?“ — Sosa opens a window into memory, loss, and the emotional gravity of displacement. Each image in the series portrays a personal belonging filled with history and significance: a piece of clothing, a photograph, a letter, a seed. These modest, almost minimal objects serve as emotional anchors — fragments of home that persist across time and distance. They are not merely material remnants, but silent witnesses to identities that refuse to vanish.

Far from a purely documentary approach, No Place is Far Away delves into the sensory and emotional dimensions of migration. Photography becomes a mode of listening: portraits of objects are interwoven with fragments of real-life testimonies, creating a liminal space where past and present gently meet. As Paul Ricoeur once wrote, “memory is not a neutral archive,” a sentiment Sosa affirms in each image — each one an act of evocation, resistance, and care.

While firmly rooted in the Cuban migratory experience, the series resonates on a universal level. In a world increasingly shaped by displacement, this body of work asks: How does identity transform when territory disappears? What remains when everything else is gone?

https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/783926454178234368/evelyn-sosa-no-place-is-far-away-mahara-co-is

Ningún lugar está lejos reviewed in Artburst, 050725.

AG2023_1120451a or d’où jaillira l’éclair de sa mort

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AG2023_1120451a

Nous n’écrivions ni pour le romantisme de la vie d’écrivain – il s’est caricaturé –, ni pour l’argent – ce serait suicidaire –, ni pour la gloire – valeur démodée, à laquelle l’époque préfère la célébrité –, ni pour le futur – il n’avait rien demandé –, ni pour transformer le monde – ce n’est pas le monde qu’il faut transformer –, ni pour changer la vie – elle ne change jamais –, pas pour l’engagement – laissons ça aux écrivains héroïques –, non plus que nous ne célébrions l’art gratuit – qui est une illusion puisque l’art se paie toujours. Alors pour quelle raison ? On ne savait pas ; et là était peut-être notre réponse : nous écrivions parce que nous ne savions rien, nous écrivions pour dire que nous ne savions plus ce qu’il fallait faire au monde, sinon écrire, sans espoir mais sans résignation facile, avec obstination et épuisement et joie, dans le seul but de finir le mieux possible, c’est-à-dire les yeux ouverts : tout voir, ne rien rater, ne pas ciller, ne pas s’abriter sous les paupières, courir le risque d’avoir les yeux crevés à force de tout vouloir voir, pas comme voit un témoin ou un prophète, non, mais comme désire voir une sentinelle, la sentinelle seule et tremblante d’une cité misérable et perdue, qui scrute pourtant l’ombre d’où jaillira l’éclair de sa mort et la fin de sa cité.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Whispering through a Stone.

AG2025_1156335a as an evident condition of

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AG2025_1156335a

In terms of the development of “democracy,” it is difficult to overestimate the enormous gain Western governments managed to consolidate when they successfully advanced democracy as the opposing counterweight to communism. They had actually gained control of the entire word for themselves, leaving nary a trace of its former emancipatory resonance. Indeed, democracy had become a class ideology justifying systems that allowed a very small number of people to govern—and to govern without the people, so to speak; systems that seem to exclude any other possibility than the infinite reproduction of their own functioning. To be able to call an unchecked and deregulated free market economy, a ruthless, no-holds-barred opposition to communism, a right to intervene, militarily and otherwise, in countless sovereign nations and their internal affairs—to succeed in calling all this democracy was an incredible feat. To successfully present the market as an evident condition of democracy and to have democracy viewed as inexorably calling forth the market, is an astounding accomplishment. (Kristin Ross)