unfortunately this is what i thought you meant by ‘post’…
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
慢遞件 dispatch HQL-299
// 內容 CONTENTS //
《聖誕島，自然而然》 Memorial to the Last Christmas Island
Pipistrelle, from the series Christmas Island, Naturally by Robert ZHAO
Renhui (趙仁輝作品)
// 訂量信息 QUANTITATIVE //
分兩件的作品 one artwork in two pieces
(蝙蝠聲音探测器和麥克風 bat sonar detector and microphone)
185 x 134 x 82 cm
// 出發點 START POINT //
香港鰂魚涌 Quarry Bay, Hong Kong
// 到達點 END POINT //
新加坡中山公園戴斯飯店 Days Hotel by Wyndham Singapore at
Zhongshan Park, Singapore
// 慢遞人員 COURIER //
易拎何子 PORTABLE
// 運輸狀態 SHIPPING STATUS //
派送成功 SUCCESSFULLY RECEIVED 2019-06-09，10:57
慢遞招募發布 ROUTE REQUESTED 2019-05-29，16:41
我本來沒想記錄這條線，因為突然間——也是機緣巧合——我接了一條付費的線路。但是在飛機上時，看到了一場異常漂亮的雲，像是被蝕刻的懸崖、翻滾的海浪、手提箱又或是UFO排著隊一個一個湧現，一個騎伏在另一個上面。我想著拍張照吧。我想象著熙熙攘攘的人們像雲朵一樣擁擠在這個光滑無菌的飛機場里，高高的、有弧度的天花板下然後，另一個慢遞員說他不確定這趟旅程是否能激發任何想法，因為乘坐的是飛機而非24小時的火車；飛機場真的太無菌了。然後，我回應他說我喜歡高昂情緒在這種無菌環境中所帶來的強烈對比。然後，我覺得再另一個慢遞員太天蠍了，在表達願意承接另一條線路時對「愛」這個詞的使用充滿算計。好像如果她不愛我了，那條線路也就終止了。我不確定因為愛而讓一個人捲入工作是否是可恥的，又或者如她所言，一再用荒唐的量化思維衡量事物，反映了我們自身的被奴役，而且不過是按照又一個資本主義邏輯在走。另一個慢遞員說，這個天蠍座慢遞員十分擅長太戀愛——就字面意思，談論浪漫的戀愛(演講，公開發表言論，表演)。但我們對愛到底能說什麼呢？我覺得她談論愛的時候是在利用我，但也許我拜託她慢遞時她也同樣覺得被利用。也許這就是愛的勞動⋯⋯這種愛的類型就是我們厭惡父母所有的那種，哪怕鬧翻天最後還是綁在一起。一直在一起。
這個慢遞員如此感慨於另一個慢遞員討論愛的能力，也說明她在情緒上遭遇了某種困頓。這些話不知道怎麼說。這也是勞動？感覺卡住，搜腸刮肚，想要一吐為快？就像是情緒進入了一個無菌的環境，熙熙攘攘在胃和掛在你嘴後面的那個小東西的大門之間奔波，可航班總是一再延誤。這真是項艱巨的任務。
我想起了一張飛機機翼指向雲海的照片，是一位朋友在2011年拍攝的，當時他48歲，第一次坐飛機。其實他是從北京到廣州去工作，但是在雲端，他寫了一首詩。
這會兒，飛機上的空調還是一向冷的讓人絕望，但我們正朝南飛行，太陽在我這一側。我一直緊靠窗戶以取暖，但我沒有拍雲。
I didn’t think about documenting the route this time, mostly because I felt shame to suddenly, by chance, be carrying a route for financial gain. But then while on the airplane, an especially beautiful explosion of clouds, like ravaging cliffs and waves and suitcases and UFOs waiting in line, one after another, bulbous one on top of another. I think about taking a photograph. I think about swathes of people like clouds rushing under the tall, curving glass ceilings of sleek and sterilised airports. About how another courier said he was not sure if he would be able to come up with inspired documentation this time, travelling by plane as opposed to the 24-hour train ride of his previous route; airports are too sterile. About how I then responded that I like the contrast of such high emotions in those sterile environments. About how I felt like she was being so scorpion in her calculated use of the word love when talking about her willingness to take another route. That courier route would stop when she stopped loving me, supposedly. I was not sure if it should be shameful to engage someone to work for love, or, as she said, to run again on something absurdly quantifiable, meaning facing up to our servitude, and just simply following another capitalist logic. Another courier says that scorpion courier is very good at 談戀愛——literally, to talk about romantic attachments (and the act 演講, of talking publicly, is to perform). But what can we really talk about love? I feel like she’s using me when she talks about love, but perhaps just as she feels used that I ask her about routes. That is the labour of love, perhaps…the kind that we resent our parents for, the kind that keeps them together after all those explosions and all this time. All this time.
