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Author: dig
somewhere swimming inside me is a question
somewhere swimming inside me is a question
I don’t want to answer. it’s not my name I hear,
but something else, drowning in its own fluid.
a girl on the ferry smiles at me. I smile back—
& it seems to mean the world to her.
Somewhere Swimming, Kyla Marshell
Elswhere
TEXTE ZUR KUNST Issue No. 138 / June 2025 “Exhibition Politics”
195 CALL AND RESPONSE / Cecilia Bien on Christine Sun Kim at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (ACCESS RIDER Christine Sun Kim – Herunterladen via secession)
201 THE EXHIBITION IS ELSEWHERE / Barbara Reisinger on Park McArthur at mumok, Vienna, and Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
Credit: NASA/Julia Shepherd
out of isolation and into social struggles
In 1911, Sigmund Freud addressed his followers gathered at Nuremberg, where he restated the import of his practice: “the task of psychoanalysis lies not at all in the discovering of complexes, but in the dissolving of resistances.” A formal antipode to political resistance, psychoanalytic resistance dams up desire and obstructs traumatic knowledge. It is conservative, allergic to change, and aims for the kind of frictionless normativity against which the unconscious drives rail. Meanwhile, we associate political resistance with change itself, with a blockade that pushes for revolution—rather than a blockage that censors its very possibility. If we read Freud as urging his followers to help their patients move through their resistance, psychoanalysis is a project on the side of material and political reality by bringing patients out of isolation and into social struggles.
coordinated among themselves and thus acquire meaning
Observations on the Long Take, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967)
Translated by Norman MacAfee and Craig Owens
As long as such actions remain unrelated, be it the language of Kennedy’s last action or that of his assassins, they are fragmentary and incomplete languages, all but incomprehensible. What is needed to make them complete and comprehensible? The relationship which each of them, groping and stammering, seeks with the others must be established. Not through a simple multiplication of presents–as in the juxtaposition of various subjective views–but through their coordination. Unlike their juxtaposition, their coordination is not, in fact, limited to destroying and emptying the concept of the present (as in the hypothetical projection one after the other of the various films at FBI headquarters) but to rendering the present past.
Only completed acts may be coordinated among themselves and thus acquire meaning
[…]
The substance of cinema is therefore an endless long take, as is reality to our senses for as long as we are able to see and feel (a long take that ends with the end of our lives); and this long take is nothing but the reproduction of the language of reality. In other words it is the reproduction of the present.
But as soon as montage intervenes, when we pass from cinema to film (they are very different, just as langue is different from parole), the present becomes past: a past that, for cinematographic and not aesthetic reasons, is always in the present mode (that is, it is a historic present).
[…]
It is thus absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning, and the language of our lives (with which we express ourselves and to which we attribute the greatest importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations among discontinuous meanings. Death performs a lightning-quick montage on our lives; that is, it chooses our truly significant moments (no longer changeable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments) and places them in sequence, converting our present, which is infinite, unstable, and uncertain, and thus linguistically indescribable, into a clear, stable, certain, and thus linguistically describable past (precisely in the sphere of a general semiology). It is thanks to death that our lives become expressive.
Montage thus accomplishes for the material of film (constituted of fragments, the longest or the shortest, of as many long takes as there are subjectivities) what death accomplishes for life.
via Pasolini, P., 1967, Observations on the Long Take, in The Cinematic, D. Campany (ed.), 2007. London: Whitechapel and The MIT Press.
Go by the signs
Eliza Swann aka Emerald.
“Your love goes to the centerline of the branch
But you desire all the water.
There is no way of knowing
What I tell you about love is true.
Go by the signs.”
Frank Stanford, from “Directions from a Madman,”
untitled 071125
Clipse: Tiny Desk Concert, July 11, 2025.
Tiny Desk Primer: Betsayda Machado y Parranda El Clavo, February 16, 2018.
Invitation to a dispensary
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