dig

Dig

  • Untitled

    Etel Adnan
    Etel Adnan

    Untitled, 1970. Oil on canvas (1925-2021) SFMOMA via flickr
    wikimedia

  • I breed a poorly concealed affliction in my heart

    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

  • Frankétienne

    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.

  • AG2023_1033351a or a wisp of becoming

    AG2023_1033351a

    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.

  • AG2023_1044406a ¡se embellece!

    AG2023_1044406a

    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

  • AG2023_1044814a or some heightened state of being

    AG2023_1044814a

    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

  • modes of inhabiting the middle

    PXL_20250224_224646351~2

    Which stories do fields, gardens, forests, and deserts tell? How are they articulated in—and between—the extensive and intensive senses of articulation? In what ways are they distributed between muthos and logos? There is no one all-embracing answer to these questions because the answers are indexed to various plant communities, distinct vegetal milieus, or modes of inhabiting the middle. Plant communities are tangles of stories about interactions among plants; the collaborations and collisions of plants with bacteria, fungi, and animals; agriculture and permaculture; diets and habitats; and, less and less so, the wilderness.

    The deserts that grow worldwide as a result of deforestation are the environments that best correspond to the arid abstraction of globality, inherited from the rarefication and dematerialization
    of reason. It did not have to come to this: spirit could have been receptive to matter, feeling at home in the forest, while culture could have meant care for and cultivation of life.

    … assuming that the plant’s self is not separated from the place of its growth, whatever it tells about that place is already a phyto-biographic narrative and, vice versa, the story of a plant about itself is a slowly developing narrative about its surroundings.

    … keepsakes of my memories, the mnemonic centers of gravity that evoke the events and even the atmosphere of my life at the time

    Michael Marder, A Philosophy of Stories Plants

  • AG2025_1144951a or rendering witness accounts about life

    AG2025_1144951a

    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.