The courier that is impressed with another’s ability to talk about love confesses that she gets stopped by emotion. All these words that don’t know how to come out. Is that a labour, too? To be stuck with our hiccups and having to work around not knowing how to liberate difficult words? Like emotion in a sterile environment, rushing all about somewhere between a stomach and the gate of that little thing that hangs in the back of your mouth, even though the flight paths are on perpetual, repeated delay. It is a lot of work.
I think about the photograph of the wing of the aircraft pointing toward a sea of clouds, the one photographed by a friend in 2011 on his first journey by plane at the age of 48. He was on his way from Beijing to Guangzhou for work, actually. But while up in the air he wrote a poem.
The air conditioning on this plane is as usual on high for sterility, but we’re flying south, and the sun is on my side. I keep leaning close to the window to keep warm, but I don’t take a photograph of clouds.
Posted by 丫 | reply »「尋找問候」系列第三章（wish you were here）
倫敦 london – 英属哥伦比亚省列治民市 richmond, british columbia
dearest,
that’s heavy. hope that it is not a reflection of your current state.
is it?
but i discovered this today, which whether or not you like the music, you may begin to love simply by the way it is described:
Talked to you on the phone the other day——WhatsApp voice call——and I noticed the dissecting and unsettling silence fading in between each spoken word, like someone holding the breath or stopping time. Or a tap closed between each filling of a glass. It was a clean, cleansed, silence; one purified by the dullness of calculation, of automation, of regulation and optimisation.
I remember the feeling of talking with friends via landline connection——it felt like a direct channel opened up between our ears and tongues, an airiness of circulation. I could hear the other person breathing and the slight static noise of electricity hardwiring us. Now I don’t hear the other person’s breath anymore——the algorithmic sound detection for controlling the threshold of the microphone transmission seems to not register breath as a signal deemed necessary for communication.
…
日惹 yogjakarta – 墨西哥城 mexico city
wonder if you remember that we had said we would go on holiday together last year.
wonder how you and your child are doing.
wonder if you remember that i had wanted to make strange models for your movie.
wonder if you remember that i haven’t written back to your e-mail.
can a contemporary condition become one’s psychological impairment, the wonderous thing, like her blank auto-replies, or trying to imitate the words of a great master:
⋯⋯很想对着那些无忧无虑的娇花倩草哭上一场。可她的眼泪已经被巨大的悲哀征服了，她这才明白绝望者是没有泪水的。
⋯⋯All she wanted to do was cry into those graceful and carefree petals, into the beautiful grass, but any tears in her had already been conquered by tremendous sorrow, and she finally understood why those in utter despair shed no tears.
— 遲子建 CHI Zijian，“亲亲土豆 Potato Kisses”
Posted by 丫 | reply »但願您也在這裡 （finding greetings series no. 2）
布拉格 prague – 舊金山 san francisco
kostel sv. mikuláše na starém městě (the church of St. Nicholas on the Old Town)
i wanted to be everywhere, all the time. but somehow time stumbled, fell down, and we were led to change genres because nobody took us seriously. or was it simply taking the time to get back to roots, ironic after that white dude’s patronising joke thirteen years ago (so you came to China to find your roots, eh?), me and my roots, everywhere, all the time. keeping it real is just something really really difficult, you know.
you know, just letting you know, you’ll be an arrival point because there’s a one-way love letter at stake, like determined roots and you, the water between my fingers.
