Portable Gray

VOL.4 NO.2 / FALL 2021

I
Portable Gray
 MAGAZINE PUBLISHER PORTABLE GRAY
VOL.4 NO.2 / FALL 2021
Executive Editors Portable Gray is published twice yearly by the University
Ghenwa Hayek and Seth Brodsky, of Chicago Press for:
University of Chicago, USA
  The Richard and Mary L. Gray
Editor-in-Chief   Center for Arts and Inquiry
Zachary Cahill, University of Chicago, USA   929 E. 60th Street, Suite 112
  Chicago, IL 60637
Senior Editor
Mike Schuh, University of Chicago, USA POSTMASTER: Send address changes to:

Managing Editor   The University of Chicago Press

Naomi Blumberg, University of Chicago, USA   Subscription Fulfillment 299 383
  1427 E. 60th Street EDITOR’S PLAISANCE THE GOOD JUICE
Design   Chicago, IL 60637 Ghenwa Hayek Ryan Lay and Aram Sabbah
David Khan-Giordano, Chicago, Illinois, USA
ISSN 2637-8361 (Print) 301 398
Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry Advisory Council ISSN 2637-8396 (Online) QUILTING VOICES IN THE HANDS OF SKATERS
Ghenwa Hayek, Interim Director (2020–21) Nathalie Joachim, Emily Hooper Lansana, Nick Sharratt with Mike Schuh
Adrienne Brown, University of Chicago, USA Copyright © 2021 by and Jacqueline Stewart
Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago, USA The University of Chicago 405
Edgar Garcia, University of Chicago, USA 310 ‫ ر ح‬٩٩٧
Theaster Gates, University of Chicago, USA On the Cover: THE ANECDOTE (A LANGUAGE ACT)
Patrick Jagoda, University of Chicago, USA Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, That which identifies them, like Mark Philip Bradley and Lee Weng-Choy Amira Hanafi
Waldo Johnson, University of Chicago, USA the eye of the cyclops, 2016. Still from 3-channel HD video,
Young-Kee Kim, University of Chicago, USA sound. Duration 8:00 min. 319 411
Christine Mehring, University of Chicago, USA THE HUNTERS SUFFERING AT THE
David Schutter, University of Chicago, USA Kittima Chareeprasit and LIR SPEED OF INVISIBILITY:
Pope.L, University of Chicago, USA SUPPORT THE POETRY OF OMAR KHOLEIF
John Wilkinson, University of Chicago, USA 330 Omar Kholeif
This issue of Portable Gray is supported by Richard REGISTER OF DEEDS
UChicago Arts and Mary L. Gray Foundation and UChicago Arts. Patrick Flores 440
David J. Levin Additional funding provided by the Andrew W. Mellon THE FLOOR, THE COUCH, THE TOYS
Bill Michel Foundation supports Gray Center Fellowships and 346 Maud Lavin
related programs. For those interested in learning more CAMERA SENSE
about the Gray Center and supporting our work please Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Sidney R. Nagel, 442
visit: graycenter.uchicago.edu and Jennifer Ding SWAN SONGS FOR BUSAN:
THE CHICAGO CHAPTER
363 Stephanie Cristello
   NEOLOGICON:
A COSMIC CODEX FOR 456
ANTHROPOCENIC ALTERATIONS BUILDING WORLDS,
Time Extraction Unit (TEU) LOSING FRIENDS
Zachary Cahill
369
SKATEBOARDING 466
CONTRIBUTORS
371
IT’S THE HARD FLIP
Kyle Beachy, Alexis Sablone,
and Mark Gonzales
 EDITOR’S PLAISANCE

This has been a harrowing year for most people on this planet.
Even as those of us lucky enough to have vaccines
(and not to have lost people to COVID-19; to port explosions;
to climate catastrophe; to collapse; to cancer) worry about
variants, and people struggling against the variants worry
about vaccine access in countries where distribution remains
slow, the memories of the simultaneously dizzying and dull
daily grind of our pandemic lives have started to fade. I find
myself having to think back to try to recall the routines of
2020: pandemic walks; stuffed animals in windows; signs
thanking essential workers supplanted, in my neighborhood,
by BLM signs, by Biden (and, notably, Bye-Don) signs, by
graduation signs. So many signs to read; so few signs of change
legible in the environment around us as we staggered into 2021.
But when I do think of Summer 2020, when I assumed
the interim directorship of the Gray Center, in the haze of
early summer before my hometown Beirut literally exploded
during a global pandemic and an economic crisis, I remember
collapse and stasis, but I also recall collaboration; creativity;
and critical thinking and practice in a moment of global and
personal crisis alongside the wonderful Gray Center team:
Zach, Mike, Sabrina, and Naomi.
Challenged to re-think what a collaborative,
experimental, and normally inward-facing place to merge arts
practice and critical inquiry could look like in a year where
seemingly nothing could merge except for succeeding crises,
we came up with a plan to re-purpose our travel budget and
redirect it to support the work of artists around the world.
