You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
The Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures after Property and Possession, 2016.
“Anybody who thinks that they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of the terror, is wrong.” Fred Moten
via Sarah Jane Cervenak’s IG
It was only thirty-three seconds long, this “satirical” video, but it is one of the most comprehensive depictions of what I want to call the American Imaginary that I have ever seen. Within the American Imaginary, there is and always has been a subcategory of people in this world who are not only born to suffer but are habituated to it. They come from the “shithole countries,” as previously defined by the president, during his first term.
…
In America, AI is a copyright issue, an uncanny video, a propaganda tool. Through the portal, it is the destructive, extractive and violent contest to get sufficient cobalt and coltan out of African ground.
…
strong case Fanon made for a radical humanism as the necessary basis of any progressive socialist politics. “What matters today,” Fanon claimed, “the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences might be.” Not us, not them: humanity.
“Trump Gaza number one”, Zadie Smith in New York Review of Books.
Kishin Shinoyama, Shoku
Publisher by Ushio Shuppan, 358 pages, 1993, Hardcover under dust jacket, in a slipcase, 32,5 x 24,5 cm.
To temper an obstinate and wicked
Pain that has been burrowing into me for some time
I try, now and again, to cry out piteously
To the one who, oh miserable me, preys upon my heart.
But, a disciple of desire, my voice
Is scarcely heard, and already it moans and shouts.
What a harsh refrain, and so inimical to my longings,
I am deterred from begging for mercy.
And a thought says to me: fool, do you not see
That you always receive both scorn and injury
If you throw yourself meekly at the feet of someone cruel?
Thus, in silence, I breed a poorly concealed
Affliction in my heart, which is where the seed
Of that cruel love that gives me such despair took root.
Paolina Secco-Suardo Grismondi translated from Italian by Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett via swwim everyday
i am a promise awake with knowing
a pull in a thread
sprawling
a sputtering
a stuttering
a slant
a song
a rising
a falling
[…]longing for the pierce of stars
tonguing the night
brushing away the darkness
til there is light
around
beneath
inside
Desire [even in the time of the tyrant], Leah Umansky
Wilky Toussaint narrates a biography of Frankétienne. Jean-Pierre Basilic Dantor Franck Étienne d’Argent, 12 April 1936 – 20 February 2025.
Haiti Inter : “adieu maître du spiralisme poête de l’infini”
Ultravocal, September 5 – October 3rd, 2024, Central Fine.
Radio Aporee, the platform radio aporee is online since about 2000, the project radio aporee ::: maps has started late 2006. it is a global soundmap dedicated to field recording, phonography and the art of listening. it connects sound recordings to its places of origin, in order to create a sonic cartography, publicly accessible as a collaborative project.
A curve nearly naked
an arc of almost,
a wisp of becoming
a wand—
tiny enough to change me.
The Way We Love Something Small, Kimberly Blaeser
For the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, cordova has developed a multi-media installation seeking to explore “the juxtaposition of past structures to more contemporary structures that illuminate the ephemeral nature of our existence, as beings who create material culture as a means of documentation and memory” (Monique Moss).
Press release, william cordova, on the lower frequencies I speak 4u (alquimia sagrada), January 23–February 29, 2020, Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.
espere, en este edén
se bebe, se lee, se teme,
se repele, se embellece
¿se embellece?
espere,
¡se embellece!
tres veces reses
tres veces trenes
es excelente
(te ves endeble)
de frente, enter
espere, ¿enter?
¿qué tejes?
verde
verde
verde
Célebre, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, in Diario de Cuba.
We are watchers, Frida—
aching but obedient to light,
resurrected by shocks of color.
[…]We are aficionados. Pregnant
with joy in the garden’s cosmos.
We pursue hues like lovers’
lips, stalk columns of yellow
calla-lilies, praise the allure
of honey-petalled sunflowers
and the lobes of violet irises.
We thrive on iridescence—
our eyes attuned to its blessing.
Watchers. We bend near
in reverence to the bloom—
all pain humbled, stilled
for a time by beauty.
Desperate Beauty, Gail Goepfert
whoever it was standing up there
must be experiencing some heightened state
of being, or thinking—or its opposite,
thoughtlessly enraptured by the view.
[…]Only after a good five minutes did I see
that the figure was actually a tree—
some kind of cypress, probably, or cedar.
I was both amused and let down by my error.
Not only had I made the tree a person,
but I’d also given it a vision
The Figure on the Hill, Jeffrey Harrison
Only the plants will ever know, Wysocka / Pogo. 2021.
Michael Marder. Also at the Philosophical Salon.
A Philosophy of Stories Plants Tell, M.Marder.Plant Stories.pdf, 2023.
“plants not only silently tell us something (indeed, a great deal) about themselves and the world, but also that they tell stories, rendering witness accounts about life and death, light and darkness, middles, beginnings, and ends.
Plant-Thinking, A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, 2013.
“Reconstructing the life of plants “after metaphysics,” Marder focuses on their unique temporality, freedom, and material knowledge or wisdom. In his formulation, “plant-thinking” is the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants, as much as the process of bringing human thought itself back to its roots and rendering it plantlike.”
Plants in Place, A Phenomenology of the Vegetal, Edward S. Casey and Michael Marder, 2023.
“vegetal existence involves many place-based forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward, fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the surrounding world.”
Philosophy of the Home, Emanuele Coccia, Richard Dixon (Translator), 2024. Interview in Pin-Up.
This video, made in 1986, documents some of the testimony given in the Trial of Titled Arc. The artwork on trial is Richard Serra’s public sculpture, Tilted Arc, commissioned and installed by the U.S. government in 1981. Four years later, a public hearing was held to consider the removal of the sculpture from its site in Federal Plaza in New York City. Richard Serra and other artists, politicians and community members speak in defense of Tilted Arc, on public art, and the role of the government and the of the people in shaping the public’s visual environment.
1986, 28 minutes, Paper Tiger.