the text and images below are posted from beijing, berlin, buenos aires, hong kong, los angeles, new york, sado island, shanghai, tokyo and zürich. there are a few of us, and this is the space in between.

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the unfolding or the folding, always halfway

frame021

“to say nothing, to say everything, to say the thing itself and to sink the word into its pure presence as a thing, it is all the same, the same fury. it is always to forget the caress of the sign, the light touch of meanings always distorted, never fulfilled. neither the explicit nor the implicit ever attest to anything, other than the unfolding or the folding, always halfway. not to say everything but to let something be said of everything.” (jean-luc nancy)

(one frame captured from the pile of rotting (porn) film reels, a work-in-progress with toby, more info here soon..)

Posted by f | reply »


icarus

hanging

“Did I really speak? Have I ever really spoken?”

Posted by 丫 | reply »


“can intimacy exist in public?”

secretcommunity550

Secret communities tested in aleatory fashion, Acconci’s limitations are practical, too. Beginning at the site of the Bundesnachrichtendienst and arriving at the Auswaertiges Amt:

The subject was chosen walking past the site of the German Secret Service building (to be finished in 2012). A plywood construction blockade, there is hardly any graffiti here. One stencil of a walking man whose head is a surveillance camera.

[14:06] The subject has been spotted on Chausseestrasse walking south at a medium pace and smoking a cigarette with his right hand.

Getting on the U-bahn, Schwarzkopfstrasse.

Stadtmitte, getting off.
Walking south on Friedrichstrasse, turning left on Krausenstrasse.

[14:16] Subject is noted to always look both ways before crossing the street.

Taking a left and turning into park.

[14:21] Subject missing.

[14:22] Subject 1 has most likely entered building number 40 at Leipzigerstrasse, and subject 2 is picked up at the point of departure, exiting from the building wearing high-heeled boots, blonde hair, carrying a black shopping bag in her right hand. She suddenly turns and walks the other direction. [14:26] Subject number 2 enters a jade coloured BMW 725i. We return to the point of departure of Subject 1. 40 Leipzigerstrasse. [14:28] Subject number 3 exits 40 Leipzigerstrasse. She walks east, wearing a multi-coloured scarf and black hat. Walking at leisurely pace, adjusting her hat.
[14:37] After playing Lotto, subject walks into the adjacent super market.

Blumenkohl, broccoli, kiwi.

[14:50] Subject 3 investigation is terminated in supermarket. Subject 4 recognised at 14:49 walking out of the market, carrying a large bottle of Pepsi.
[14:51] Walked inside Multipolster furniture store a few doors down. Appears to be working there.

[14:53] Subject 5 spotted walking west on Leipzigerstrasse. Subject 3 rediscovered walking west on Leipzigerstrasse. She is carrying groceries in a black nylon bag. Subject 3 investigation re-terminated.

Leipzigerstrasse 43. Subject 6 is spotted buying a small potted plant from the Blumen & Pflanzen shoppe. He wears a beige trenchcoat and red scarf, carrying a white and blue shopping bag and newly purchased flowers. [14:59] Subject meets a couple at the intersection of Leipzigerstrasse and Markgrafenstrasse. They all hold shopping bags and chat for a moment before trying to enter a restaurant door, finding it locked. The go to the next eingang and enter City Hotel.

[15:15] Subject 6 exits hotel accompanied by the same man and woman. He is no longer carrying the flowers and shopping bag. They walk north on Markgrafenstrasse. [15:23] Subject 6, accompanied by the couple, walks into the Auswaertiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office). He is seen removing his trenchcoat before security check. Subject 6 investigation terminated.

After some days, she didn’t feel the need to continue in the same way again, I mean, what is participation anyway, if it’s the same as tearing the sheet, sticking around to feed the birds or clicking——wordlessly——”add friend”. How engaged does one need to be to find intimacy, and what is participation in a group in which nobody notices? Taking part, you took part, again again… but what of inaction in the kinesphere, an allowance of space in regards to an other, not taking the responsibility. What can simply be, we were the worst at imagining a telos, so it just goes here to there nor there, our passivity is incremental. but why keep thinking of community and collectivity with such utopian ideals, anyhow. he asks, “can you imagine any form of positively created collectivity”? I thought of all my ill feeling; now, like a nearing in language or love, linking forward or a re-action may not require positives or negatives…

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你说你的2008年,又过一年,一早上后是第二天前

thank you… now sleepy… second sabbatical…

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a closed door that leaves us guessing

A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing

Pedro Costa

1. Masamichi Matsumoto is the director of Athénée Français Cultural Center, and Kazuyuki Yano is the chief of YIDFF (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival) Tokyo Office.

