Activism is increasingly instrumental, meaning it’s a form of power that is tied to the logic and algorithm of the status quo. This makes activism, even in the search for justice, a creature of the status quo, which renders hope and justice, as ironic as that sounds, a creature of the things we’re trying to leave behind.
— Dr. Bayo Akomolafe on Slowing Down in Urgent Times
it awoke me from sleep, the thought. A correction. something that clarified the feeling of not wanting to forgive, or not being able to. it’s trite, but three had always been my breaking point in this series of incursions, especially in those cases when there has been a latitude of attempted understanding and reasoning in between. the recipient of the gaslight, on the other hand does not calculate. how much is enough? the arbitrariness of numbers is probably less reasonable than the process of enduring or the tenacity of tolerating or the act of forgiving. actually on a certain level, it would be unreasonable——no?——to say to a friendship, to love, that i do not accept this anymore. right? W says there is no reason to 絕交 and we need time to learn and understand one another. of course. but what if i say simply that i am unable to continue like this? i do not like to count, but something keeps ticking. was it that which woke me from sleep?
perhaps it was the sudden clarity of watching an awkward transpiring of a series of very reasonable utterances of ‘not quite loyal’ words. the crispy field recordings of an anthropocene, brown noise wilderness that had kept me unconscious before came back again through the reverse journey from sleep into a dream-like scenario. i am in the post-apocalyptic game which we had romanced together last summer. so i am alone, but reflecting upon relationships that are perhaps no longer possible, and there is something forlorn and undone about this, though that’s what apocalypse is really. it’s drizzling and murky here all the time, here and there, we woke into dream and reality is simply a matter of perspective. it’s exactly that we argued about this, a simple difference of experience about something that happened in the past. you brought it up because you were hurt and disappointed, but what is meant by ‘not quite loyal’ is that hurt is prickly and dishonest if it only cowers behind rage. it’s reasonable, yes, like when i reason with myself that forgiveness is a higher ground. i’ve still never gotten there, still on game one（放下，不是放棄，而不是失去）, too short of an attention span for mantras.
how does she keep forgiving? it’s a questionably positive character trait these times around, a puzzle to play on both sides, like when S describes M’s bad quality of not being able to see anything negative of anyone else. I thought when she said it, oh, how strange that is! What’s so wrong with roses? But anyway, I am not M nor your ex-girlfriend, not so forgiving and not so resilient, maybe not so tolerant, not so enduring. i don’t want to calculate, but don’t know how to bear the unfair exchange of a wound for a blow, even if understand how I may be implicated in its opening. I am sorry, even, that I said something awkward and ambivalent when we played the game that time, but wasn’t it obvious that we were in the grey and murky chapter where awkward and ambivalent things are uttered? Is being sad and disappointed a violence already inflicted, with reasonably violent returns? That is the ambivalence of saying stupid things that you realise are stupid in the midst of voicing them, but there they are, your mouth is open, stupidity lays before you just as the person in front of you, the one who receives it while listening with an unwittingly ever so slightly peaked (piqued?) eyebrow. The person in front of you doesn’t say anything in this moment, of course——that’s what ambivalence does; it delays time in the staccato of its complexly unfurling hesitations, though the simultaneous folding in and folding over of affect leads to other arhythmic utterances for which connections are astray and hence may also be categorised as stupid. ‘retarded’ is a politically incorrect term these days, but it is exactly about the mismeasure of time rather than being wrong or right per se. Ambivalence is fair. Its slowness is an emphasis upon space rather than its surrounding points and prickles.
justice requires calculation. but i’m no heroine, and it’s always a bit more complicated than that.
Posted by 丫 | reply »「我感覺是，在人中時越來越感覺自己的變化」
i flew again on your birthday. that’s the excuse anyhow, for these weeks of greetingless-ness. but noticing that this makes for too many times of beginning with ‘sorry’ when the greeting finally comes, i don’t want to say sorry yet again——know i’ve already sucked the meaning of words dry these last years. too much has already been said, or if i did say it, something always warps and buckles along the way. bristles bend. it never feels right, and i detest this rightness. words overlap and cancel one another like low-res animations playing endlessly in an empty, unlit room.
