Throbbing Pulse

[verolivotto]

Biking BK

- ‘Have you seen David Bowie’s post on Instagram’ she sang

- ‘uh?’ he pangs

- ‘David Bowie the dog I mean..’ she laughs

- a pro-biker joins the stop light next to us as ‘Sitting on the dock of the bay’ out of his bike speakers bangs.

[anneboyer]

what resembles the grave but isn't

Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying “this is not your grave, get out of the hole”; sometimes being pushed, saying “you can not push me into this hole, it is not my grave,” and getting out defiantly, then falling into a hole again without any pushing; sometimes falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug, often falling into this set of structural and impersonal holes; sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying “this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole,” all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders of each other to get out of the hole that is not the mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together; sometimes the willful-falling into a hole which is not the grave because it is easier than not falling into a hole really, but then once in it, realizing it is not the grave, getting out of the hole eventually;  sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; sometimes surveying the landscape of holes and wishing for a high quality final hole; sometimes thinking of who has fallen into holes which are not graves but might be better if they were; sometimes too ardently contemplating  the final hole while trying to avoid the provisional ones; sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!" 

[verolivotto]

The Inuit people are perfectly aware of the change of the air, of the ice, of the waters. Indeed they have an elaborate and developed discourse. They made films, they have a TV, they made a whole TV station where you can find several programs in relationship to the change in the ice, the change in refractive indexes in the atmosphere, all sorts of things. These are collected under the term sila: the breath of the earth and the waters and the airs. The circulating breath of the world under the Inuit term sila, which is different from climate change but not against climate change. Climate change is an imported concept that comes with southern scientists, that comes with a whole other array of southern experts who have at best a culturalist, multi-culturalist interest in Inuktitut language, or in Inuit thinking or people and would not consider that there are probably whole practices of observation in relationship to the changes in the ice and the waters and the airs collected under the relationships such as sila that climate change apparatuses and their modeling apparatuses are relatively bind to. A robust taking care of country in the circum polar north might be much be better off with a serious undertaking to not translate Inuktitut world into English or other western languages or viceversa but actually to redo and undo each other so that nobody comes out of the contact zone the same way as they entered it. That's the kind of contact zone that I, we, you, they long for and partially construct and what is partially at stake, and it's absolutely at stake in the hunting life of the Inuit people.

Donna Haraway, “Making Oddkin: Story Telling for Earthly Survival”  

[verolivotto]

Not here - No yet

'Not here - Not yet' is a series of interviews and installations investigating how to communicate climate change causes, impacts and solutions through activist art with the aim to convey a message that is constructive, against doomsday scenarios and connecting to different world views. First two iterations are here.

[verolivotto]

“It seems to me that in the human supremacist culture of the West there is a strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain. This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices the strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing from digging us up, keeps the Western human body from becoming food for other species. Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: Horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood, and alien monsters eating humans. Horror and outrage usually greet stories of other species eating humans. Even being nibbled by leeches, sandflies, and mosquitoes can stir various levels of hysteria. 

This concept of human identity positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. The outrage we experience at the idea of a human being eaten is certainly not what we experience at the idea of animals as food. The idea of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery in which we humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never prey. We may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles. This is one reason why we now treat so inhumanely the animals we make our food, for we cannot imagine ourselves similarly positioned as food. We act as if we live in a separate realm of culture in which we are never food, while other animals inhabit a different world of nature in which they are no more than food, and their lives can be utterly distorted in the service of this end”. 

[verolivotto]

Louise Bourgeois “The Destruction of the Father” (1974)

“The Destruction of the Father (1974) deals with fear - ordinary, garden variety fear, the actual, physical fear that I still feel today. What interests me is the conquering of the fear, the hiding, the running away from it, facing it, exorcising it, being ashamed of it, and finally, being afraid of being afraid. This is the subject. I’m not an expert, but I know what fear is; I know what fear will make you do. The fear - garden-variety fear - what do you do about it? Do you run away? There is a long, long list of what you can do. The way immature people can conquer- they don’t conquer it, but they feel that they make the fear disappear - is by falling in love. Right? You deceive yourself. you pretend to yourself that you love in order no to feel that pang of the fear. You “fall in love” with somebody that you are afraid of, and it short-circuits the fear; you do not feel the fear. If you take a snake and a bird - the bird is fascinated, right? It’s exactly the same. It’s mesmerised. He doesn’t suffer, he’s not afraid - in fact he’s thrilled - and the snake gobbles him up. That’s it! All my thinking is in terms of images. This is the trouble. But the difference from real love is that it does not come to sex; there is no real desire. I think that the rest of being in love - real love - is that you want to give”. 

