You spoke of the beginnings of a new metaphor with which we should look at our present condition, like living in Beijing, realistically. Our metaphors come from bicycle encounters and the emotional outcroppings of the everyday. at the time i could only see flesh as a gliding, swerving in and around vehicles, going without cutting corners. We laughed about the flows.
The flesh as meat——not as skin, as I had previously so imagined——is a space of tightness, of form and intimacy and movement as a squeezing of space. Skin as a gliding over and around, all options open except that one moves merely as a compatriot of gravity, touching, just going. Where do we look, realistically, while on our bicycles, in encounter? Nobody cares. Movement is a question of whomever may 让 first, usually predicated upon size. But let us enlarge our frame of view. To examine our reality here is a fleshy matter, full of scars and circumstance. Situationism could be given, rather, a form of agency. Adjacency. Victorious life proposes a next-to. If we were to give up subjectivity and objectivity, can movement presume, ex-stasis? Flow is always a making up of what came before, along the lines of a scar, reaction and healing. Let us make up for imperial autocracy, let us make up for capitalist pigs, let us make up for the sick yellow man! And so we are stuck in a striving or a being, reactionary.
But Vitanza’s scar is a middle place between flesh and skin, along surfaces and imbedded within. Realistically, we find ourselves covering over, working through, both as a form of being and of representation, as spectators and actors, as lifeforms headed inevitably towards death. Is such certainty a place of flesh or of skin? We fall asleep with the TV, we learn to love and hate our lovers. This affect is of flesh and skin, multidirectional, surfaces and interiors all at once.
Scar as both a place and temporality, a contextification. It is the grounding memory of affect, a node upon the flow of the body, or movement ex-stasis. Flashbacks of life in times of death should tear our bodies from such ecstasies; these are the groundings we can never break away from, realistically.
I slipped and hurt myself today, on or off cycles, wet pavement. In the midst of mutual shock, she snapped at me. I’m sorry, I said.
…in the sign of the scar—where foreground and background collapse—negotiating between life and death, skin and scar, public and private, I will hallucinate on a series of cultural objects that would provide us with exemplary ways of “living on” in the scar of the sign as Dasein. But as I do that, note that I do that semiotically across the images being unfolded over there. Da Sein. But. Of Sign. The episode of “Scar Tissue.” I am trying to situate myselves, through a series of interruptions, corruptions, eruptions, between over there and here. Becoming be-tween. Ec-static. Perhaps after a while you, too, will situate yourselves in between there and here.
–Victor Vitanza, “Design as Dasein”: Scar, … to be accompanied by video
Posted by 丫 | more »overseas memory
overseas memory was played on friday 18th of june in zürich
fill out the overseas “steckbrief”: name, 1. question you always asked yourself, 2. question to somebody in the room, 3. question to everyday life, 4. question to intimacy, 5. question to space.
all “steckbrief” are hanging on the wall of inspiration. study who asked which question…
every question exists twice in the memory…
look for the pair of questions and in addition identify the person who asked the question
overseas memory is not easy and i didn’t win, but at least i remembered a few questions and i know who asked them…
hide and seek, a life
blind children playing hide and seek, 1912 (via julian kücklich)
“i remember that the verb to find [trouver] does not first of all mean ‘to find,’ in the sense of a practical or scientific result. to find is to turn, to take a turn about, to go around. to come up with a song is to turn a melodic movement, to make it turn. no idea here of a goal, still less of a stopping. to find is almost exactly the same word as to ’seek’ [chercher], which means to ‘take a turn around.’” (maurice blanchot, the infinite conversation)
Posted by f | reply »at risk, facticity.
C = the condition of not knowing (gap) the possibility of being wrong
Posted by 丫 | reply »treatise on the university of disaster
I had no idea what he was talking about, really. Reverberations pass away easily, behind the ears, at pressure points, when cooking. Roles are performed in adequate fashion, resulting in countering feelings of inadequacy, words flow, nothing is communicated. The treatise is about performance, perhaps. Insinuation of a guise, this is not real, whichever how you really feel. No, really. Keeping it real.
Had no idea what i was talking about really. Sometimes the emotions would arise, and one would find oneself unable to act appropriately, a subjective propriety, a nicety. Trying not to look too hard at his pimples. The palimpsest of his pimples, because even thirty-somethings get them, oh yes, renewal, we can feel like teenagers again and again and over again.