actually it is now the third year in a row to be on an airplane on your birthday, perhaps the mark of a ritual. to be in air as excuse, to be full of air as metaphor, to be on flight mode as break of communication. to catch so much of your own breath there is no longer space for words. being in an airplane is kind of like that, anyhow, the quiet of disquiet, white noise turns pink turns brown, ears turn inwards.
perhaps rituals serve the same purpose: affirmations of meaning that do not really require words. small gestures repeated at certain intervals of time create affective knowledge, like knowing the amount of time before the sun’s blessings make Alÿsian-sized valleys of industrial blocks of ice. the valley of all that i could have said but did not spilled over the sides of the building, he sent American Greetings e-cards once a year, there was a click over a caress. she would rather say nothing at all than let it be said cheaply.
a no-rhythm rhythm. that’s the ritual. flight mode white-pink-brown noise, repetition, air-pressurised tinnitus, the rituals of getting older. i miss you sometimes and that is all. there is not much more efficacious beyond that. i really hope that you are happy, that your body fills with good air and songs of peace. the fact that i can no longer tell otherwise is perhaps the sign that there was no more space for me to know——air time——like the sound of a stranger’s breathing next to you on a long distance journey. it feels close because everything around is passing darkness, and you’re too timid to ask any more questions because you were once cursed for it. and because the best regard answers in words never bring you anywhere.
better to take a flight instead.
happy birthday and a new year, f
Posted by 丫 | more »
「尋找問候」，第五章（wish you were here no. 5）
the first page of Resident, or Resident Evil, or This Minor Contextualisation of a Minor Temporality Known as Publishing on the Run, self-published 2022 (the copy for boat is the only time a delivery has completely failed)
dear h.,
the first disclaimer is that this letter is possibly not to only be read by you. i can imagine you might find some offense to that, but i realised like some strange twitch in me, there is something making me unable to face up to certain individuals on the ‘should reply to’ list, kind of like being less able to look at people in the eyes. and if i could only make this happen through finding a channel through a more general, faceless you to you, then it may only be this for the time being. looking aside from your eyes, there is a thing next to the thing. but it must be next to you.
i hope you may not be too offended and can find a way to understand this possibly strange manner of behaviour, perhaps a bit of a narcissistic reverse to the original request to hear more about you. i think most of what i saw and wrote before were also self-projections, which despite their reassurances makes me feel worse somehow, like not being able to look a you in the eye. that is why i said i will try to ‘face’, another way.
i ran into our mutual acquaintance Y last weekend and——in the same vocal paragraph of bemoaning the fact that people don’t read anymore——she was adamantly encouraging about continuing to write. so i try to readdress.
the last message you wrote was that _Friends are important. Especially nice if one doesn’t need to socialize to have them_ And it has almost come to this stage in life where one can say exactly that, like wise (and funny) C. noted so so long ago about knowing a good relationship when you can sit together in the same room together and feel comfortable not speaking to one another. more recently, W. discovered a version of it in the form of a named therapy called ‘body doubling‘, which is a less romantic, more production-oriented way of thinking about being together in a world that is absolutely not ‘together with it’. That goes back to the difficulties of being sad-core in a success-driven society, though one may also argue that success-driving is exactly what makes the fissures with sadness ever irreconcilable.
so go back to rhythm. 4/4 time is simply 4/4 time, but one can be-come another, there must be infinite transitions from the one to the other, right? Is this a silly metaphor? What makes you laugh these days, if you are still thinking about the point of humour? I actually really love your laugh. It’s more like a giggle or a chuckle, because you are generally a quiet person, and that is endearing coming from a man, if i can say that. An array of subtleties there, but maybe (another projection here) that combination of cynicism with humour is where our rapport found its place. i think i would define absurdity in such a way, but hope we can find some sort of specificity here that extends it beyond the nationalised version of which you spoke? Or maybe you’re right, as we are mostly so well trained now as ‘internet Americans’. That is the horrible contemporary universalism of language and humour buttressed by technology. Do you remember the very bad joke about Elaine and Coke that you shared with me when we first began talking more, from the ad campaign that was all over the city at the time? Something like that.
