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.

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