//2022年11月23日、東京。Art Center Ongoingで「かえれないわたしたち」という無断企画展を勝手にやったばかりなのに、パパの体調のことで、急遽、12月のまだ高いエアチケットを買わなければならなくなったのです。帰れない私はまる3年ぶりに上海に帰ることになりました。なかなかドラマチックだよね。自分はよく「中国」という言葉を避け、「上海」と言うことを好んでいることに気づきました。

//2022年11月30日、東京。出発までカウントダウンの1週間。上海の烏魯木齊中路で白い紙を手にした人たちによって「白紙革命」と呼ばれる、これまでにないデモが発生しました。それは偶然にも、私の上海の自宅の前の路でした。ネガティブなニュースを読みすぎたので、パソコンからすべてのデータを削除しました。 また、もう1台クリーンなスマホを用意しました。 実際に使っているスマホを持っていくかどうか、非常に迷っていた。規制の基準が曖昧なので不安かな。

//2022年12月7日、浙江。入国の深夜、中国政府は「これからPCRはもうしない、ロックダウンもしない」と発表した。3年の「ゼロコロナ」政策は急に終わったのか？後で自分の失敗に気づいた。上海より安いチケットのために浙江省から入国したこと。そこは私の実家です。 親と、過去とつながっている場所です。隔離ホテルに向かうバスは、深夜の高速道路を疾走し、まるでブラインドボックスのようにどこに行くのかわからない。バスは消灯し、乗客は眠っているように静かだった。暗闇に残された光は、スマホの画面の光だけだった。急速に後退する冬の夜の木々を結露した窓から眺めていた。私はこういう冬の深夜バスに乗る感覚をよく知っている。

//2022年12月11日、浙江、隔離ホテル。隔離されたホテルの部屋には、青いプラスチックの四角いスツールだけが置かれている。 よく見ると、その上に花の模様がある。 ネットで鉛筆と白い紙を買って、フロッタージュでこの模様を保存した。窓の外に山がある。八日間山を見た。それが親しみと喜びをもたらした。久ひぶり！ここの空気の湿度、空の色、食べ物のにおい、方言、人の雰囲気（オンラインだけど）を感じるんです。 電話からママのアンハッピーリアクション、ママと私のそれぞれのエモーションを感じるんです。コントロールフリークママと弱くてパラノイアパパはいつも正反対な意見で、私は葛藤を抱えた娘に成長しました。集団主義、あるいは上からの強力な未知の力。いろいろな突然の不可解な力によって、少女時代に戻されたような気がします。RUN AWAY GIRLだったね。この３年間ママと会えなくて会いたかった。もうママとの関係は治ったと思っていたけど、オンラインコミュニケーションのフィルターがかかっていたかな。リアルはどうかな？ママとの関係も多分中国との関係に似てる感じ。あーあ、ママ、愛してるよ。愛してるけど、怖い。ネガティブで弱い心を見せてしまい、申し訳ないです。浙江省に戻ることは、少女時代に戻ることです。

//2022年12月15日、浙江、隔離ホテル。検疫期間がもうすぐ終わる頃、隔離ホテルの6階の部屋の窓から向かいのバス停に手を振ると、ようやくパパが私を見て手を振り返し、またスマホを掲げて写真を撮った。 でも、ママはどこに行ったの？数分後、wechatグループに私が手を振っている写真が届いた。パパはもういなかった。 少ししてママが現れて、ママも手を振り始め、私はもう一回手を振らなきゃいけない。必然的にちょっとしたパフォーマンス感があるね。ママも写真やビデオを撮って、私もまた撮りました。

//2022年12月16日、浙江、実家。この国のすべてが正面から襲いかかり、私を包み込んだ。言葉遣い、声のトーン、思考の癖、目線、動作、すべてです。 反対するものも、実は自分の身体の中にずっといた。