Spinning off our existing Sidebar series, where Gray Center
fellows and visiting artists presented their work to a small
gathering of interested people, we decided to name the project
FarBar, a nod both to our past and to our vision of the reach
of the conversations we wanted to have and the practices we
wanted to support during a global pandemic. Far from our
normal routines, and distant from each other, we sought ways
to connect and to support and to think with others about
making art and making meaning in times of crisis.
The issue you are reading today is a distillation in
print of some of the conversations that became FarBars over
the course of 2020–2021. The range of these conversations
reflects not only the interests of the stunningly creative people
behind them, but also some of the most urgent issues of our
contemporary moment: social inclusion and politics probed in
Amira Hanafi’s playful and poignant group translation of H.R.
997- the English Language Unity Act, and Omar Kholeif’s
personal poems composed in relation to the material presented
in his FarBar lecture “Code Switchers: The Art of Being
Invisible.” Curator Zoe Butt introduced us to Pollination—a
curatorial collective that works across Southeast Asia addressing
issues of art, activism, and urban and rural living amid

© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 299

environmental degradation and mutilation in their multimedia
artwork—who contributed their essay The Hunters to this issue.
A few weeks later, we explored the textured soundscape of a
post-oil Nigerian delta future presented in Sonic as Landscape by
Mpho Matsipa, Olalekan (Lake) Jeyifous, Dani Kyengo-O’Neill,
and Wale Lawal, which will have a future manifestation with
the Gray Center. Very early one Manila morning, Patrick Flores
and his colleagues described the challenge of archiving the
art of the pandemic present, as well as adjusting to making art
under pandemic conditions for online audiences, such as Jason
Dy’s congregants, or for an incredibly discerning art critic/
audience of one precocious child, as Mark Salvatus did in his
series of photographs for Yoji. Rocky Cajigan was unable to be
at the FarBar, but his paintings of everyday pandemic groceries
are included in the issue. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz unpacked
ways of seeing with physicist Sidney Nagel and neurobiologist
Jennifer Ding; Emily Hooper Lansana, Nathalie Joachim,
and Jacqueline Stewart dissected ways of telling stories and
building community through stories. From the intimate spaces
of our pandemic homes to the empty spaces of pandemic
cities, we learned about ways of moving bodies through space
and time, and skateboarding as performance and protest
(and, now, Olympic sport!), most notably from Kyle Beachy,
Mark Gonzales, and Alexis Sablone, visually reinforced by the
included portfolio of images by Nick Sharratt on skate zines.
Like Sharratt’s images, some of the texts in this issue
did not originate from FarBars but are contributions that
extend the topic of thinking about our pandemic lives in ways
both ordinary and unexpected and that resonate tightly with
our FarBar contributions. The Beirut-based artist collective
Time Extraction Unit (TEU) has proposed Neologicon: a
Cosmic Codex for Anthropocenic Alteration, Stephanie Cristello
the curatorial advisor for the 2020 Busan Biennale reflects
on what it means to bring pieces of a shuttered biennale to
Chicago in her elegiac Swan Songs for Busan. Maud Lavin writes
of the joys of pandemic sex and corporal rediscovery; and
the interview between Ryan Lay and Aram Sabbah about
PalSkate, the association for skating in Palestine, reminds us
again of the privilege and delight of having bodies that move,
laugh, play, and protest especially after this year where so
many of us felt the extreme fragility and vulnerability of flesh,
both ours and others’, as Zach Cahill’s poignant testimony to
two lost friends makes all too real.
In sum, the issue in your hands or on your screen is
an artifact of the year we all went online. In many ways, it
is an extension of this journal’s sixth issue, Another Idea. If
the former was a collection of art made and assembled in the
immediate aftermath of emergency and lockdown of early
2020, this issue is the longue durée version as a moment we
thought would end in a couple of months transmogrified into
our reality for more than a year. We hope you enjoy reading it
as much as we enjoyed making it.
—ghenwa hayek
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QUILTING VOICES
A Conversation with Nathalie Joachim,
Emily Hooper Lansana, and Jacqueline Stewart
On December 2, 2020, the Gray Center held a FarBar conversation on storytelling and oral
tradition with performer/composer Nathalie Joachim, storyteller Emily Hooper Lansana, and
film historian, preservationist, and curator Jacqueline Stewart. They shared with the online
audience insight into their personal storytelling practices, and then together they explored
the intersections and differences in their experiences with listening to and telling the stories
they find most meaningful. What follows is the edited transcript of their conversation.
nj — I’m sure you’re wondering how one another that I was able to meet so many
storytelling weaves into the life of a flutist of these women and actually sit with them
or vocalist or composer but to tell you that, person-to-person and hear their stories.