Another thought. That you can continue with the small joy you take from the live shows. Small joys is the same thought as rhythm, i think. So how to maintain the rhythm in which you can keep returning to that? Because of course it is so hard to see what small joy is in the midst of a dark refrain, or in the outburst of anger. I try my best not to react these days. Writing to you in this way is perhaps the same gesture of self-reflection while feeling terrible. So yes, I don’t know how to think too much about Kassel because it bore, in some ways, that feeling of rift. The core and the face alienated from one another in this overdramatisation of camaraderie that I wanted to partake in, but could only flitter about numbly because most of the things that were causing internal distress had nothing to do with the context at hand. Looking back now, perhaps I could have made better links between the core space and the extension of limbs. I don’t know how that would have been possible. I tried the direct confession to the best of my ability. I apologised. And still, I lost a friend. Too many accumulations of ‘created absence’ these years. That echo of emptiness is probably what rings this tinnitus.
About you at that time, I only felt that you were eager for having a real dialogue, which I would have wanted to do but can never do in those social situations because I want to try to take care of everyone——a mise en scène——only to end up failing mostly myself, of course. I didn’t feel anything destructive on your part, only that you were unable to read this from me and the situation, leading to your feeling of disappointment? what did you feel was destructive? were you upset?
i think you know yourself well enough to make choices that work fine for you given circumstances, but perhaps it is also about learning to rely more upon what we don’t know about ourselves, or about others… I wonder if Brasil was able to do that for you? You didn’t say too much about it. Someone said to me once that when he was young, he used to think that he was right, that it was the whole fucking world that had gotten it all wrong. But the older he became, things turned, and maybe it was that the rest of the world had it right, and he was the one who couldn’t figure it out. Years later, a young friend said with a grin to me that he hopes to keep finding himself wrong, because it’s when he feels that he’s more ‘right’ than everyone else that he’ll know he’s gotten too old. are you an old man yet, dear h?
Shall we meet (online) soon? Do you have non-socialising, body-doubling friends where you are now? Is it important for you to bring bodies and friend(s) and ideas and trust together into one room, and how do you go about doing that?
from another city,
e[UTF-8]
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sometimes the fires cannot be fought,
in which case, you can also e-mail me at ho【愛特】iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter【點】net.
何穎雅 now in new territories.
小船 Boat
With the exception of one fateful date, the four other exercises that I designed for Visual Diary Archive were each put together with a specific person in mind. I don’t speak to any of them so often anymore, and with distances, it sometimes becomes difficult to know where and how to begin again. Words don’t always bridge gaps, and perhaps neither do images, but if a series of exercises incite certain actions, I wonder what new thoughts, imaginations or understandings may be filled in the spaces between us.
The other quandary or surprise this brings us is the question of participation. It was because of a lack of general participation that I decided to ask a single person to respond to the exercises for me, and since each exercise had also been addressed to a singularity, it somehow made sense for this text-based response to be as well. So this is for Boat——less far, but also some distance away. I thought we would be connected by the expanse of sea next to our cities, but after checking the map I realised that the water where you are has a different name than the water where I am, even if water is fluid and I don’t want to believe it has bounds.
…
Nina and Asako made a work together in 2014 called The soup of a body past: notes on evaporation. Here is an image of the text that was printed and hung in the space:
And so I think now, along with Fotini and pictures of words, of the similarity between water and thoughts flowing between us, like ancient salts that both wound and heal us over time. Do you know the English idiom about rubbing salt into someone’s wounds? It means to make a bad situation worse, to aggravate it.
When we talked recently about togetherness, about how to participate in a project about being together, it felt almost like salt, like our non-togetherness being amplified by discussing it, and after that long back-and-forth of messages, I cried, alone. It felt bad, but maybe like the tolerance for salt, alcohol, and drugs, resilience grows with experience, so I really cannot say it was an overly aggravated situation. Unlike the connoisseur, after all this time I would prefer to make less judgements about who and what are wrong or right or bad or good. But maybe we can keep searching for new words or images or thoughts to simply keep describing the taste of these things. Like the quandary or surprise of your participation, I want to meet something outside of myself and get to know it better.
