A ghost, even of a library, recognizes its own. I see myself reflected in Friedl Body’s 1975 photograph of the dark, hollowed eyes of Harry Smith starting out at me from page 150 of Jonas Mekas’ A Dance with Fred Astaire (Anthology Editions, 2017). In 1987-1988, Smith – musicologist, filmmaker, painter, anthropologist and paper-plane collector […]
Trying to make myself write some sort of commentary on the latest “emergency” reportage, I tear up my notes as soon as I write them. – Roland Barthes Some books whisper to me as I pass through the shelves I haunt. The final pages of Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books 2015) , amid […]
A new rite in belated homage to Pierre Bal-Blanc’s recent exhibition I GOT UP at Hot Wheels Athens, with works and performances by Sophie Calle, Delia Gonzalez, Dan Graham, On Kawara, Georgia Sagri, Scratch Orchestra, Serapis Maritime More info here: https://hotwheelsathens.eu/exhibitions/i-got-up/
I can begin here; it’s as good a page as any. I suppose if you are willing to listen to a library’s ghost story, then mysterious dreams of the future are no less fantastical. Maybe it even helps you to picture me as that skeleton you see here, staring out from Tshimumba Kanda Matulu‘s painting, […]
This isn’t really a post, it is a reminder; a memorial. As Minus Plato prepares for its 10 year anniversary (and potential conclusion) next year in May 2022, I am thinking a lot about that ‘Minus’ and what it means (and, specifically, what it means for me). On reading Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian […]
My favourite symbol is the Tree of Life. The human race is the trunk and branches of this tree and individual humans are the leaves, which appear for one season, flourish for a summer and then die. I am like a leaf of this tree, and one day I shall decay and fall, and become […]
Paul B. Preciado writes in his lecture/report to a psychoanalytic Academy Can the Monster Speak?: Today, once monstrous bodies produced by the patriarchal-colonial regime of sex, gender and sexual difference speak for themselves and produce knowledge about themselves. Echoing Kafka’s Red Peter in his short story ‘A Report to an Academy’, Preciado describes how through […]
I started typing out these thoughts as an Instagram post, only to stop myself, copy and paste them here, and continue to write them as a Minus Plato post instead. As I continue to post, repost, amplify and comment on Instagram, I too often forget that one reason I started this blog in the first […]
Minus Plato’s Parler Clair Radio (which you can hear streaming on this site) is now streaming Radio Alhara and The Sonic Liberation Front in solidarity with Palestine. Radio Alhara have together with a group of sound platforms and sound artists started The Sonic Liberation Front in order to create one sound for Palestine. Minus Plato stands with Palestinian […]
[No, the title isn’t the obvious pun (hole for whole), although if you read it quickly another, less tangible pun may emerge. The post you are about to read is in fact a hole. And no, not ‘like a hole’, but a real hole, in and of itself. Before I begin, let me offer you […]