First, I wanted to thank a few people –- this is going to be a bit like the Oscars, but that’s how it is. I wanted just to say thanks to my mother, to Mr. Yano and to Mr. Matsumoto, because they are the two most important people for me, at least for some time now. (1) They’ve given me a good reason for something that I’ve felt –- that perhaps I’ve loved Japan and didn’t know it. Just as in the cinema, we must meet people, real people, in flesh and blood, to believe in this love. Of course, I thank all the others in the very lovely brochure that you have published, and which gives me great pleasure and honour. All of this is to say that I thank those who I know now and didn’t know before, and that has something to do with what I’d like to say to you today, tomorrow, and the day after – simply, that we can know things through the cinema. Like me, for example, I loved Japan and I knew some things about Japan, without ever having been here before now.

I knew the Japan of films, above all of the three directors most well known in Europe –- namely, Mizoguchi, Ozu and Naruse. I knew Japan through them, these who are dead, who are of another time, but I loved it already, at a distance – and that also is very important in the cinema, to love at a distance. There were things in Japan that I’d never seen in the films of Ozu or Mizoguchi or Naruse, and that I continue not to see in Japan. Here, I launch into a rather complicated subject, for there are things that these directors, or the other great directors I don’t know, hid from me, aspects of Japan that they didn’t show me. Today I’m in Japan and I still don’t see them. That is to say, sometimes in the cinema, it’s just as important not to see, to hide, as it is to show. The cinema is perhaps more a question of concentrating our gaze, our vision of things. That’s what great directors, like these three Japanese, are doing. They are not showing Japan –- they’re condensing something. Instead of scattering your mind, your heart and your senses, they’re concentrating your vision. That’s what I’m always saying: the cinema is made for concentrating our vision. To concentrate means also to hide. It’s a cliché to say that Japan is like the films of Ozu, and the history of Japan is the same as in the historical films of Mizoguchi. Now I understand and I sense Japan better (it’s the same thing: to understand is to feel and to feel is to understand). For example (and you must not laugh now), I have the impression that I don’t see pregnant women on the streets in Japan, and I understand that after having seen the films of Ozu. I know what it means not to see a pregnant woman on the streets of Tokyo. In Ozu’s films, he gives us cues to understand that it’s hidden. That is to say, Ozu prepared me to see this absence of pregnant women. So, sometimes a director who is very much a realist, working almost in a documentary mode like Ozu, sometimes he makes films also to hide something. There’s a secret somewhere in his films, and to assert certain things he must hide others. Maybe it’s necessary to step a bit outside of Japan, because what I’m about to say could make you uncomfortable, I don’t know … but for me, the true Japanese documentaries are by Ozu. All the people I know in Japan, all my Japanese friends, I knew before, through the films of Ozu. What I’ve just said, Ozu has written in his journal. He says: ‘I’ve never made up a character. In my films, I make copies of my friends.’

Read the rest of this entry »

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祝你没边没沿的快乐。。。keep dancing!




and hope you are having a good time, well into your 30’s—-knowledge and wisdom much further beyond… 生日快乐 happy birthday, rl… muchlovefromafar

Posted by 丫 | reply »


i’m sorry that in illness i can’t tell old friends from new / i dream of indifferent people, but not you.

酬了天频梦微之

山水万重书断绝,/ 念君怜我梦相闻。/ 我今因病魂颠倒,/ 唯梦闲人不梦君。

(“Dream and No Dream” by 元稹 Yuan Zhen)

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生 日 快 乐

a not meaning to be so direct, yet, a surprise from the wedding batch, found within the files on your computer, an unknown photographer and an unknown boy, startled, staring you in the face, t-necked. make yourself a crown. 生日快乐。

Posted by a | reply »