Your postmaturity, maybe. Treatises that we haven’t written yet, half-thoughts, names dropped, another drifting off on the bus again. No, there. When the girl with the ponytail steps on my foot in the bus, I notice her, her captivated audience of fellow passengers, a spectacle in action. She is playing paper-rock-scissors with a boy shorter than her, perhaps that is what it makes it more obvious that he is cheating the game, as his eyes steal glances upwards on every count, towards her poised hand, ready to draw. If he is quick he can change his draw at the last moment, just after he’s seen her paper or rock or scissor coming down like an absurd call of judgement. His is fickle and cunning at the same time. Paper wraps around rock. But each time the breath before the draw is prolonged just a bit longer; she knows his game. He knows she knows his game. And the game shifts a little bit, bus ride bumpy, to a different battle of suspense: who will cheat on the other first. the classic grid of one to another strategy, don’t call it war, it’s just the way things are. remember that lecture that we went to where you didn’t understand? Punnett for non-pundits, I’m on the bus and I could observe this moment for hours. fault or fancy? their fists are suspended in mid-air, holding on a bit longer than forever. this is a treatise on the university of disaster.
Posted by 丫 | more »Die Mannschaft
On Football, Nationalism and Identity Crisis
In anticipation of the football world cup, the Lebanese show their sympathy towards the German national team. The amount of German flags hanging in our neighbourhood is increasing and slowly causes discomfort.
Posted by daniel | more »chainletter dinner
We prepared some of your recipes…
Maria Kley:
何京蕴 Anouchka van Driel & Jasmina van Driel:
Please click “more” below to see the full recipes.
Posted by o | more »went to peru. visited factories. clothes are made. pictures were taken.
alibi, from latin, ‘in another place; elsewhere’
beijing, may 2010. individually wrapped cookies and the extra air inside packagings to prevent the chips from breaking. full of excitement, woody asks for our permission to polish the wooden surfaces in the room. he later forgets his basketball behind when his grandma rushes him to go eat dinner. fluffy white things getting in my eyes as i’m riding the bike. the daily tears. the precariousness of life in china. so much dust. everything happening out there, in the open, like the man who is trying to ‘hide’ his bag amidst the bush in the middle of a busy highway. all flesh, no skin. we ride the bus and he argues that women are weaker than men, generally speaking, everyone should know their place, he says. gobo, my new favourite. she says i take too much care, like being mama, ‘can you enjoy when you are like this?’ but then a few moments later she says i’m like child. postmaturity? my friends’ babies and wedding plans. so much life happening. the unpronounceable volcano, the mispronounced “debt restructuring”. sigh. where do we go from here. the haunting pronouns. acknowledging the other. ethics, infinitely demanding. hitting a ball against the wall, our mediated exercise. winter turning into summer, no spring. the guilt of being far away. the relief of being far away. the time, the time, the time. i try to make a dorodango. it turns out not that shiny and ends up cracking on the way home.
kind of, sometimes
to the old lady working at the internet cafe, whom i could slam a hundred times in aftermath but only saw my childish smile in backwards retreat, we could make an example of you in our courteous, civilised new metropolis, as per a certain someone said i was often wont to do, some sort of ethnographic approach to what lack of humanity there may be in world of screens and headphones, of blank faces and pounding hearts, why in the world should i wish to make an example of you, sickly woman with cracked face who sits in the dark by day, your rule this world perhaps and i am mere observer, a hasty brushing off sends me away, without being able to engage in the very services that you offer. or the mistake that we make in this situation is that working for the money (the system that creates low wage working conditions, the worker that desires to fill this position for lack of better opportunity, because it is easy, because it is simply what is there) eliminates the very ‘you’ of this equation, for You, Other, are simply no longer there. This is not an issue of being looked down upon or prejudiced, it is the disappearance of another all together. Combined with the last 61 years of our lack of self, we come back in full force with an overbearing subjectivity that oppresses all not-self as well. it leads us to a form of exchange without humanity whatsoever, but what sort of presumption was that, anyway.
i cringed when he mentioned that words had been missing of late, but the lack of literature could have been a parallel to a similar decline of the sense of being. i am present, perhaps, in some way, a childish half-smile, but it’s only half-shock, a blinding before anger sets in, what was that about to solidify, hard-set equations, exchange is never all that, i kind of hate you sometimes, kind of, sometimes.
Posted by 丫 | reply »home
yesterday i felt like i’ve never been here, today like i’ve never been there.
we start talking to no one in particular, a no one without properties
“what a lovely name for a street.” feeling. still. yes. no. nostalgia. for something that will never be. alas. so we walk. we walk. with the need for dreams to commit suicide. sometimes. “c’est la chose la plus horrible à faire“. or is it. again and again. and an afternoon in the sun. tracing and retracing and walking anew. circles perhaps. fly. yes. fly again. it’s good to be in a place without lists and rows. construct to reconstruct or an economics as a doing. in the city. it would be nice to see what we cannot see. “precisely to fill the emptiness with emptiness, and thus to share it.” you do with it what you will. never a prescription for life. and yes we are left ‘inconcluded’. always. upon arriving home a message overheard from the new york subway through to london: “everyone knows. that love. belongs in the microwave. for two minutes.” 哈! thank you maria.
Posted by a | reply »