//2022年12月17日、浙江、実家。でも、困難は欲望を増大させる。

//2022年12月20日、浙江、実家。ここでの人間関係のほとんどは、実家のある団地のグリーンベルトにある剪定されていない木のようなものです。高すぎてすでに未開の森のように荒々しく、絡み合い、空を覆ってしまっている。「柔らかい柳の枝に風が吹くように」、何度も何度も彼女の言葉を思い浮かべるが。

//2022年12月22日、上海、冬至。ようやく上海に戻る時、バスの中は運転手と私ともう一人の乗客だけになっていた。近所をちょっと散歩した。この路ですよ。烏魯木齊中路。友達が「もう革命聖地になったよ」と冗談で言った。アメリカ大使館、イラン大使館、フランス大使館もある路。人を制限するブリキ壁がまだあるんだ。なかなか崩れないね。交差点ごとにパトカーや警察官がいて、私服の刑事の方が多いかもしれない。警察官は、たくさんの時間頭を下げて、スマホで遊んでいる。かつてはいろいろな人や文化がミックスしていた面白いこの路は、ここ数年でインスタ映えする路となり、あらゆる種類のトレンディなカフェやアイスクリーム店がひしめき合っていた。今は落ち込んでみたい、戦後の雰囲気すら漂っています。 そんな見知らぬ上海でも、私の大切なバッファゾーンであることに変わりはない。クリスマス前に上海に戻った最初の1週間は、知り合いも知らない人もみんな陽性になちゃってた。

//2022年12月24日、上海、クリスマスイブ。政府が強制的に接収した郊外の工場棟にあるシェアアトリエの引っ越し。 過去のたくさんのもの、カビがついてる作品も捨てた。鍵の山。ドアがどこかわからない。対象のないキー。対象のないパスワード。

//2022年12月28日、上海。実際に中国に入国してみたら怖がる必要はまったくないのです。出発前の恐怖は想像していた恐怖だね。想像していたけど、同じくらいリアルで恐ろしいものだった。自分の弱さを思い知らされた。今思ったら、今までの「正義」な私は、ロマンチックすぎて、自己感動的な偽善だったじゃないのか？用事の合間にちょっと シェアサイクルしたら、久しぶりにシンプルな喜びを感じることができました。

//2022年12月29日、上海。心理的な帰属意識と物理的な帰属意識、どちらが真実なのでしょうか？複数の目的が混在しており、目的が不明確である。 彼女は病気のパパに会いに来るため？ 家族を訪ねるため？ ママとの現実の関係を確認するため？ 思いがけず移住の心理的問題を解決するため？ アトリエの引っ越しのため？荷物の整理と発送のため？ 上海の映画館で中国語字幕付きのフランス映画を見るため？ 好きな美術館で、見たい展覧会を見るため？ 友人と再会するため？ 銀行カードや運転免許証など、特定の事柄に対処するため？ 何年も会っていない元カレたちに会いに行くのか、行かないのか？結婚した私の顔を見せるため？

//2022年12月31日、上海。2022年最後の日、突然、彼女のアパートの鉄門扉が倒れた。彼女は布団の中で泣いていた。泣くことは奨励されない。悪い状況でも、人は良い面を見せる傾向がありますね。昔行った映画館に行った。昔行ったレストランで食事をした。昔の友人や恋人に会った。昔ようにネットショッピングをした。昔の習慣やディテールなどを真似ることは、過去とのつながりを再構築しようとすることです。過去へ。でも失敗。モノや環境が過去の情景や感情を運んでくれるけど。何故だろう。人は自分の過去とどう向き合うのか？

//2023年1月1日、上海、元日。ハッピニューイェー！ハッピニューイェーか？ まあ、とにかく、いよいよ新年がやってきました。烏魯木齊中路が突然、オシャレな男女の群れで活気づいた。それから10日後慌てて上海を出るまでずっと、このまちが急に活気を取り戻したようにすごく感じた。都市のエネルギーやっぱり！そして、前のいろいろあったことが跡形もなくなったみたい。すべては起こり、すべては忘れ去られた。