I would have to go back primarily to my Through that process, I learned that
heritage. I’m Haitian-American and for us, for one of the best ways to gain a true history
my family and for Haitian people, our history of a place and of a people is by engaging in
has really relied on storytelling as a practice. conversation with them and allowing them
Much of our history has been communicated to tell their own story to you. The more you
via oral tradition, both through the telling of do that within a community, the more you
our histories to one another but also through begin to weave yourself into the story of the
our music as a way of preserving our history people and the place as it has been and as it is.
for many centuries now. So, I like to think of It was really wonderful for me through Fanm
myself as having been born into a practice of d’Ayiti to have the opportunity to learn how
storytelling unknowingly, but quite happily our histories are intertwined, how our stories
now in my career. My grandmother and I in fact overlapped even though none of us
used to spend a lot of time together, mostly knew one another and more often than not
creating songs with one another and that how much we really had in common—in this
was our way of telling stories to one another case a deeply shared love and pride for our
and sharing bits of our personality and bits of heritage and for our people and also a deep
our life. It allowed me and invited me into a commitment to showcasing the value of that.
space that was really welcoming, really open. That inspired me to have a renewed
My relationship with her helped to define sense of engagement with people in a really
what I consider maybe the first true safe space true way. The album and the project itself
where I could express myself freely and not weaves in not only the stories of these iconic
have to put on airs or pretend to be anything Haitian female artists but it also brings in
but me. She also helped me learn to translate the voices of young women and girls in Haiti
a lot of the telling of my own story through and of course brings in the voice of my own
music. That really came full circle with one grandmother and my voice as well. I loved
of my most recent projects, Fanm d’Ayiti, that. Actually, what storytelling in that sense
which translates to “Women of Haiti.” brought me was that in the telling of other
That was the first time that I actively stories, it also allowed me to continue to share
employed storytelling in my work. I spent about myself more freely. For me, it’s one
about two years researching female artists of the more genuine projects that I’ve had a
from Haiti, female musicians from Haiti, chance to work on. It also ignited this spark in
specifically those who had lived these me to continue connecting with people in this
incredible lives but had gone largely under- way. In fact, that project has actually shifted
recognized. It was through the generosity the way that I engage with people in the
and spirit of Haitian people connecting with world even though right now we’re not able
Nathalie Joachim, Chicago, IL, USA; Emily Hooper Lansana, University of Chicago, USA; Jacqueline Stewart, University of Chicago, USA
© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 301
to engage with one another as we normally
would. It has allowed me to have more true
and genuine connections with people and
has had me wanting to learn more and more
about our shared history.
The thing is that every community has
somebody who cares about it and all you
have to do is seek them out and just about
anybody will be willing to tell you their story
if you ask them who they are and how they
are. This has built a new artistic practice for
me in using the beauty in everyday stories
and showcasing them in music, which I think
is a universal language that most people can
engage with quite fluently and quite easily
and can help reshape the world, reshape our
understanding of one another. I think that
I’ve been talking a long time now so I’m going
to pass it on. That’s just one way and we can
get more into that later, but I’ll pass it on to
either Jackie or Emily.
js — I’ll go next. I’m not an artist but I would
say that storytelling is certainly a part of my
scholarly practice and my archival practice
and much of that work focuses on artists.
So I think some of the things that I would
share resonate with some things that Nathalie
was just talking about. First, I’ll say that,
like Nathalie, I spent a lot of my childhood
with my grandparents. Every weekend, every
holiday from school, all summer long I was
with my grandparents. That made a huge
difference with regard to just listening to that
generation speak about their experiences. It
wasn’t that they weren’t open to questions but
it wasn’t really presented as a dialogue. It was
like, “You’re listening to me.”
I learned through that to listen and
to be quiet while listening. So I do a lot of
projects that involve collecting oral histories,
conducting oral histories, and in some ways
when you’re doing that kind of research, you
have to suppress your desire to say, “Mm-
hmm (affirmative).” You’re supposed to be
completely silent and emote in other ways,
because it’s all about the other person’s
voice. We did oral histories as part of the L.A.
Rebellion Preservation Project. This is an
ongoing project to document the history of
the first film school to train a generation
of black filmmakers who went to UCLA
302
from the late 1960s through the mid-80s,
so Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, our friend
Ben Caldwell, Haile Gerima, there are dozens
of them.
More and more, we learned through
the process of doing these interviews and you
just sort of sit and listen to the ways that they
would narrate their life experiences, their
time at UCLA and beyond. When I was a
grad student, I did a project at the University
of Chicago going around and interviewing
African-Americans who had been students
and faculty at the university in the 1950s,
60s, and 70s. As part of the South Side Home
Movie Project, we conduct oral histories with
the families to get some of the context for the
films that we’re collecting and preserving.
Since they’re for the most part silent films,
it’s really useful to have some kind of vocal
reflections on what we’re seeing in those films.
Then I’ve done some interviews as part of the
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. They
have an oral and video history project to talk
to filmmakers about their practice.
So I have really found it to be invaluable
to talk to artists about their process because
that’s not always evident in the work itself. It’s
not always something that—especially artists
of the generation that I’ve been speaking
to—are accustomed to talking about or have
any kind of pre-packaged way of articulating.
