You asked Hito Steyerl to sign your can of Spam following her artist talk at the Wexner Center for the Arts, here in Columbus, Ohio, on January 26th, 2018. At the ensuing gathering at Ann Hamilton’s studio, with art faculty, MFA students and other guests, you sat next to Steyerl who told you that they […]
When he visited An American City, the inaugural FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art in September 2018, my librarian attended an evening reception for the launch of the second volume of the exhibition catalog at an event at the Cleveland Public Library amid Yinka Shonibare’s The American Library, a both dazzling and sobering installation […]
The chains are formed linking stubborn bubbles of isolated worlds will it stain or purge these aging cells – Otobong Nkanga ‘Future’
It is Saturday after a long week of long posts, so this is going to be short (and tomorrow even shorter). Just as yesterday was written for your ears, as he asked you to listen (not to me or him, but to a conversation as a way of knowing, making and remembering), today is a […]
“What are you making?” I am making conversation – Ursula Johnson to Ginger Dunnill on Broken Boxes podcast, 15 March, 2016 When writing Our Library of the Future: A Ghost’s Story, the sequence of daily posts that act as a steady build up towards Minus Plato’s endgame and the exhibition Whisper into a Hole (watch […]
The Rag and Bone Bookshop of the Heart – after William Butler Yeats’ ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ and the poetry anthology – a gift from your mother – edited by James Hillman, Michael Meade and Robert Bly. On September 25th, 2017, back when I was still alive (albeit barely) and you were still a classicist […]
A voice moves through me, saying: The first time I used the recorder I said, ‘But what is happening?’ I didn’t really understand, I really felt strange with this device, it isn’t something that’s so obvious, and then I said, ‘Well, it’s logical that I felt this way,’ that is, I want to be close […]
Another day; another post. But for this one, you get a glimpse into process. Yesterday he was digging deep into settler colonial foundation narratives on site at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston. As he often does when he reposts these posts on here on Instagram (‘New post on www(dot)minusplato(dot)com’, because a while ago […]
Ok, so let me start with a history lesson. If you sitting comfortably, my settler colonizer librarian and reader, then I shall begin… In her recent book Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes how 1787 was the year that gave ‘the road […]
Some books are lies frae end to end, And some great lies were never penn’d. – Robert Burns ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook: A True Story’, from Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Edinburgh edition, 1787. What is past is prologue. – Zadie Smith White Teeth, 2000 So it begins…the beginning of the end of Minus […]