Category: studio

AG2022_2100568a

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AG2022_2100568a

Interview -Beatriz Cortez and Candice Lin

CORTEZ: In your work there’s a certain irreverence towards the Western humanist concept of the human as sacred. It is one of the things about your work that blows my mind. It makes me think not in terms of hyper objects but micro-objects: about all the worlds that already live inside our bodies and about how our bodies will disperse, not only to become cosmic dust but also to become lots of microbes and nutrients for other bodies, and not only when we become compost but also as we move around, each of us a porous body secreting its liquids throughout the world.

LIN: That is really fascinating that you are thinking about “what is not meant for us” as a way to shift scale, to think of justice beyond the political human sphere. I usually associate such scalar arguments, such as the idea that the Earth will survive us but we will not survive what we’ve done to the Earth, as arguments for nonaction—apolitical inertia. But you seem to be activating this reframing as a way to care more, to be more invested, while aware that we are neither master nor subject of the narratives unfolding. This reminds me of something that seems like a contradiction but perhaps is not, that I have been thinking about in both of our work. I think we share a desire or openness to learn from the materials—how they resist us, what their will asserts, and how we might embrace things that rust, mold, or change as part of the work.

AG2022_2100544a

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AG2022_2100544a

miséricorde (larousse.fr) misericord (wordsense.eu) or mercy

nom féminin

(latin misericordia, de misereri, avoir pitié, et cor, cordis, cœur)

  • 1. Pitié qui pousse à pardonner à un coupable, à un vaincu ; pardon accordé par pure bonté : Implorer miséricorde.
  • 2. Sorte de console placée sous le siège relevable d’une stalle d’église et servant, quand ce siège est relevé, à s’appuyer tout en ayant l’air d’être debout. (Les menuisiers des xve et xvie s. les ont sculptées de mascarons ou de petites scènes d’une grande fantaisie.) Synonyme : patience
  • 3. Disposition à venir en aide à celui qui est dans le besoin.

via wordnik – [Middle English, pity, from Old French, from Latin misericordia, from misericors, misericord-, merciful : miser?r?, to feel pity; see miserere + cor, cord-, heart; see kerd- in Indo-European roots.]

grace –

  • That element or quality of form, manner, movement, carriage, deportment, language, etc., which renders it pleasing or agreeable; elegance or beauty of form, outline, manner, motion, or act; pleasing harmony or appropriateness; that quality in a thing or an act which charms or delights: as, to move with easy grace.
  • Favor; good will; friendship; favorable disposition to another; favorable regard: as, to be in one? s good graces; to reign by the grace of God.

AG2022-Document-013122-ExpoChicagoBillboard-page002b

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AG2022-Document-013122-ExpoChicagoBillboard-page002b

[…] join in, for us, to change misery.

Barely, related — The Calamity Form : On Poetry and Social Life, Anahid Nersessian.

Like the commodity form, the calamity form enables an “active and in-depth knowing of nothing.” Its “peculiar achievement” is not to explain the conditions responsible for the epistemic and experiential dilemmas and contradictions of its moment but rather to put us “on close terms with incomprehension.” Through its “anti-denotative and anti-representational” strategies, the poetry “repossess[es] the occult character of the commodity and sets it not against but beside the inscrutability of its historical moment” (p. 4, emphases Levinson).

In other words, the relationship of commodity form to calamity form is one of adjacency: a serial, similarity, reiterative relationship rather than a hierarchical, logical, and causal one. The calamity form is Nersessian’s category-term for Romanticism’s way of suspending, attenuating, downgrading, vaulting over, fracturing, blurring, deforming, and misdirecting the normative relationships between signifier and signified that characterize narrative, statement, argument, and reference. The calamity form, on her reading, neither critiques nor idealizes the commodity form; it “rehearses” it …

Marjorie Levinson on The Calamity Form via Critical Inquiry