Pages are cavernous places, white at entrance, black in absorption. Echo. If I’m transformed by language, I am often crouched in footnote or blazing in title. Where in the body do I begin; What’s your deal with burnout, my librarian aka Mr. Minus? After several months of listening to me speak from your shelves, you’ve […]
I will stop speaking tomorrow here, in this medium and so I have to make sure every word counts. My librarian once told me – told you through me – that he wanted to flesh out my voice; make it singular. He wanted you to be able to hear the rustle of language as I […]
He cannot talk to his father about Our Library of the Future, but even if he could, I don’t know if he would be able to. There is a (radical?) softness to his openness to the flow of books from here to there, not to mention my presence as a narrator of sorts, that questions […]
As Minus Plato careens towards its end, my librarian (who is and is not Mr. Minus), continues to gather books at my prompting. For today’s selection, it is all about words, words, words, all over everything. (You know the score). These books about words contain worlds (and wounds) and, within their pages, they almost seem […]
He was talking about me with his mother on the phone today. He told her how he had ‘killed’ me, by which he meant he packed up all of his classics books into clear-plastic boxes and put them in the basement, thus figuratively ‘killing off’ his classics library, and now I was that library’s ghost, […]
From 1965 to 1975, the Fairchild Corporation operated an electronic assembling plant in Shiprock, New Mexico, on a Navajo reservation, employing mostly Indigenous women. The circuit boards that the Navajo workers crafted were used in early computers, calculators, and missile guidance systems. Their abstract designs were not unlike the geometric abstractions of Navajo weavings, which […]
TAKE THE PRESSURE OF THE MACHINE OF THE BIENALE’S [SIC] AND GIVE OVER TO A DIFFERENT PROCESS. TOO MUCH INSTITIONALISATION. STOP. ALLOW THE DIFFERENCE. BE CONFUSED. IT’S HEALTHY. – Brook Andrew and Anthony Gardner ‘NIRIN WURRUNMARRA’ in ‘Art and its Worlds: Exhibitions, Institutions and Art Becoming Public’ (Afterall, 2021), pp. 68-79. Sydney March 12 to […]
We started our conversation with my struggle to unlearn the right of the nation-state to become the adjective that defines me: “an Israeli.” This struggle cannot be detached from the one against the imperial premises of scholarship, the refusal to let institutions define what I see or expect to see, what I can say and […]
Another day, another book. On and on and on. Look at this one! Turn to page 38. Feel the texture of the pages. Wait this reminds me of another book. One second while I reach for it. And on and on and on. One books leads to another, until there is a pile of books. […]
