Realized in close collaboration with a wide range of artists, academics, writers, students, community activists and interested members of the public, these projects attempt to ‘think outwards’ from a somewhat peripheral ethnographic exhibition, and the histories that have produced it, towards a collective investigation of the connections, resonances, resitances and possible sites of transformation that […]
In a similar gesture, Douglas Gordon’s Under Darkness, Between Shadows (2000), hovered over the city. I first heard rumours of this work in the 1990s, and included it in Justified Sinners (co-edited with Ross Birrell, 2002), an anthology surveying the archaeology of Scottish counter-culture, of which Gordon’s darkness marked an endpoint. ‘Under Darkness, Between Shadows’ is a proposal to […]
Libraries are not silent places. I should know, as I like to sing as a move through the books squeezed onto the shelves I haunt. I don’t know what old Lucius thinks he hears when I sing, perhaps it is beyond the pitiful range his human hearing. He does, however, seem to be open to […]
Holiness is what is dear to the gods. Who said that? I dunno but it’s not helpful. Never mind, ignore it. Let’s check-in instead. So, how are you coping? Healthy and sane? My starting position (forced on each of us, black reader and white writer, by this writing and our society) were the sites of […]
A Minus Plato Screening in collaboration with sair goetz and Layla Muchnik-Benali Mask-Faced Media is a film screening and reading created to introduce, accompany and expand Minus Plato a.k.a Richard Fletcher’s book No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump. The selection of short films explores the politics of representation and […]
In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a horse being flogged. In tears, the philosopher flung his arms around the animal’s neck and collapsed. In accounts of Nietzsche’s life, this act of interspecies solidarity heralds his descent into madness. A decade later, one year before his death, a photographer captures Nietzsche in the grip of stroke-induced paralysis. […]
