B: People talk of the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt the economy of Europe. But they don’t ! ! mention the African Plan, which enabled Hitler’s hordes at a time when their economies !! were under siege, their stability threatened. Who saved Europe? It was Africa. There is very little talk about that. There is so […]
If I admire, or even excuse, a brutal act committed two thousand years ago, it means that my thought, today, is lacking in the virtue of humanity. – Simone Weil ‘The Great Beast: Some Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism’, in Simone Weil: Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1962) p. 133, quoted in […]
He turned, finally, to the book Moyra Davey published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition for the 2018 Scotiabank Photography Award in 2018. It is the largest book by Davey he owns, like Index Cards an anthology of texts, but also a rich survey of the artist’s photographic and film work. While flicking through […]
Wisława Szymborska Forugh Farrokhzad I am you, you and the one who loves and the one who suddenly finds a vague connection within herself with thousands of unknown, unfamiliar things. – Forough Farrokhzad ‘Sin’, from ‘Forough Farrokhzad: Poet of Modern Iran’ (I.B. Tauris: London, 2010), p. 17. Cecilia Vicuña A sound birthing its own death. – […]
Robin Coste Lewis We had books and a waterfall was falling in the corner. I didn’t tell you I couldn’t remember what that thing was you said to me once, that tender thing you’d said I should never forget. The moment you said it, I forgot it I wondered if you thought we were lost. […]
Lisa Robertson This is a history of sincerity. The tree uses silence. – Lisa Robertson, ‘R’s Boat’, (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2010), p.55. Cecilia Vicuña It’s difficult to understand to what degree miniscule species have survived in the leaves of books and even to imagine a reader for each of these books is absolute […]
Joan Naviyuk Kane In a way, the animal detaches itself from truth. I might lose myself amidst such strange propulsions. In a way, I am fooled into rooting for a cause, one that I clearly hate. There’s a hole here. – Joan Naviyuk Kane, ‘Another Bright Departure’ (Cut Bank Books: Missoula, 2019), p. 2. Alejandra […]
Brandon Shimoda When someone breaks down Everyone leans into someone breaking down And touches that one It can go on – Brandon Shimoda ‘The Desert’ (The Song Cave: New York, 2018), p. 129. Bhanu Kapil What did Ban do that outweighed art? What kind of art did she produce? Returning to the U.S., I lay […]
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 […]