Louise Bourgeois in conversation with Donald Kuspit (1988)

[verolivotto]

I derive a guilty pleasure from witnessing and representing ruins. Images of destruction are beautiful because there is pleasure in knowing a kind of truth, the truth of fragility and impermanence. But there is suffering buried in these images, the suffering of others, and by extension, of ourselves.

Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher

[verolivotto]

Destabilising the vocabulary of happiness

The Atlantic Ocean, Praia Camburizinho, São Sebastião (SP) (October, 2016)

I am a lover of language and of foreign accents and I recently discovered a fascination for the relationship between the language we use and our thought processes. My search led to a gem that is the Positive Lexicography project by Tim Lomas. The project has the ambitious goal of “filling the gaps in our vocabularies and helping us give names to newly felt emotions, or to those that are familiar but difficult to articulate” and by extension also to “help the field of psychology, which is often criticised for focussing too much on Western experiences and ideas, develop a more cross-cultural view of well-being”. 

I chose one word for each letter of the alphabet so far proposed by the lexicon and I’m adopting them in my own vocabulary in the never ending effort, in the words of Donna Haraway, to “destabilise worlds of thinking with other worlds of thinking”.  One strategy I thought of, for slowly familiarising with words belonging to cultures foreign to me, is to ask - whenever I get a chance - about the use of these words to people I know already or whom I’ll meet in the future. 

AUFHEBEN (German, v.): sublimation; to raise up, to remove/destroy, yet also paradoxically to preserve/keep

BAYANIHAN (Tagalog, n.): co-operative endeavour in the service of a shared goal; a spirit of communal unity

COMMUOVERE (Italian, v.): to be moved, touched or affected (e.g., by a story).

DUGNAD (Norwegian, n.): a collectively pursued/undertaken task; voluntary community work

ENRAONAR (Catalan, v.): to discuss in a civilised, reasoned manner

FRISSON (French, n.): a sudden feeling of thrill, combining fear and excitement

GANBARU (Japanese, v.): lit. 'to stand firm'; to do one’s best

HEDERSMANN (Norwegian) (noun): An honest man with great integrity

IMANDARI (Arabic, n.): ‘righteousness,’ cultivating good words and deeds.

JAKSAA (Finnish, v.): to have energy, enthusiasm, and spirit (e.g., for a task).

KRENG-JAI (Thai, n.): ‘deferential heart,’ the wish to not trouble someone by burdening them

LUTALICA (English, new coinage, n.): the part of your identity that doesn't fit into categories

MOKITA (Kivila, n.): a truth that everyone knows but no-one talks about

NAM JAI (Thai, n.): lit. 'water from the heart', selfless generosity and kindness

OPIA (English, new coinage, n.): the ambiguous intensity of eye-contact

PIHENTAGYÚ (Hungarian): ‘with a relaxed brain,’ being quick-witted and sharp

QUERENCIA (Spanish, n.): a place where one feels secure, from which one draws strength

RADARPAR (Norwegian) (n.): Two people that work very well together

SISU (Finnish, n.): extraordinary determination in the face of adversity

TARAB (Arabic, n.): musically-induced ecstasy or enchantment

UITWAAIEN (Dutch, v.): lit. 'to walk in the wind'; to go out into the countryside (e.g., clear one's head)

VIVENCIAS (Spanish, n.): living fully, experiencing life deeply and intensely in the here and now

WÚ WÉI (無為) (Chinese): to ‘do nothing,’ acting in accordance with the Tao, being natural and effortless

XENIA  (Greek, n.): 'guest-friendship', the importance of offering hospitality and respect to strangers

YIN YANG (陰陽) (Chinese): holistic duality, dialectical (co-dependent) opposites

ZWISCHENRAUM (German, n.): an open or empty space in or between things

[verolivotto]

Exploring music scenes in low-res phone video

on Youtube.