What I mean is, if it was a less than ideal situation that hardly a soul volunteered their images or words to this project, maybe it was kind of salty to finally see your contributions——several being what I saw as misunderstandings of the instructions. I think anyone who has asked anything of anyone else will know this taste. Let’s call it the strange flavour of ‘participation’ or ‘getting others to do things’, together or not. Sometimes it comes in the form of ‘collaboration’ (what Eyal Weizman calls the ‘very absolute extreme’ of participation), sometimes ‘coercion’ (what parents sometimes have to do to get their children’s compliance), and very often ‘compromise’ (what we as independent, less than star practitioners have to do within the systems that we would often rather confront). In this instance, there are two layers of participation: one requested from a general audience on the Internet; and secondly, the participation from you, which was performed as a favour to me. Both may be described as the kind of slightly disappointing or wounded salt of things not happening as were expected, but maybe I have to suck on this a bit more, to allow a passage of flavours to come through in engaging with that (non)participation. Something more like the 鹹梅 salty plums I used to love when I was a child——sour, sweet, bitter, savoury and salty.
So if I am to try to take in these five images you posted just a little bit longer, yes, some things made me squirm a little bit, or laugh, doubt, affirm, feel perplexed, and/or smile. The date 2020-06-30 got replaced by a longing for Shanghai about one year earlier, and it felt at first like a betrayal to all that 2020-06-30 means for Hong Kong. On the date of your photo, 2019-05-26, chosen for some other reason of which I am not aware, things had actually already begun boiling here. You, living next to waters with a different name, are not expected to have known that. And so your participation with rain in another city on another day defuses the centrality of importance, like maybe the way that rain probably was once a particle of air which was once part of an ocean with a wholly other name.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for 2020-06-30
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for Fotini
But you want us to know your name. 張小船, big B – big O – big A – big T (x2), little b – big O – big A – big T. I had initially imagined the Fotini exercise to locate searches for meaning, like when we take photos of pages from books to replace taking notes, or record signs as a way of remembering. You’ve shared yourself with us here, in a few guises but you all the same, funnily captured in a print format that is mostly outdated, though it makes sense in the context of you living now in Japan and with what I had asked you before in an audio recording also dedicated to you. So yes, ‘a lot of Boat’——meaning, and a string of things to remember.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for 京蘊 Anouchka
You appeared again with Anouchka, and it was so surprising to see you, ordinarily so shy, now leaning back in this very forthright position, looking at the camera confidently, even if hidden under a cap and sunglasses. Those metal bars must be the Cuban counter to the kind of structures they put in the parks and underpasses of Hong Kong——manmade objects to keep people from public spaces. No loitering, no sitting, no sleeping. But there you are, sitting defiantly on top of them, and though it must be quite uncomfortable, you reveal in the caption the immunity offered by being in the eye of a crush. Now he is crushed in prison and your small secret opened up in the maze of someone else’s archive.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for Nisan
Nisan would probably not be pleased that I’ve translated her idea for a continuous line among discrete objects in this way. So maybe it is fitting that your image leaves a very small gap in the line, which, if we were to put together with the other photos, would break the horizon. It’s not certain whether this subtle subversion on your part was purposeful or simply a visual opening of the ‘rules of participation’, but I’m glad it would be you to do it, just as I am thankful that it would be you to tell me during a long and painful back-and-forth all the horrible things that have gone astray and still be my friend.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for Nina
And maybe that’s why the last one, Nina, is the one to end on, because it’s another intimate space between you and a lover. This time you are the photographer, but for all the power within that role it is a sudden fear from the sudden movement of his sleeping body that clicked this shutter. And this is quite a complex story for a mistaken photograph——at least compared to the majority that I had collected and cannot place at all except by virtue of the photographs taken before and after. Your photo for Nina bears similar warm tones as the ones that she has collected in her archive, though hers are mostly created by the redness of light seeping through skin.
…
I want thousands of beads of sweat from my body to seep through my skin and slip into an ocean that has one name on one side and another name on another. Sometimes these oceans are named after people, while you, on the other side from here, are named after the vessel that keeps us afloat on the sea. It was the most cheeky and romantic of things for your parents to do, but like these images, what I like most are for these smallest of intimacies to be laid bare in a plain space for anyone to know and see, the most subtle invitation for participation. An act of taking notice.
And after those long hours of talking about ‘getting people to do things’, it is still difficult to come up with answers. But you contacted me tonight as I wrote this text, asking for a favour.
So for now——simply——yes, of course.
