Waldstr. 33 | living room
offline i’m concerned with memory pieces: like this one that multiplies a cyclamen alongside a bowl rubbing. it’s ‘still life with significant objects’ in course note speak. it’s also my grandparents’ living room thirty years on. not sure where its graphitey flatness may take me. back in time? or forwards? or just a little circle?
“Neoliberal citizenship is nothing if not a training in resilience.
All of which is to say that anxiety and resilience are now core to the jargon of neoliberal authenticity. Superficially, such jargon is full of ‘recognition’ for the complexities of human experience (‘of course you are anxious’; ‘we all share the same fears’; ‘it’s only natural to be anxious’), but this merely encourages the naturalisation of a neoliberal subjectivity mobilised for security and capital: the jargon of neoliberal authenticity is the jargon of neoliberal authoritarianism. This is police power at its most profound, shaping subjectivity and fabricating order through counselors within police departments, therapists within the community, psychologists in the media, and experts working in the cultural field, all offering advice on our anxieties and coaching us in our resilience.
And it is police power par excellence in closing down alternate possibilities: we can be anxious about what might happen, but our response must be resilience training, not political struggle. We can be collectively anxious and structurally resilient, but not mobilised politically.”
(Mark Neocleous, 2011, Anxious Resilience, Mute 3 (2), pp 50-59, available also here)
a slither of memory from my 9-year old self. how could i have forgotten: the magic of leaving one’s body; becoming a raven; and of time moving at different speed in different places.
do not be fooled by the sunny clunky animation; but above all: do enjoy this weekend.
an afternoon sunlight shows up all and nothing: the growing chillies, the decaying apples, a bit of forgery and plenty of still life. the motion of it all outside the frame.
that there’s so much wood in this year’s art.
today: with fog. that never cleared. all day long. and more to come. tomorrow and the day after. and possibly the day after that too.
weather that belongs to some woods and not others.
(of course without a camera at the opening)
in all of last weeks’ hectic, this got uploaded but never circulated. jason kavanagh and my collaboration now also in sound on the web and not just our floating installation with headphone.