It has been deeply meaningful to me to talk
to an artist about their practice within the
broader context, as Nathalie was just saying,
their biographies and their aspirations, too,
and how those have changed over time. So
when you can walk through with someone
how it is that they developed an idea, how
they engaged in collaboration, all of the
problems and pitfalls that would necessarily
happen in creating a work especially like a
film work, maybe I shouldn’t say especially a
film work, probably happens across artistic
practices, especially collaborative ones.
Then hearing the way that these
artists talk about the relationship between
one work to the next or what happened in
between times. It has given me a completely
different way and a deeper curiosity about
creative practice and about how to historicize
creative practices as well. Depending on how
you frame the questions which maybe we
can at some point talk about here, there’s
a really interesting way in which another
kind of latent narrative can emerge that
has to do with how people understand their
relationships to institutions. That’s like
formal institutions, we’re asking people, “How
did the University of Chicago treat you?”
And it was bad. The short answer from
the 50s through the 70s is that they were not
treated well, but then to provide a space for
people to really think about how it is that they
entered institutions, how they had imagined
institutions prior to entering. We have the
term microaggressions now, but those are
the things that would emerge as people were
talking, just some of these everyday incidental
moments that as they accumulated gave a
specificity to ways people were experiencing
their racial selves, their gendered selves,
their sexual identities. So being able to really
understand an institution through the eyes
and the experiences of individuals, this is
crucial for many of the different kinds of
questions and problems and projects that I’ve
developed over time.
With the South Side Home Movie
Project, for example, we collect these small
gauge films and it’s mostly happy times and
graduations and birthday parties. There’s a
feel-good narrative that one can create out of
these films, for sure, especially as they stand
on their own, but as you talk to the families
and start to get the stories about how people
and why people migrated to Chicago and
where people worked. They’re middle-class
people for the most part, they’re not wealthy
people. They’re making some really deliberate
decisions about what it is that they’re showing
about their home lives. There is a pride
especially for the African-American families
that have donated to the Archive that they’re
taking in their accomplishments, precisely
because this is something that counters
everything that mainstream society would
believe about black people.
So, understanding the ways
that people’s work environments, their
relationships to their church, their
relationships to their schools, their children’s
schools, it really allows for the conversations
that we need to have about the wide range
of institutions that are structuring racism
and inequality and these students themselves
have not necessarily been doing that kind of
self-reflexive work but through oral histories
through storytelling, when people just talk
about their first days on the job or what
happened in their first class or whatever it is,
that broader picture comes into focus.
The last thing I would say, it goes back
to the being quiet thing, which is because so
many of the storytelling collecting projects
I’ve been involved with are really extensive.
Sometimes you’re with people for two hours,
three hours, four hours, sometimes longer,
it’s really intense work. It can be very intense
work. I’m reminded of a comment that Haile
Gerima made when he was talking about
making the film Sankofa, which is such a
remarkable and powerful film, and how an
elder had come to the screening and told him
that he was a vessel and he really embraced
that concept. It’s really humbling when you’re
collecting and listening to the stories of other
people, you have to kind of move out of the
way. Then there is a lot to process, for me at
least, after it’s over.
Especially when you can get to a place
with people where they can feel that they’re
sharing things that they haven’t been able to
share before because they haven’t gotten the
invitation before, it’s draining but I don’t mean
that in a bad way. I mean that it is necessarily
something that takes a lot of energy and that
lives with you. It was with me long after the
actual experience of sitting with the narrator
and I think that’s a really important reminder
that doing that kind of work meaningfully
means that you’re not just extracting
something from somebody else but that there
is an exchange that should be taking place. I
must stop there so Emily can talk.
ehl — Thank you. I’m excited to be here
tonight with Nathalie and Jackie. I have so
much respect for your practice and the unique
approaches that you take to storytelling and
am so excited to see so many friends as part
of the circle. I am a storyteller and I focus on
the oral tradition and like Nathalie, I think
it started in my childhood although I didn’t
recognize it at the time. I grew up in a family
where my parents believed that kids should
perform, so we were taught to be musicians.
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My brother, the oldest, is a guitar player, a
blues musician and he writes a lot of songs.
Still to this day, my sister plays the flute. They
tried to get me to become a musician starting
when I was two years old.
I played the violin, the baritone, the
piano, and probably some other things. I loved
to play and I hated to practice so it wasn’t
as pleasant for people to listen. My mother
was determined that when people came
over, she would be able to say, “This is what
my kids do.” They started recognizing that
when I spoke that I would sort of come alive
in a different way. So initially it was poetry
and then it was theater. In college, I was a
Theater Studies major. I came to Chicago
to pursue a career in theater. As a young
African-American actress, I was frustrated by
not being able to feel empowered in decisions
about my art in terms of what stories I was
going to get to tell.
I was invited by a friend who is now
a storytelling partner and collaborator to
see a performance of Jackie Torrence, who is
one of the great leaders in the growth of oral
storytelling in the ways that it is embodied
now in this country. I sat in that audience of
primarily adults that evening and said, “That’s
what I’m supposed to do. That’s my thing.” I
wrote a grant to the Arts Council. They had
a program called the master apprenticeship
program for the folk arts and I apprenticed
with a local storyteller whose name is Shanta.