Posted by 丫 | reply »epistolary formations (for Ĵ, Ş, Ȼ and Ḅ)
dearest yous,
digital crumbs here in response to those things you said, those things you sent, real material ways and a digital means. ‘i am sorry for the delayed reply’ prefaces so many of these formations, followed mostly by the mental hesitation for apologising too much. though it’s nice to hear ‘no need to apologise’ in response sometimes, it takes a sorry to get there. truly sorry for too many things.
lateness somehow psychologically necessitated a more involved response, if this so-called ‘publicness’ can warrant any more meaningfulness. actually i told Ḅ that what i like most here is the anonymous intimacy of passerby in public, because being an outmoded place, it’s hidden in plain sight, Emily Dickinson style. there was a period when i wrote little notes and left them in random places, too, and i found one a few years ago that didn’t get distributed, so sent it to Ẳ in the post along with a bunch of other random things, but i think the clutter of it all overwhelmed her, so there was not much conversation about it afterwards. at the time, her son could just fit the quarter-sized sample jacket i made in fashion school.
so many things need explaining.
and your faith astounds me sometimes. but i guess we still make (it) work. it’s perhaps not so dissimilar——nudity in public, intimacies for those who were never keen at p.d.a., the weaning separation from one’s body that is called a work.
Art is insufficient to narrate the inhumanity of history, because it is insufficient to explain it. Disaster is either explained by means of psychology, or the savagery of society is described as if it were a supernatural event; fascism is presented ‘as the machination of rackets outside society, not as the coming-to-itself of society as such.’
-from The Orpheus Double Bind: What Can Writing Save?, Nurdan Gürbilek
and what would you say to those that don’t watch films, don’t really read books, don’t dance? aren’t they terrible, those people, how are you going to explain it to them? how are you going to wish for them the thing that changed you and you don’t regret it not one bit, except all the times you fail to explain it to your stern mother or that person in power that you wanted to impress. you’re sorry.
Ş, i like the digitised irony that your rooms reminded me of playing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or growing up choosing my own adventure——though you don’t say ‘you’. but something like she says, it wasn’t birds but paper speaking——your real, material and actual post, Ş, so carefully bound by hand and sent to me across the Pacific just as you said you would, when most people don’t. and with that I have to tell you, unapologetically sorry, that I haven’t forgotten what I said I would send to you. it’s not ready yet, hopefully soon.
“Time the Great Healer (live at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 5 September 2006)”, Cat Power
though today i put off work to deal with a number of personal matters. and really that is an irony as well, as if they were separate in these realms, you know what i mean, but again it’s something about still learning to explain after all this time, i have to reiterate myself and you to yous again and again, because you weren’t listening and in my anger i don’t hear myself. maybe you’ll say i have to listen more in order to be heard. maybe.
i like that the package from Ĵ, one of the most dedicated in believing the romance of ‘art’ and ‘post’ all these years, came this time not directly from you but by the smooth spaces of guanxi through the editorial office of a magazine based in Spain. i like that you once fleetingly included me in one issue, and still hope that we’ll have that chance for a two-day dialogue over sidewalk beers some day.
“ピンクブッチ Pink Butch (ラララ Lalala)”, マジカル・パワー・マコ Magical Power Mako
i like that an e-mail from Ȼ seems so anachronistic amidst all of our other conversations online, that the tone differs by that very fact and that you’ve encouraged me thus to write poems in Chinese, like Ɀ also showed me, so simply, how line breaks make all the difference.
did i show you the poem he helped me to break?
每當你不在（身邊），我念及你的時候
總有許多的話，想要對你說
距離慢慢縮短，空間卻變得
越來越厚重
文字難以承載的那些話題
總與天氣有關
一種中間狀態，它從來不明白你
或者是我
我們侃侃而談
談論愛
卻總是不夠
— from the 視覺博物誌 Visual Diary Archive project “其人，其事：何京蕴 Just People, Just Timing: Anouchka”
and for Ḅ, who joined us most recently and 那麼有耐心 accompanied me 陪著我 so patiently on the 坐今天的山車 roller coaster of today:
Posted by 丫 | reply »
“these times”
these times
these special times
these unusual times
these weird times
these difficult times
these uncertain times
these turbulent times
these strange times
these difficult and complex times
these harsh times
these dreary times
these trying times
these crazy times
these troubled times
these pandemic times
these distressing and surreal times
these extraordinary times
these times of crisis
times like these
—an index of “these times” as found in my inbox, spring/summer 2020
Posted by f | more »i saw the End of the Century
L and E with matching scar tissue, Arnhem 2001
hallo, dear L,
Now that the cinemas have finally shut down (they tried their best to hold out as long as they could, seating only available in every other row), I could finally watch the end of the century go. And even if ever so subtle, it washed over me like the laps of a past self that had been thrown overboard so long ago, now cuddling up uncannily like the sound of the sea in a new moon darkness. Yes, as she said, “the way sounds, music, make you remember things you’d forgotten about yourself“.