上海に帰るまで切らないと決めた長い髪は、結局上海で切らなかった。上海に帰ってみたら、あの3年間の長さは東京のものだったんだと分かりました。

eliminating poverty

i went to a funeral today in my village with a cousin. she is his relative and died in hunger and coldness and illness two days ago at home. in her early 50s. the widow had spent months on bed alone, and was given a bun twice a day, later once a day, by her brother who is also poor and unable to do more. a few months ago, she almost died in a similar situation, but survived to the surprise of everyone. some villagers said given her situation, death is finally an end of her suffering and perhaps it is better this way. some said she had a soft temper. some said she was lazy and slow. some said she suffered from alzheimer’s along with mental issues.

three years ago, her husband went to a government office in the city with two boxes of apples as gift to apply for state benefits. on his way back home he fell to the ground. he was taken to hospital and doctors said it was hemorrhagic stroke and asked for RMB 5,000 to do the surgery. relatives were called one after another. it was only late at night when one relative finally showed up ready to pay. doctors did a CT scan and found his brain was already flooded with too much blood to do anything. he died.

the couple had been living in an old yard with no walls, full of overgrown weeds, and basically only one room with a bed. they had adopted a daughter from her sister from another village when the girl was around ten. but they were not able to pay her education and living costs and her sister paid. later her sister cannot afford either and the girl dropped out and went to work in the city. they devoted much love to the daughter but she felt ashamed of their poverty and hoped to have nothing to do with them. the daughter went back to her biological family and did not care very much for them. so today is certainly the last time she is in this village. it is also the end of a whole household, a family.

my cousin said the way poverty was “eliminated” here is often by cancelling the recipients’ poverty status in documents, which results in recipients receiving even less benefits. some villagers said in these two years the government offered subsidies for electric heaters so that many households had bought and installed it for just 200 yuan, including this household. previously villagers used coal, which became illegal in recent years for environmental reasons. but many families find the electric bill too expensive and rarely use it in winter, including the two old relatives i visited today who did not even know where is the on/off button.

the funeral was simple, not heavy, and cost only a few thousand yuan. my cousin, along with another relative, left before the procession took the coffin to the field for burial, partly because they were busy and partly because they knew the meal provided at the end of the funeral, which is the local custom, would not be a feast and probably wouldn’t even contain any dish with meat.

— posted with permission from an original text by Pop,
2020年12月17日，早上07:55

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going everywhere, in stillness

 

This quote that you once used somewhere, it comes to you, the word emptiness is at the source and in a whim you remember it, but whom was it by and where to find it back – you search and it returns that you wrote it in a post. And the words that have been in you for a while and that potentially felt like an e-mail but to whom, to him? to her? it hits you, better a post. because that emptiness revisits you, an intense happiness, an intense sadness – again that unease, nausea, ‘tedium’, as was the word in that book you shared together so many years ago and was pivotal to you both and to this. i have to move, i have to get out of this place, a sucking motion nearly 12 years long, like hearing it’s been 20 years and not being able to believe, fathom it, crawl into that perspective.

And what caused all of this, a movie, annoyingly so a movie, something so inherently tasked to trigger your emotions. what are we here for, what of your mother, your father. do we forget all the things, the times, the moments, that we share, the details are lost at least. and then right at that moment she calls. you imagine the green hills and the ocean view.

..to fill the emptiness with emptiness and thus to share it.

“Ik wilde eigenlijk al een hele tijd je terug mailen. Om in ieder geval een soort van formeel antwoord op het open einde van de aankoop te geven die informeel al via de chat voorbij kwam. Maar eerst kom ik toch maar terug op die film, goed, slecht, goed, slecht, het blijft heen en weer gaan, en heb hem toch maar nog een keer gekeken, en nog een keer, voor mij heel ongewoon.”

the way sounds, music, make you remember things you’d forgotten about yourself

 

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首爾蘑菇筆記 Spore-adic Notes for Seoul

Y’s drawing appeared on his leg a few weeks later…

 

Having left out the exact words i had meant to express to her, i sent the e-mail a second time: “oh, before i meant to say: ‘and despite *my fear and nervousness*…’ ” Fear and nervousness to be left out at all costs, if we are to talk about serendipity. Except that it’s a silly word. Except that we couldn’t find the right word in Korean. Because 緣份 is more than serendipity, if we are talking about circles of time, letting things be, how we got here in the first place. I will try to forget about my fear and nervousness, to find comfort in someone else’s words, like D. says—“理論很舒服”。

It’s the resonance that she means here, and that is to say a——let’s call it ‘pleasant’——reverberation between the two.