I remember at that point having this battle
of “I’m an actress, am I losing something of
myself by deciding to become a storyteller?”
About that time, I attended my first festival of
the National Association of Black Storytellers
and it had a very profound impact on me.
On that evening, I saw three extraordinary
performances. One was a performance as the
historical figure Sojourner Truth, another
one was of someone who had collected
stories and embodied them into a one-
person performance, and one of them was of
traditional folk tales; and at the end of the
evening, I said, “I don’t know if you call it
storytelling or acting, but that’s what I want to
do. I want to do that.” And it stayed with me.
So I have worked in the adaptation and
performance of folklore and very often that
work has been influenced by thinking about
304
the audience. I think all of my storytelling
has been influenced in thinking about
the audience but early on in my work, my
storytelling partner, Glenda Zahra Baker, and
I were working as long-term teaching artists
at a school in Chicago near Cabrini-Green.
I was often thinking, “What story do I want
to tell for these students to make them feel
empowered, and how does it need to be told?”
I want to give an example because I think it
kind of characterizes what I’m talking about
in terms of audience.
Zahra came to me with “The People
Who Could Fly” which is a story that exists
throughout African-American history. It was
written down in a form called The People Who
Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton. I said, “I don’t
like that story. I don’t want to tell that story
because I imagine that these kids are going
to say, ‘How come I can’t fly up out of here?’
I don’t want to do it.” And she kept saying,
“This is an important story, we have to tell
this story.” And I said, “Let me sit with this
story and listen to what issues I have.” Some
storytellers, no matter what form the stories
take, are focused on the ending: “how am I
going to end the story?” For me, the challenge
is always, “how am I going to begin the story?”
I heard a sermon by Reverend Jeremiah
Wright, where he was talking about a period
in African history when people were being
taken into captivity. He used this imagery of
saying that there was a time when the rhythm
in the drum changed but the people did not
hear it. That woke up something inside of
me that said, “In fact, what if I tell the story
that the people could fly and then something
happened and they lost it and then regained
it?” That became my journey into the story
and it was also critically important in that
situation that the story be told in a way that
those young people would feel that, “I’m
empowered whether or not I can fly.” So in
the end, there were those who flew away but
there were also those who survived and in
that survival there’s power.
In my work of celebrating and thinking
about how we tell folktales and why they are
still relevant, I’m adapting and thinking in
the context of what is significant about the
story in the way that it was originally told
and how can it be adapted to have relevance
in this moment? Additionally, I teach
storytelling in many different contexts.
When I’m teaching a longer-term class, I
usually start with personal story because
I think we know the most about ourselves
and then I move to folklore, then history
and finally ethnography which requires that
people are engaged in a practice of collecting
stories and thinking about how those stories
are reflected.
It’s been interesting for me because
I am really grounded in the performance of
folklore but beginning to do more personal
storytelling and more telling stories of this
moment that might introduce people to
characters that have moved me. And I’ve been
thinking about the significance of film. Two
of those stories were developed after watching
the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which
tells the story of [Nobel Peace Prize winner]
Leymah Gbowee.
I’m a member of the National
Association of Black Storytellers and the
signature story is called “The Cowtail
Switch,” which ends with the line, “a person
is alive for as long as we can remember them,”
and I think that is because there is a role that
the storyteller has of helping us to hold on
to memory. Both Nathalie and Jackie talked
about the significance of grandparents, and
I’m thinking about how there’s some way in
which my grandfather, I feel like I knew him
even though I never did because of the stories
that were told about him. I think that way
that we can keep people alive through the
sharing of the stories is really important.
I’m going to stop there and toss it back.
nj — Those are beautiful. I will also just
say that you both are . . . just listening to
you both reminds me of why I actually love
doing this as an artist, I love it. I love allowing
people to speak and just listening and hearing
what happens.
I wanted to circle back because I
kind of feel like Emily where you just ended
your story in terms of memory . . . To me, it
actually also reminded me of what Jackie was
saying about how it’s a lot to listen to people
tell their stories and it actually stays with you
for a really long time. Of course, I’ve had that
experience. That’s been my experience as well,
but I never really thought about it as building
memory. These people with whom I’ve been
able to engage within my own artistic practice
are ingrained in my memory now in this very
special way just simply by having been given
the opportunity to interact with them.
I’m certain that many of their stories—
even though that may have been one moment
of us interacting—are stories that will stay
with me for a lifetime. I wanted to talk about
memory a little bit but I also wanted to throw
out a question. Emily, do you feel that you are
reframing folklore to look for the in-between
space that maybe didn’t exist before?
ehl — I think so. I think that, in a lot of
cases, folktales are stories that came out
of a moment and have stood the test of time
and they were stories that were born out of
a moment to teach a thing, to make sense of
a thing in the world. I’m interested in how we
continue to engage stories to help us make
sense of what is happening around us?
nj — It’s so funny because the in-between
is my favorite place. You always gain so much
more from that space. It’s been interesting
for me as a composer because I find that in
some way I’ve been able to infuse that into
my compositional practice. I am aiming to
write a very specific type of melody. That is
what I feel this piece needs at this moment
and almost always I allow myself to do that.