I remember when you
(and everybody)
first got into skinny jeans,
but did you notice
that I was a bit deprecating about it?
It’s that self of we when we were more intertwined, so perennially you (is me, in admiration, is we, growing up together), and yet now grown into other realms. a wise father, still awkward (some of the cuts), still funny (still innocent), but more nuanced perhaps. It’s learning to speak from experience rather than in the voice of those we admire, just like you said. It is you, so perennially, ever you (they even look like yous), so much that i know you’ll laugh with me when i say that is a very gay man thing to do. Right around the end of the century you told me how you knew you were gay, and I can tell you from my woman’s experience that things on this end were not so straightforward, but that is me, and yous is yous. Those selves are another perception of time in a knowing-queer way, perhaps, and even so we can still be full of references (Buñuel, the assured knowledge of self in movement, so many conversations recalled, and a Barcelona to Linklater’s Vienna) because those are our experiences, too.
Amidst those fleeting points of reflective light that glimmer ever so often amidst now isolation, I was reminded to speak from a place of wisdom. Not to assume wisdom, but yes, to recall, revisit and retranslate those places we’ve been, the conversations we’ve had, and the feelings that have always been facts. Life, as she said (that someone else said), is less like the sturdy tree and much more like the weather. And fickle as that may be, we know beyond everything the colours of sunset and ensuing fall of temperature, the scent of rain, and those broad, striped gusts that ping the ear and make us hold tighter. That’s all there is. Weather, and wisdom. So let’s hold tight, as far away as we may be.
and on continuity:
a box-o’!
just slightly disappointed that it was
obviously empty—
javi drinking the last drop
repeatedly,
and ocho hesitantly taking it
still half full…
(or personality references?)
___
Fin de Siglo, now viewable online via Lucio Castro and/or a few links when you look for them.
Posted by 丫 | more »
Textual Notes PWSSSRFS…
(there are reasons to think about my body and hygiene these days)
— Notes taken while on residency with Amy Suo WU at Motel Spatie; Arnhem Presikhaaf, 2020 January-February
In the time of that sojourn, a surface wound that stayed the entire time, irritated, flaming and hardened so much that it was narrated from being the oddity of a pimple on my hand to the paranoia of a wart-like abscess. It accompanied me during our conversations like a replacement for the biting of nails which had accompanied me since childhood, the extra psychosomatic conversation with myself to harmonise and discord with any other conversations going on in the room. And we spoke about intersectionality.
— from “Worlds in Collision: Multicultural Art History (Selection)” by Carlos VILLA, from Supporting Material by Celine CONDORELLI
I picked at it, making it bleed and scab over more than once, wondering if this would be the lifelong marker with which to remember this time. Other people get tattoos for such occasions, but somehow for me bruises, scars and mosquito bites were always enough. Sometimes I liked to think about the tiniest bit of spittle from an insect you never saw being smuggled transnationally, at peak seasons such that your body could carry two nationalities of mosquito saliva at the same time, recognisably different by the radius of red and degree of itch.
It was only a surface. But as my skin-scoring became manic, I remembered one of the first meals we shared together, when we were happy to find a few pairs of disposable chopsticks in the otherwise fork-and-knife-loaded space. A bit too brashly did I rip apart the two sticks and rub their ends together so as to smooth the rough edges in the way that we had learned, and somehow a little bamboo splinter had lodged itself into the meat between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. This is the pressure point you are supposed to massage in order to release anxieties, and so it was that this residency——initially planned as an artistic labour——unfolded into my body subversively with a small army of histamines hardening a point known as 合谷 hégŭ, or LI-4. Like a pain to help release pain.
