“With the success of medicine and public health initiatives, architecture seemingly no longer had a role to play, and its separation from health was consummated.” Reinier de Graaf
Category: landscape
AG2024_1112250a or a lamentation
the one whispering an old, old tune into the ear
of the other –?Baby, baby, don’t leave me this way.
It meant nothing to me?–?
then, at least?–?but did you know the collective noun
for swans is a lamentation? And is a lamentation not
its own species of song?
John Murillo, Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,
Folding Suns or in debt to promises
Folding Suns connects artists from the Western New York Region with those from Puerto Rico and the American South; it poses sun and water as real and metaphorical binding agents across geography, time, and identity.
Curated by: Pablo Guardiola
Pablo Guardiola is a visual artist. His work points to different modes of narration and how these are perceived and understood. Recently he curated with Yina Jiménez Suriel, one month after being known in that island (ways of working in the Caribbean). He is co-director of Beta-Local, an arts non-profit dedicated to support and promote contemporary art practices and aesthetic thought in Puerto Rico.
Featured Artists:
Genesis Baez
Chango4
Claudia Caremi
Adler Guerrier
Gregory Halpern
Ahndraya Parlato
Silas Rubeck
Paul B. Thulin
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, August 02, 2024 – September 21, 2024.
The Guggenheim Bilbao was hardly the first iconic building, but it was the first to be credited with a measurable economic spin-off. And while that temporarily elevated the status of architects to near deities, it proved detrimental in the long run. After the Guggenheim, architecture was never quite the same. A single building had defied all expectation, only for expectations to defy all of architecture ever since. Economic success became the measure of architecture’s quality, to which architecture, in turn, had no choice but to apply itself. Architecture found itself in debt to promises it didn’t make and ultimately can’t fulfill. After Bilbao, ambitious museum projects could only fail. And they did.
architect, verb The New Language of Building, Reinier de Graaf
AG2024_1112220a or a tiny core of stillness
There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet.
Nothing to Save, D. H. Lawrence
can be better or worse; just not simple
“Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple,
[…]
forms of life that shift the pressures of being in relation.
[…]
engender dissociation and prefer the inconclusiveness of life in ellipsis.”
Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Writing Matters!)
AG2024_1100041a or small nodes
“Work out. Ten laps.
Chin ups. Look good.
Steam room. Dress warm.
Call home. Fresh air.
Hard nodes. Beware.”
Heartbeats, Melvin Dixon
To succeed in life a man must be adaptable.
Claudia Roth Pierpont’s The Florentine, in the New Yorker (2008), came back at the right time. Niccolò Machiavelli’s writings are central to the moral-ethical-effective discourses on power and how to rule.
““The Prince” offered the first major secular shock to the Christianized state in which we still live. Long before Darwin, Machiavelli showed us a credible world without Heaven or Hell, a world of “is” rather than “should be,” in which men were coolly viewed as related to beasts and earthly government was the only hope of bettering our natural plight.
[…]Erasmus, whose “Education of a Christian Prince” was written two years after Machiavelli’s work—he presented his treatise first to Charles of Aragon and, after it failed to elicit the desired financial result, to Henry VIII—spun his pious counsel around the central thesis “What must be implanted deeply and before all else in the mind of the prince is the best possible understanding of Christ.” Machiavelli, on the other hand, proposed the best possible understanding of the methods of Cesare Borgia.
[…]To succeed in life a man must be adaptable. This is a prime lesson of “The Prince,” and Machiavelli appears to have been determined to live by it. A republican during the republic, a royal servant when princes rule: “He who conforms his course of action to the quality of the times will fare well.”
[…]But a corollary, if contradictory, lesson of “The Prince” is that, try as he might, “man cannot deviate from that to which nature inclines him.” In composing his Medici-commissioned history, Machiavelli agonized over how to present the Medici, and the result is anything but the work of a courtier. Recounting how the family’s desire to “wield exclusive power” had led it to crush all political opposition, leaving other parties with no alternative except plots and murderous conspiracies, he concluded bluntly that under the Medici regime “liberty was unknown in Florence.”
change through exchanging with others
Our utopia is about the idea of change–not the thought of the absolute that we impose on ourselves and others. I always sum this up with a saying: “I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self” – Glissant.
The Archipelago Conversations, Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist, Emma Ramadan, translator. Isolarii, 2021.