“2012 is the year of Etel Adnan” – Hans Ulrich Obrist at Art Dubai, March 2012 But what of 2011? Or 2021, the year of Etel Adnan’s death. What is a year anyway? Adnan died a few days ago, on Sunday November 14th, so what do the years even mean within the posthumous dates of […]
Libraries constantly shed… – Shubigi Rao ‘Articulating the Archive: An Imprecise Index’, in Zoe Butt (ed.) ‘Journey Beyond the Arrow’, Sharjah Art Foundation: Sharjah, 2019, -. 238. Zoe Butt Shubigi Rao Léuli Eshrāghi Phan Thảo Nguyên Mark Salvatus Lantian Xie Adriana Bustos Kidlat Tahimik Lisa Reihana Gudskul
A voice (not mine) says something like: Borders open to an endless moment It sounds as if the voice is speaking in a large auditorium. The accent is American, although it is hard to pinpoint what region. There was once a recording of this voice, but now it is lost. It makes him think about […]
Notes on my white librarian’s Whiteness: When I was a alive my shelves were brimming with the canonical texts of a white-washed version of the ancient Mediterranean cultures of Greece and Rome. I can still feel within me the litany of white male editors’ names on the spines of those rows of green (Greek) and […]
Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,And curse me the British vermin, the rat;I know not whether he came in the Hanover ship,But I know that he lies and listens muteIn an ancient mansion’s crannies and holes:Arsenic, arsenic, sure, would do it,Except that now we poison our babes, poor souls!It is all used up for that. […]
Maybe one of the most recited mantras of the last few years – at least in my perception – has been “we need to take care of each other.” This has been so, at least since Brexit, the election of the 45th president of the United States, the march of the alt-right with chants like […]
Opening a can of worms with this post on the place of libraries within broader archival impulses. I owe my second ‘life’ (no, we have not entered Mark Z’s Metaverse yet!) as a ghost to a few lines of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever about the scholar of the future being willing to listen to ghosts, […]