(it’s funny how that’s never really so acceptable in art economies)

 

from “Things That are Massively Distributed” by Alma HEIKKILÄ

 

Y.Y. and I.S. made an exhibition with the exact same name as our project a few months ago. I didn’t know, I really didn’t know! Clumsily avoided saying too much afterwards except the utterly boring, “I really liked your show”, and basically also delayed to read the accompanying publication, for fear of inadvertently finding too much resonance. But then one thinks they should be doing more research, the spores have already been released and——let’s take small comfort in numbers again——I.S. does write about three plus one becoming understandings of the word ‘catalogue’, so one and one and one and one…new appendages would be the point of these communiqué—let’s grow into our new eachother bodies.

(a question to you though, why does agency become automatically associated in singularities?)

from “Catalogue Essay” by Isabelle Sully, Catalogue (Publication Studio Rotterdam, 2018)

 

And then at the cusp of their heat wave, the one that makes a girl conditioned to heat and sweat giggle, other Girls Like Us picked up the same networks of drifting mycellium, and they deconstructed the magazine in another magasin, taking off and piling up, cushions and colours and all forms of care…

from the Girls Like Us workshop; A School, A Park 2018

We keep talking about things that spread and circulate. People, goods, ideas, memes, mycelia. All that fussing about, when actually the question of survival, of making a home (outdated concept?) is a very concentrated, tiny little thing. Like focusing upon words across lines, line to line, and all the networks in the world following through to that little nub at the end of a serif font. And of course it’s no end, Borges, the sentences continue, and your train of thought goes somewhere else. I’ve misunderstood you.

 

 

Dear Anna,

Today we had a very nice discussion centring around your book with our collaborators from Read-in and Kunci, and together we came up with a few questions to ask you:

1. Can you elaborate more about the concept of collaborative survival, and how could it be more specifically a methodology or strategy employed generally?
2. In acknowledgement of forms of alienation and the breaking down of sociality in common life——in acknowledgement of the fact that “the world will not be saved”——how do you see the remaking of the human spirit?
3. Is there a non-human perspective that you hope to bring by introducing the mode of mycorrhiza into our thinking? Would it be possible for us to imagine this non-human or even a “post-anthropocene” perspective that could be brought to our contemporary, institutionalised lives in the urban sphere? You mention that one needs to acquire patience to mix with the multi-species other, but how can we learn to even notice them in the city?
4. What role would the matsutake take when translated into the metaphor of artists’ positions within regeneration/revitalisation projects? Do you see a role for artists in this matrix of noticing, middlemen, translation, commodification and regeneration? What could some of our aims as artist/anthropologists/thinkers be; what types of spores should we seek to spawn?
5. How do you think translation figures in relation to scalability and the potentials of mistranslation; what might that look like? Following translation as work across difference—encouraging creative listening, a political listening—is a way finding mutual understanding of each other’s world-making processes. When speaking from specific localities, translating these into a dominant language that is not mutually shared, is that also a process of scalability?
6. What role does imagination or the speculative play in your work and how can it be deployed potentially as an effective counternarrative? What are some of the tactics that you employ as a writer to weave narratives that resist the possibility of appropriation and reduction?
7. Does the concept of a latent commons require a form self-awareness among those in such relation, and can the thought of working more actively towards the commons negate the scale of the latent or even fugitive or undercommons (as per Harney and Moten)? How much latency (or opacity?) is required in order to maintain non-destructiveness and avoid expoitation? Is there something to sustain with the hidden or dormant? If one characteristic is that a latent commons is undeveloped, what does it mean to make it visible (in a way, developing it into our imagination)?