I allow myself to do the thing and then I
let it sit. More often now, a lot of my work
involves sampling. A lot of my work involves
a lot of deep listening. I give my own work
a deep listen and increasingly I’m becoming
more attached to the artifacts and less and
less attached to the thing I set out to do. It’s
also been an interesting thing to infuse in
educational practice. This year I have a one-
year composition faculty appointment at the
University of Hartford.
Teaching composition is an interesting
thing. So much of it is conceptual. A lot of
it is technical which the students are also
getting in other spaces but in the one-on-
one composition lesson, I’ve started to really
think of doing my best to allow space for the
student to come closer to being themselves.
If we can get even the tiniest bit closer to
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that, I feel like we’re getting closer to a
more true compositional voice, further away
from delivering what they feel like they are,
what I expect of them, or what is expected of
them by the institution or by audiences or
by anyone else.
So often I chuckle because I ask my
students to do something very specific and
then when they come in with the thing,
I spend so much time talking about the
little bits of it that had nothing to do with
the assignment at all and almost always
questioning what they’ve brought in as if
that wasn’t exactly the task. Like what would
happen if all of this went away and now you
just focused on making the piece itself? It
makes them become deeper listeners to their
own work and hopefully deeper listeners to
one another. Jackie, when you were talking
about the idea of the significance of the
moment of oral history and of gathering and
listening to the story about how sometimes
the story that wants to be told is going to be
told and that we think that it’s our role to go
in and ask that question but in fact, it can
come in another way.
I think it’s completely different to say,
“Can you tell me about your experience of
racism?” than it is to say, “Can you tell me,
how did your day start? How did your day
end?” Because that journey is going to reveal
those things. So I just wanted to say that
when you were describing the experience of
collecting those oral histories, Jackie, that
really stayed with me.
js — Yeah, that dynamic is really interesting.
I love this thread that we’re on right now
about whether that in-between space, or the
unanticipated, or the story around the stories
or beneath the stories because as both of you
have been talking, I’m just getting more and
more curious about . . . Especially, Emily,
when you were talking about how stories
for you can come from a variety of sources
not just other examples of oral storytelling
but other art forms. Nathalie, you’re talking
about artifacts and how important those are
in your practice. So, it just makes me curious
about what happens for the two of you in your
own performative moments, maybe it’s the
performative moments that we can focus on
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for a moment, at least when you’re doing this
kind of translation work, because, Emily, part
of what you’re doing is you’re channeling.
You should describe how storytelling
works for you but it’s not like you memorize
something and you’re getting up there and
reading it. You are synthesizing, you’re
improvising. I’m just curious to know how
both of you do that when you’re working with
a variety of materials that are not necessarily
just musical or verbal.
ehl — I think that every storyteller has
a different approach. My approach is very
much grounded in oral storytelling. So, I do
not write my stories down first. Whatever
experience that I’m going to work on telling,
I’d say if I’m going to be in the kitchen and
I’m going to look around the kitchen and
I’m getting to see the cinnamon and I’m
going to tell a story about my mom and the
significance of that smell in my childhood
and what moments are connected to that.
But my process is very much about the story
told and my process of developing the story is
saying the story out loud. When I’m teaching,
I am focused on oral storytelling. So if you
write down your story and memorize it, that
is really special but that is not being alive in
the moment; that’s memorizing and sharing,
and I think that they are two different things.
nj — I would say in my own experience of
this, once I get past the oral history collection
point and have done a lot of deep listening to
the material itself, what I’m most seeking is:
how are these voices, how are they wanting to
share space with one another? So much of my
listening and re-listening to the oral histories
that I’ve collected is my time trying to figure
out if these voices interact because they are
all generally from the same community or
connected by some threads. So if they weren’t
sharing the same space, how do these voices,
how are they telling me that they want to be
sharing space with one another?
Which again is almost never attached
to the questions that I asked them directly
or how the conversation developed, which I
think is really nice. Then, musically, what
I’m trying to do almost always is to shift the
audience’s perspective very much to the space
between me and we. That you are listening to
this other person’s story but that I’m always
trying to shift the perspective of it so that you
never become attached to that person being
this thing. Now that I’ve decided actually
that all of these voices go in this room in fact,
is that their voice or is that my voice, is that
our shared voice in this space in this moment?
