Category: landscape

“I tasted—careless—then—
I did not know the Wine
Came once a World—”

One Year ago—jots what? (296), Emily Dickinson

Emanuele Coccia offers us his reflections on fashion, ecology, and transforming city/home. (Exhibition-Magazine, 2021(?))

This pandemic has shown us a kind of corporeal continuity between all human beings. This is a big deal because it’s a physical and sensible consciousness that we recognized in a single, selfsame flesh. It’s the first time that there has been a global event where everyone is aware of at the same time with a unification of bodies and consciousnesses. Everything that we had created to produce politics became obsolete: nations no longer make sense. We are truly on a single planet, and we will have to invent instruments that allow us to do politics at that level. This is true for the current question of vaccination. Everything that we have produced was conceived for a fractured world. The progressivist discourses – the “true left” – are those which will allow us to understand how to find a non-imperialist way of living together, which is at the level of this self-evident truth and this shared suffering. This virus has definitely closed the door on the political and cultural experiment of the 20th century. All of the current debates about identity are not very interesting. They are battles defending territory which has already been conquered. The great battles of the future are elsewhere I think.

Coccia with Sophie Abriat

We only need design because we are born without having either the experience or the idea of happiness. This is why we spend the rest of our lives observing, touching, measuring the world and tasting it to understand what makes us feel good. In this way, we also explore our body and our mind. This continuous exploration of self and the world in search of happiness is what we call dreaming. And design is the ambition or claim that there is a method in the way we dream, and the attempt to give a single name to all possible forms of happiness.

[…]

Actually, what interests me most is not to observe the present, but to explore what in the present is already working on shaping the world of after tomorrow. And not tomorrow, which is always a consequence of today, but after tomorrow — the kind of future that is not yet predictable and that is unrecognisable compared to the present. That is precisely why it can afford to coincide with an ancestral past. The most radical form of exploration for this should be in dreams: the dream is already an exploration, and being able to explore the dreams of others is the most important faculty for any creative. So much more than observation, dreaming is the most powerful tool of exploration.

A Take On Fashion: Emanuele Coccia

Popova on John O’Donohue’s thoughts on beginnings–

Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. Risk might be our greatest ally. To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are, attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening. There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over.

Also, O’Donohue on friendship :

In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul… This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person’s individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny.

The Inner Landscape of Beauty, On Being (02808).

“… It’s the 29^?? […], a cicada droning

on the sill and a plague on TV and the kid going on and on,

but it feels good to sit here buzzing inside myself watching

TV at the odd end of Florida, […] a cicada moaning

on the sill and a plague on, and the kid going on and on,

so I go on debating with myself whether it’d be better

to die of the plague or to die of anything other than

the plague during a plague”

The Plague on TV, Jaswinder Bolina

“It takes more time than I expected

for death to be over,
I tell my brother. And he, a hunter, says, Yeah
in the tone that means, Of course.

The Night Before I Leave Home, Elisa Gonzalez

“… I racked up habitual sins. I desired, desire

such knowledge from this world that if age one day empties my mind
I sometimes think I’d be grateful. Imagination, too,

is old habit, assiduously maintained
despite consequences.

[…]

I learned you can separate pleasure from disgrace, though
it’s hard to make a habit of pure happiness, when there’s so much to know.

“Epistemology of the Shower,” Elisa Gonzalez, American Chordata, Fall 2021.

Anahid Nersessian, in NYR, always write astutely on forms.

“I asked him recently if he finds it difficult to teach undergraduates. “Yes,” he said, “because photography doesn’t have to be art.” Unlike easel painting or classical ballet, photography is a fixture of the everyday world.”

“It is, after all, these same qualities—condensation, obliquity, an emphasis on affect, a posture of confiding—that define the poetry generally called “lyric.” Lyric poetry is what most people think of when they think of poetry, if they think about it at all. It’s poetry that allows the reader into the private consciousness of another person, often the poet herself.”

““Neither inside nor outside the image,” Chion says, the acousmêtre is neither a detached narrator-spectator of the film’s action nor a mysterious presence hovering in the wings, waiting to be revealed. It is rather “a kind of talking and acting shadow” that seems to be “wandering along the surface” of things, “seeking a place to settle.””

“Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, is an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world—and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand—than by those surrounded by “loved ones.” Zadie Smith, Intimations

“… & I place blushed

                         begonias newly-potted on my windowsill—

sad replica of my childhood garden. still, I wept

             when my grandmother’s tree returned—

                         replanted messy by surreptitious hands.”

Native Title by Ina Cariño