重慶 chongqing – 星加坡 singapore
a hearty welcome: a massive dish showcasing Chongqing’s sprawling high-rises greets visitors at the opening of the Hotpot Cuisine Culture Festival yesterday. The pot——a reflection of Chinese people’s culinary passion——is divided into two, with half containing light-flavoured broth and the other half, a spicy variation. Models of skyscrapers sit in the middle. The municipality is widely regarded as the origin of hotpot.
紐約 new york – 紐約 new york
i started to realise the meaning of repetition. maybe because i was once a teacher, and that’s what one does in school, spinning drills, tires as hips. an exercise machine for getting old and being afraid of being forgotten.
you weren’t so didactic, but romantic still loops. we won’t call it like that because you wanted agency, 醒了 and 行了 again and again, aware of pretentions, but what recourse is there? you make your bed.
i make it again and again. and realise that actually that arendt bit is about systems, too. about the ecology of ‘it’s hard to be a good person’, being holistically compromised. about the distance between a sender and a receiver, about the logistical operations of the greatest love poets——”close to cynicism the way comedians are close to sadness”.
you realise、 you rise、 醒了 (a doubt about wokeness)、 行了.
finding greetings series no. 1 （但願您也在這裡）
excerpt from Radio Corax broadcast 13 August 2018, with Claire Serres
無聊的風（氣）the wind of boredom － 多倫多 Toronto
阿姆斯特丹 Amsterdam － 羅特丹 Rotterdam
達拉斯 Dallas － 水牛城 Buffalo
Front gate of the legendary Southfork Ranch, made famous by the Ewing family in the 80s television series Dallas.
巴哈馬群島 Bahamas － 上海 Shanghai
香港 Hong Kong － 柏林 Berlin
View from the Peak of Central Business District at Night
利比里亞 Liberia － 東京 Tokyo
Carnival: The Most Popular Cruise Line in the World
阿姆斯特丹 Amsterdam － 烏特勒支 Utrecht
倫敦 London － 烏特勒支 Utrecht
Women’s Barracks (1950)
Cover Artist: Barye Phillips
图珀洛 Tupelo － 上海 Shanghai
Elvis Presley was born in this house January 8, 1935. The dwelling built by his father, is located in Tupelo, Mississippi, and is open to the public.
樓梯破洞 hole in stairwell － 舊金山 San Francisco
基韋斯特 Key West － 根特 Ghent
Key West now boasts bicycle policemen. Shown here, at the southernmost point in Key West, are two of them ready to do their duty.
發您的郵編地址到ho[at]iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter[dot]net ,收來自哪裡哪裡的祝福⋯⋯
Send your postal address to ho[at]iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter[dot]net for greetings from somewhere⋯⋯
達拉斯 Dallas － 柏林 Berlin／柏林 Berlin／海牙 Den Haag／太原 Tai Yuan
United States Postal Service Dallas, Texas, Preston Royal location, 29 October 2018
首爾蘑菇筆記 Spore-adic Notes for Seoul
Y’s drawing appeared on his leg a few weeks later…
Having left out the exact words i had meant to express to her, i sent the e-mail a second time: “oh, before i meant to say: ‘and despite *my fear and nervousness*…’ ” Fear and nervousness to be left out at all costs, if we are to talk about serendipity. Except that it’s a silly word. Except that we couldn’t find the right word in Korean. Because 緣份 is more than serendipity, if we are talking about circles of time, letting things be, how we got here in the first place. I will try to forget about my fear and nervousness, to find comfort in someone else’s words, like D. says—“理論很舒服”。
It’s the resonance that she means here, and that is to say a——let’s call it ‘pleasant’——reverberation between the two.
