“Something barbaric always adheres to the deliberate destruction of a work of art” — Judge Michael Ponsor quoted in Stephanie Bailey’s article on Christoph Büchel for ArtReview (041424).
“… making it one of the most expensive liquid commodities in the world — after snake venom, Chanel No. 5, insulin, mercury, and human blood.” D.M. on HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e in The Drift : Isuue Twelve.
The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to refer to a ‘conflict’ between two peoples after one of them has slaughtered the other in such staggering numbers. The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.
But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide …
[…]
Or in the words of the nation-state law of 2018, which enshrines Jewish supremacy: ‘The right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.’ It’s no wonder Palestinians and their supporters proclaim: ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.’ What many Zionists hear as a call to ethnic cleansing or genocide is, for most Palestinians, a call for an end to Jewish supremacy over the entirety of the land – an end to conditions of total unfreedom.
[…]
Opposition to anti-black racism is embraced by elite liberals; opposition to Israel’s wars against Palestine is not. They braved doxxing, the contempt of their university administrations, police violence and in some cases expulsion. Prominent law firms have announced that they will not hire students who took part in the encampments.
[…]
short-term impact is undeniable: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood thrust the question of Palestine back on the international agenda, sabotaging the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, shattering both the myth of a cost-free occupation and the myth of Israel’s invincibility. But its architects, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, appear to have had no plan to protect Gaza’s own people from what would come next. Like Netanyahu, with whom they recently appeared on the International Criminal Court’s wanted list, they are ruthless tacticians, capable of brutal, apocalyptic violence but possessing little strategic vision.
Since 2010, the number of people sleeping rough in England has more than doubled and all other forms of homelessness (for instance, families living in temporary accommodation) are at record highs. Around eight hundred libraries have closed (a fifth of all libraries in the UK, most of them in deprived areas) and more than two hundred museums. In many cases, surviving institutions have reduced their hours and cut staff. More than a thousand publicly accessible swimming pools have been closed, and nearly 60 per cent of public toilets. So many bus routes have been cancelled that buses now cover 14 per cent fewer miles than in 2010. Councils face an estimated £14 billion backlog in road maintenance, with up to 50 per cent of roads judged to be at risk of complete deterioration within fifteen years.
[…]
Why,? with this record, did the Tories keep on winning?
These experiences shaped my understanding of what Quijano meant by ‘delinking’ (desenganche). Delinking from what – from the assumptions, principles and accumulations of meaning built upon the promises of modernity. 11
The second step of delinking is relinking. Relinking with what? According to Afro-Colombian thinker, activist and artist, Adolfo Alban Achinte to relink means to re-exist: not just in the sense of resistance but fundamental re-existence, for which there is no blueprint. It would be imperial to think that the necessary creativity once you delink from conceptual and emotional frameworks has been already mapped. It is up to the delinkers, so to speak, to work on their own relinking through their own memories, trajectories and forms of domination. However, I would say today that it is of the essence to relink with earth, with Pachamama (mother earth) as it is voiced in the South American Andes.
This exchange makes clear that decolonisation (as decoloniality) in the twenty-first century is not a master plan for liberation but a myriad of delinkings to re-emerge and re-exists in whatever communal we (each of us) find ourselves wounded by coloniality, which again are not the same for everyone.
Also, On Decoloniality, a series edited by Walter Mignolo & Catherine Walsh. 2018. “… constructing paths and praxis toward an otherwise of thinking, sensing, believing, doing, and living.”
The Practice of Diaspora is nothing short of a masterpiece. By looking at the way black life, thought, struggles and quite literally, words, are translated across the black Francophone and Anglophone worlds, Edwards reveals how Paris became a locus for the development of black modernism and internationalism during the crucial interwar years. Rather than search for some essential unity, he explores difference, creative tensions, misapprehensions and misunderstandings between key black intellectuals. The result is a spectacular interdisciplinary study that will profoundly change the way we think about the African diaspora.–Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
—just an ache that grew
until she knew she’d already lost everything
except desire, the red heft of it
warming her outstretched palm.
I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land, Rita Dove
“Kwè m si ou vle mwen pa konn ki sa ou ye Yon lonbrit ki pèdi kòd li nan mitan liv pwezi Yon flè choublak ki gen malozye Yon zwazo ak zèl li mare dèyè do l Mwen pantan sou ou san m pa t konnen kilès ou ye Jodi a bouch ou tètanba Rèl sa a pi gwo pase doulè w”
Ogun’s Return (Once Again… Statues Never Die), 2022 Inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag Framed: 60 1/4 x 79 7/8 x 2 1/4 inches / 153 x 203 x 5.6 cm Edition of 6 + 2 APs
One of the edition is in the Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by Jorge M. Pérez, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the PAMM Ambassadors for Black Art.
Sculpture at Maurice A. Ferré Park managed by by the Bayfront Park Management Trust.
“Mais soudain il te tient le poème Comme si ta volonté n’importait pas Il te tient il est plus fort que toi Il est sous ta peau Il se cache dans ton sang”
