The surface-level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of this state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level expressions. The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally
- Siegfried Kracauer
.jpg)
.jpg)
Was it fate? I remember the marvelous Shelburne Museum in Vermontwhere, in thirty-five houses of a reconstructed village, all the signs, tools and products of nineteenth-century everyday life teem; everything, from cooking utensils and pharmaceutical goods to weaving instruments, toilet articles, and children’s toys can be found in profusion. The display includes innumerable familiar objects, polished, deformed, or made more beautiful by long use; everywhere there are as well the marks of the active hands and laboring or patient bodies for which these things composed the daily circuits, the fascinating presence of absences whose traces were everywhere. At least this village full of abandoned and salvaged objects drew one’s attention, through them, to the ordered murmurs of a hundred past or possible villages, and by means of these imbricated traces one began to dream of countless combinations of existences.Memorable passage from The Practice of Everyday Life.
- Michel de Certeau
"After Auschwitz, history is no longer a rational unfolding. The summit of reason, order, administration, is also the summit of terror. Calculation and accounting encounter the mathematical sublime of railway timetables and of genocide at the same time."
- Bill Readings (on Adorno's "After Auschwitz")
"Cinema City is a project to document, archive and re-read the cinema producing cities through images and narratives within cinema and its impacts and manifestations in the lived world; involving inter-disciplinary and collaborative research, pedagogy and art and media productions."The Cinemas Project will be featured as an installation at the Delphi Filmpalastam. Amruta Sakalkar has designed a lovely little two-seater cinema hall in which the images will be presented. Thanks to Madhu, Kausik and the folks at KRVIA and Majlis for putting it all together.
Both fiction and fact are rooted in an epistemology that appeals to experience. However, there is an important difference; the word fiction is an active form, referring to a present act of fashioning, while fact is a descendent of a past participle, a word form which masks the generative deed or performance. A fact seems done, unchangeable, fit only to be recorded; fiction seems always inventive, open to other possibilities, other fashionings.
Separate living quarters, toilets and washrooms will be provided for all domestic help employed by residents. Moreover, to render them 'invisible', segregated entrances and elevators have been constructed.Whoever said Utopia was a place that could never exist? For the Great Indian Middle-Class Imagination Machine, it is very much here.
Discover new photography from China, Australia, Cuba, India, the US, Canada, England, South Korea, and Brazil. This volume also includes new photobook reviews, a great video interview with UK photographer Simon Roberts, and more. So, settle in with a cup of good coffee, put your feet up, and enjoy!(Remember to hit the "slideshow" button for larger images in all the series)
"Buildings hold purposes, ruins hold questions and secrets."From the wonderful blog Welcome to the Interdrome.
In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.
Read the entire text at Granta online.Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.