I had been telling everyone that it had been such a difficult year for me, or for most people in my context, rather, but now, when I had limited this sabbatical purposefully to run back into the fire, that heat seemed to flake away into something much more quietly insurrectionary, like the last hibernation before the end of the world. What were we gathering amidst these stories and meetings, me picking self-consciously at a surface wound on the back of my hand and scheming in those vague ways afforded by poetry? Would it be possible to be productive about this care in letting go, somewhere in between concern and a manic extraction of the conversation one has with oneself, parasiting off of the glimmers of knowledge and joy and jealousy of these people around me. So many intensities.
— “Witch-hunt: gossip has always been a secret language of friendship and resistance between women”, Hannah BLACK
In many parts of the world, women have historically been seen as the weaver of memory——those who keep alive the voices of the past and the histories of the communities, who transmit them to the future generations and, in so doing, create a collective identity and profound sense of cohesion. There are also those who hand down acquired knowledges and wisdoms——concerning medical remedies, the problems of the heart, and the understanding of human behaviour, starting with that of men. Labelling all this production of knowledge ‘gossip’ is part of the degradation of women——it is a continuation of the demonologist’s construction of the stereotypical women as prone to malignity, envious of other people’s wealth and power, and ready to lend an ear to the Devil. It is in this way that women have been silenced and to this day excluded from many places where decisions are taken, deprived of the possibility of defining their own experiences, and forced to cope with men’s misogynous or ldealised portraits of them. But we are regaining our knowledge. As a woman recently put it in a meeting on the meaning of witchcraft, the magic is: “We know that we know”.
— Witches, Witching-hunting and Women, Silvia FEDERICI
Among you, it becomes difficult to compare all that has been said to all that has not been said. All of these conversations. And these words are a conversation with those conversations, if not simply out of a question of translation but out of the need to make space for myself in this constellation of you(s) and me(s). To ascertain, like that book I took from your bookshelf: Feelings are Facts. We(s) would need to meditate through hours and hours of these discourses in order to sift though the medley of feelings that make up this moment, and that is a fact, too. Yes, as the witches say, “We know that we know“.
— “Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Differences”, Carol GILLIGAN
And maybe I know too many things. My head is filled with all sorts of banalities like the facial expressions of strangers and the taste of your favourite Grüner Veltliner and the prick of winter mosquitoes. Like the approximate sojourn of a piece of shit that appeared a few days after I arrived. It was the lack of anyone’s care to remove it from the narrow path between our residency room and the project space, making it such that you took the long route around every time, while I forged ahead to play hopscotch. I had the forethought that this dog I never saw had left the natural wastes of its circulating body just like the mosquitoes, and perhaps I should bring other contraband back this time as another memento of my stay. But an uncared-for poop was just a parallel temporary visitor like us to this space motel, and the day before I departed, what were now like hardened coal nubs finally blew away with that strange storm of not very much rain. Perhaps its winds were so great it blew its own rain away, a storm having a frightening conversation with itself. Its utterances came out like screeches and gales that shook the glass of our cove. From inside, we lifted our heads up in awe, and when we went outside we walked at strange angles with our heads down, pretending not to overhear. Buddha was also blown violently away that day, falling off of a neighbour’s balcony and left as an Asian corpse shattered in the white neighbourhood. In the beginning I kept thinking we would have been a strange sight here, our little crew, but actually there was nobody around most of the time, and we were left to play on our own like children at the slumber party. We stole time that way, turning their money and our own productivity into a space for taking care. Even so, I walked on that shit at least once, but you took time, and we cleaned up our tracks together. Self-quarantine, if you want to call it——I gained ten kilogrammes, too——but something else feels lighter because I know we had taken it on together. This takes space and so it was that ‘project ruimte’ was exactly that, not as the space for projects but a project to make space, as a fact of feelings between us——to read together with long pauses in between, to write letters from near and far, and to eat and resist the fallen communality of a shared meal out of one bowl. To be together and trust in someone else’s voice to guide when our eyes are closed.
I don’t know yet how to bring this space into visibility. And maybe it doesn’t have to, except as mischievous glances and giggles between those of us who know, and even if you don’t see us you will feel the smiles in our voices in that space behind your ears and in front of your neck——a tingling somewhere between an itch and a tickle to make chords and discords in you, too. Take care.
— Altered quotations and notes taken from the afwasdoekje reading group, PWSSSRFS No. 1, 2020 January 25
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