(it’s funny how that’s never really so acceptable in art economies)
from “Things That are Massively Distributed” by Alma HEIKKILÄ
Y.Y. and I.S. made an exhibition with the exact same name as our project a few months ago. I didn’t know, I really didn’t know! Clumsily avoided saying too much afterwards except the utterly boring, “I really liked your show”, and basically also delayed to read the accompanying publication, for fear of inadvertently finding too much resonance. But then one thinks they should be doing more research, the spores have already been released and——let’s take small comfort in numbers again——I.S. does write about three plus one becoming understandings of the word ‘catalogue’, so one and one and one and one…new appendages would be the point of these communiqué—let’s grow into our new eachother bodies.
(a question to you though, why does agency become automatically associated in singularities?)
from “Catalogue Essay” by Isabelle Sully, Catalogue (Publication Studio Rotterdam, 2018)
And then at the cusp of their heat wave, the one that makes a girl conditioned to heat and sweat giggle, other Girls Like Us picked up the same networks of drifting mycellium, and they deconstructed the magazine in another magasin, taking off and piling up, cushions and colours and all forms of care…
from the Girls Like Us workshop; A School, A Park 2018
We keep talking about things that spread and circulate. People, goods, ideas, memes, mycelia. All that fussing about, when actually the question of survival, of making a home (outdated concept?) is a very concentrated, tiny little thing. Like focusing upon words across lines, line to line, and all the networks in the world following through to that little nub at the end of a serif font. And of course it’s no end, Borges, the sentences continue, and your train of thought goes somewhere else. I’ve misunderstood you.
Dear Anna,
Today we had a very nice discussion centring around your book with our collaborators from Read-in and Kunci, and together we came up with a few questions to ask you:
M. has mentioned several times about needing to find out again the name of the Japanese scholar who talked about our Asian spinelessness. In Eastern ontology of print there was no spine. The book was a scroll. Does the spine allude to a ‘Western rigidity’ and an obsession with structure and order? “We have no spine but that will be something that we’ll talk about.”
(but to have the courage to talk about it, i’ll have to forget my fear and nervousness)
To mention in speech what somebody else has said is perhaps a way of ‘owning it’. Or what are the footnotes of speech? Can the simultaneity of attributions be translated in real-time, like ASMR tingles and little cartoon devils on shoulders? And what if you are the one who is really terrible at telling stories, at making the punchline of the joke work? No, I think I’m funnier in Chinese.
But what I really wanted to tell you about is something that has half-slipped my memory for at least ten years now, though the other half of it keeps coming up every now and again, like those waves of text while walking.
I read you here and I read you there, here and there, like a spore trapped in my memory because I will always remember the fuzz of something in the vicinity of you on the page. At the same time I know exactly where you are, left or right, a third of the way down…everything else in darkness as we rode a night bus through a foreign country.
— from the COVER; Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Display Distribute『CATALOGUE』No. 3, co-edited with Kunci and Read-in
This one was somewhere about three-quarters of the way down, on some days it’s on the left side of the page, on others it’s the right. He talks about the linguistic typology of words that become true by virtue of their utterance——what are they called? In conjunction with this writing, I tried——as I do every once in a while when I want to ‘own it’, to track it down again. Weird keyword searches, scanning the possible PDFs. Tonight I realised that I must have lost the hard copy of that beloved book, the one that I think it’s in. But then I found only one sentence from the entire PDF version highlighted: “For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny.”
I won’t tell you who this comes from so that you’ll feel the same haziness as I do,
(remember my place on the page)
as if I was telling it to you in casual conversation while we are waiting together for something. Let’s own it. But anyway, it’s not the term ‘speech acts’. Though I saw that exhibition as well. If we should talk about our being-in-language, utterances to representation, yes, then my fear and nervousness comes back, a whole life gone by…destiny. and it circles back to 緣份. it must be circular, it must be circular, I say to myself. Not so grandiose as a speech act, but as small and tiny a little thing, like, “sigh…”
____________
* This post is also, in ever so slight variation, germinating another website called 圍群 Monument of Apron。
Posted by 丫 | reply »seven days for désiré[e] (don’t pull away)
she called it a challenge in black and white, the days numbered incorrectly, but the rules repeated. seven seven seven seven seven seven seven days, seven seven seven seven seven seven seven photos of your everyday life. no explanation, no people. supposed to challenge a friend to join, so 點, a?
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