Musically, that’s almost always what I’m
aiming to do and results in something very
different every time and it allows for actually
a much more fluid sense of conversation
between the voices whether they’re coming
in through song text or through actual
recordings of their own voices or some
combination thereof.
js — It was super interesting.
ehl — I’m interested in the form of
storytelling, film, music, and oral story, that
there’s something really interesting to me
about the form that a story is shared and
then how we hold it. I’ve seen moments in
films that trigger a story for me and months,
years later, I’m still holding that because of
what happened from both the image and
that sound. Then the same thing with a piece
of music. Although what is different about
the forms is that in an oral story, once it’s
finished, it’s finished. So you only have the
memory that holds on, you can’t go back and
re-watch the story necessarily in the way that
you can re-listen to the piece of music or you
can re-watch the film.
audience — How do you choose which
stories to focus on?
nj — Yeah, it’s always hard. Thank you for
that question. To me, it’s clear. In a way it’s
hard, it’s also quite easy. The hard part of
it is you have limited time. So you do have
to choose and you can’t choose everything.
What’s been exciting about that part
artistically is how to make the decision for the
piece but then what can be further created as
companion pieces, as opportunities for other
means of dissemination communication and
keeping people folded into your story long
after it’s gone and continuing to build on
those stories. So almost every time that I’ve
worked in this way, there’s been this beautiful
archive of work and then an opportunity to
figure out how to share that.
I know with my Haitian project, what
was really beautiful about that was that
because so much of our history has been in
oral tradition, even though these artists are
known familiarly in a lot of the songs, a lot
of the old Haitian folklore songs are known
because we’ve learned them through this
oral tradition. Many of them are not written
down. The histories are not written down.
They’re not known, they’re not shared. So
what you get a lot especially from right now,
there’s a really active young generation of
Haitian people trying to really understand
more about our history.
I had to make some strategic choices
for the album. I made different choices for
the live show and now I have this archive of
work that can exist and has already proven
to be a resource for Haitian people. I want
to continue to build on that throughout the
Haitian diaspora, which has been really a
side effect of that and a way of engaging with
people that I had not anticipated. Now that
I’m doing more of this work in American
communities, I’ve started thinking of it as
quilting in some way to sort of harken back to
an American tradition. These stories are being
shaped and molded into artistic moments,
but they are also beginning to build a fabric
of understanding of American history that is
very different than the American history that
we have and that has been told.
On the one hand, artistically it is a
challenge to have to limit myself but also
a beautiful challenge, like what do people
walk away with? But also not having to feel
too precious about it because I know that
there are many more ways for these stories
to continue to live on and that in fact the
practice of doing this beyond the music is
about continuing to preserve our history, to
be used by other people in other ways going
forward collaboratively or otherwise, like
just turning the material into something
entirely new, as well. That is exciting to me
artistically, it’s exciting to me socially and
personally also.
ehl — I’m curious, Jacqueline, about the
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editing process with film. Do you have a sense
that knowing the story that you want to tell
impacts how the film is edited or does it reveal
itself in process or both?
js — Wow! You mean like in general
fiction filmmaking practice not video
documentation? That’s a super interesting
question. I’m thinking about that in relation
to what I might want to say by way of
connecting black storytelling practices in film
and not just film at large and there again I
would go back to my beloved L.A. Rebellion
filmmakers. What they were trying to do, and
what I think they succeeded in doing, was to
figure out how they could use a form that had
denigrated black people for so long since its
inception and how they could bring the kinds
of storytelling, traditions, and techniques
that you work in, Emily. Like how would
you be able to tell an Africanist story using a
Western medium.
When I think about something
like Haile Gerima’s Sankofa or Julie Dash’s
Daughters of the Dust, what they try to do
formally is replicate some of the traditions
of African storytelling. Instead of following
one individual protagonist, you have a kind of
collective story that’s being told and the story
is working not just in this collaborative way
but it’s also speaking to multiple time periods
at the same moment. So there’s a layered
history and layered experiences. The figures
are speaking kind of allegorically even if
they’re situated in a particular time and space
in the plot.
It takes me back to what Nathalie
was saying about quilting because I think
that’s just a beautiful model for understanding
so many of the things that we’ve been talking
about tonight. Then, if you think about
not just that the quilts are made of pieces,
so these stories are necessarily partial,
incomplete, subjective, all those things.
When you put them together, there are so
many interesting things that happen. And
then that artifact also ages and having the
capacity to understand the history of the
making of the thing is also really important.
The quilt itself has its own history of its
construction and circulation and how it falls
apart and then the strategies we use to try to
fill in the pieces or replace them or make the
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quilt bigger. My grandmother used to have That’s me, I need to know how to start.
old quilts and she’d make new quilts out of So that’s one piece. Another piece is that
the old quilts or create new borders around if something in the story doesn’t make sense,
them all the time. So there’s this fascinating I can’t tell it. I have to make it make sense for
temporal dimension to what we’re talking me because as a listener I need for the story to
about and, here again, it’s why I always feel make sense. So those are the pieces. Those are
really uncomfortable when people feel as some of the pieces that rise up for me in terms
though ethnography is or history practices of finding the voice of the story.
are getting at the truth and then somehow
that’s safe and real and we can always go back
to that. But no, because the frame around it,
why did you collect the story? Who were you
when you did it? Who was paying you to do it
or not paying you to do it? All of those things
shape this artifact.