[verolivotto]

Tonight, after signing the peace accord in Cartagena, Farc leader Timochenko asked for forgiveness to all victims of this 50 years long conflict. Two generations have been wanting the end of the war and to hear the word 'Perdón'. Teary eyed Colombians are heading to the polls to approve or reject the piece accord signed in La Habana this wkend. Despite widespread disinformation buying up poorly educated people, the Yes will win. Amid the happiness of my colombian friends and colleagues disillusion seeps through because tough times loom ahead for the implementation of the peace deal. One issue among many is how to redistribute vital agricultural land, previously under Farc control, in a just way when other armed groups are ready to occupy it. Probably worse is that Santos neoliberal government is ready to sell this land to big agro-businesses from China and the US. #firmadelapaz (at Plaza De San Francisco)

[verolivotto]

Breaking with the left anthropocenic enjoyment

With Jodi Dean and Donna Haraway.

[verolivotto]

And while Isis is organised in places where it is strong, and is capable of setting up cells outside its own territory, it has also recognised that all it needs to do to widen its impact is to provide a lethal context for attacks – a convenient peg for the angry and alienated. The crucial point that many have missed is that it does not actually matter to Isis whether there is any real connection: whether the new “soldiers” it claims after the fact are more disturbed than ideological. What matters is the fact of the act alone and its power to frighten, divide and destabilise – and that the attack is understood to be inspired by Isis.

Peter Beumont (2016)

[verolivotto]

Given Walter Benjamin's conception of mythical history we make a distinction between memory and history. Memory entails forgetting but history entails the political remembrance of past forgetting and remembrance. Smart Charisma, both when it comes as Silicon Valley ideology and when it comes implemented in Markhov Models, regulating the streets we actually live on, is radically anti-historical, and that also means that its futures are not really futures at all. Benjamin said, in 1934, that what we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath its picture as to rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use-value. And so it is I believe with contemporary media and smart technologies. The revolution of the future will first need to have a concern for the past as history and care for it in the present as politics.

Willem Schinkel “Future Capital in Smart Cities” Keynote lecture at the Futurosity Summity, May 18th, 2016, Rotterdam 

[verolivotto]

Earth day every day

[verolivotto]

Fiji became the first country in the world to formally ratify the Paris agreement on climate change.

[verolivotto]

An essay I co-wrote with my friend Biddy Livesey on urban vulnerability and relocation in Cali (Colombia) and Christchurch (New Zealand) is available on the great Distance Plan Journal (among other recommended readings)! From the press release this issue (n 3):

"sets out to survey how migration, environmental crisis and climate activism are debated in relation to capitalism and its alternatives. Taking Judith Butler’s notion of precarity – the destruction of the conditions of liveability – as a starting point, the issue brings together texts and artist pages that speak about the relationship between ecological and economic precarity. [...] A series of conversations and essays look at how policies complicit with economic liberalisation have stalled meaningful action on climate change, compounding global and regional inequalities".

The Distance Plan is a loose collective of artists, writers and designers whose work aims to promote discussion of climate change in the arts. Its intent is to expand the common conception of climate change, to include it being understood as an issue of economic inequality and intellectual agency.

[verolivotto]

You are a horse running alone and he tries to tame you compares you to an impossible highway to a burning house says you are blinding him that he could never leave you forget you want anything but you you dizzy him, you are unbearable every woman before or after you is doused in your name you fill his mouth his teeth ache with memory of taste his body just a long shadow seeking yours but you are always too intense frightening in the way you want him unashamed and sacrificial he tells you that no man can live up to the one who lives in your head and you tried to change didn’t you? closed your mouth more tried to be softer prettier less volatile, less awake but even when sleeping you could feel him travelling away from you in his dreams so what did you want to do love split his head open? you can’t make homes out of human beings someone should have already told you that and if he wants to leave then let him leave you are terrifying and strange and beautiful something not everyone knows how to love.

“For Women Who Are Difficult to Love” - Warsan Shire