 

M. has mentioned several times about needing to find out again the name of the Japanese scholar who talked about our Asian spinelessness. In Eastern ontology of print there was no spine. The book was a scroll. Does the spine allude to a ‘Western rigidity’ and an obsession with structure and order? “We have no spine but that will be something that we’ll talk about.”

(but to have the courage to talk about it, i’ll have to forget my fear and nervousness)

 

To mention in speech what somebody else has said is perhaps a way of ‘owning it’. Or what are the footnotes of speech? Can the simultaneity of attributions be translated in real-time, like ASMR tingles and little cartoon devils on shoulders? And what if you are the one who is really terrible at telling stories, at making the punchline of the joke work? No, I think I’m funnier in Chinese.

But what I really wanted to tell you about is something that has half-slipped my memory for at least ten years now, though the other half of it keeps coming up every now and again, like those waves of text while walking.

 

I read you here and I read you there, here and there, like a spore trapped in my memory because I will always remember the fuzz of something in the vicinity of you on the page. At the same time I know exactly where you are, left or right, a third of the way down…everything else in darkness as we rode a night bus through a foreign country.

— from the COVER; Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Display Distribute『CATALOGUE』No. 3, co-edited with Kunci and Read-in

This one was somewhere about three-quarters of the way down, on some days it’s on the left side of the page, on others it’s the right. He talks about the linguistic typology of words that become true by virtue of their utterance——what are they called? In conjunction with this writing, I tried——as I do every once in a while when I want to ‘own it’, to track it down again. Weird keyword searches, scanning the possible PDFs. Tonight I realised that I must have lost the hard copy of that beloved book, the one that I think it’s in. But then I found only one sentence from the entire PDF version highlighted: “For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny.”

I won’t tell you who this comes from so that you’ll feel the same haziness as I do,

(remember my place on the page)

as if I was telling it to you in casual conversation while we are waiting together for something. Let’s own it. But anyway, it’s not the term ‘speech acts’. Though I saw that exhibition as well. If we should talk about our being-in-language, utterances to representation, yes, then my fear and nervousness comes back, a whole life gone by…destiny. and it circles back to 緣份. it must be circular, it must be circular, I say to myself. Not so grandiose as a speech act, but as small and tiny a little thing, like, “sigh…”

 

____________

* This post is also, in ever so slight variation, germinating another website called 圍群 Monument of Apron。

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seven days for désiré[e] (don’t pull away)

she called it a challenge in black and white, the days numbered incorrectly, but the rules repeated. seven seven seven seven seven seven seven days, seven seven seven seven seven seven seven photos of your everyday life. no explanation, no people.  supposed to challenge a friend to join, so 點, a?

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i miss some of you some of the time

sketch from 《公众 PUBLIC》, 2008-2009年

 

iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter went online in the first month of 2006 and the first post was backdated thematically for the 31st of December, 2005.

it could all be a lie, making long sentences and abusing commas, for over ten years now. i wanted to make a book, but she could see no reason for more excess of materialisation, another she and we just never have the time. the service desk of on-demand distractions is backlogged, piled up. and there goes…

there is a lack of reason for loose configurations, too, here and there encounters, wanting to overhaul, but remembering where you came from.

 

HE SHE WE THEY YOU YOU YOU I HER SO PRONOUNS TO
BEGIN THE
DANCE CALLED WASHING WHOSE NAME DERIVES FROM AN
ALCHEMICAL FACT THAT AFTER A SMALL STILLNESS THERE
IS A
SMALL STIR AFTER A GREAT STILLNESS A GREAT STIR

—Anne Carson

 
all love and dust to the other roundtable of 王尘尘 Cici and 刘心宇 LIU Xinyu this month.

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16 July was supposed to be a lucky day

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immigrant’s on kawara

祝您…这龙年初十五 wishing you, on the fifteenth day of a new lunar year

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