I’m trying to get back to what you were
asking, Emily. I can see how it’s so important
to think about the different modes that people
use, whether filmic modes, literary modes,
musical modes, kinds of verbal performance,
the forms themselves also are woven into
infiltrating those artifacts that we’re working
with. They’re constituting them.
nj — I get excited about the idea of the
object, the collecting of it, and the creation
becoming this thing that then—in the spirit
of quilting—gets repurposed or remade. I love
the idea of that. I think it’s like art becoming
generative art, feels really exciting to me in
terms of, . . . I don’t know, I’m a nerd. I get
excited about it.
js — We are all nerds. That’s why we are
talking about this on a Wednesday night.
ehl — There was a question from the
audience, they asked, “does the story have or
develop its own voice, tell itself in a sense?”
I think it depends on the story.
So, when I was learning storytelling, my
mentor said to me, “You will find a lot of
stories that you like but you have to love a
story to tell it.” I have found that when I love
the story that there are some ways in which
it feels like the story tells itself. On the other
hand, I have felt that there are some stories
that are really difficult to tell. I know that for
myself as the storyteller, they’re sort of like
stumbling blocks that I have. I have a stack
of stories that I really like but I don’t know
where they start, so I can’t get to an ending.
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 THE ANECDOTE
Mark Philip Bradley and Lee Weng-Choy
Kuala Lumpur-based art critic Lee Weng-Choy and University of Chicago historian Mark Philip
Bradley are working on parallel projects that explore the conditions of contemporary art practice
in Southeast Asia. Here they discuss how Walter Benjamin’s notion of the anecdote and the recent
archival turn by visual artists together offer generative questions for their own thought and writing.

Mark Philip Bradley, University of Chicago, USA; Lee Weng-Choy, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Thao Nguyen Phan, Mute Grain, 2019. Three-channel video: 15 mins, color,
310
© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. sound; ed. 5 + 2AP. Installation view, Sharjah Biennial 14, 2019. 311
lwc — Mark, recently you shared with me
a proposal for a project you’re working on,
about the “global South” and the “making
of our times.” It got me thinking more
about my own approaches to writing about
contemporary art. For over twenty years, I’ve
written about art and culture from a perch in
Singapore, but I wouldn’t describe my work as
covering or specializing in Southeast Asia. I’m
more interested in reflecting how we represent
the region than attempting representations of
it myself.
If I may start our conversation by
sharing an anecdote, but one without names
or dates—which, I suppose, is anathema to a
certain kind of historian. If I really wanted
to chase down the facts, I probably could.
But I want to relay it in this form, as if telling
a joke, even though it’s not. So, a renowned
artist, who’s around eighty, is about to do a
major retrospective, and, as part of the whole
project, wants to recreate a performance she
did from fifty years ago. She tries doing all
the moves—there are lots of fast, repeated
movements—and, since she’s not young
anymore, it’s tiring, and, you know, difficult,
to say the least. She starts having doubts.
She calls up a friend, an esteemed dance
choreographer, who’s about the same age. The
artist explains her situation, asking her friend
if she has any advice, any tips to share. Her
friend says: Yes. Just practice.
When I was young, I wanted to be
a physicist. I had this notion that physics
was the best way—not just for me, but for
anybody—to understand the universe and by
extension, our own little world. After a few
semesters in upstate New York, I had a change
of mind, and switched schools, courses and
coasts. As a teenager, I wasn’t much of a
reader. Yet somehow, during my sophomore
year, I decided I wanted to write a book.
It would take a number of years of flailing
about before I found a focus; that happened
in my late twenties, soon after I moved to
Singapore from the US. I realized then that
what I wanted to write is art criticism. I chose
“criticism” because I did not study art history
but philosophy, literature, and theory, and
felt that that word best described my own
approach to art. Decades later, and here I am
in Kuala Lumpur, and, among other things,
312
am very, very slowly trying to put together a
collection of essays on artists—the pandemic’s
not helping, and I’ve stalled on the project.
The book will be called, The Address of Art, and
the Scale of Other Places. Besides being about a
number of artists I admire, it’s also an attempt
at addressing the world at large.
What I thought I could touch on here,
in our co-writing collaboration, are these
questions of “address” and “scale.” I like
“address” because it refers both to “location”
as well as to how one “speaks” to an audience
or about a topic, and “scale” is not just about
size but also precisely about relations—about
how one fits into a context, space or place.
Mainly, though, I’d like to make a case for art
criticism as a practice without methodology.
mpb — We are thinking along parallel lines.
You want to write about art informed by your
philosophical engagements. As a historian,
I want to write history, but as I do I want to
borrow from new methods developed in the
world of art practice. There has been a lot of
talk in the art world about an archival turn
and developing research-based practices. As I
understand it, many art schools now require
an engagement with research as part of the
MFA process. I began to encounter some of
this work as I started my own research on the
history of the global South. The emergence
of Southern visual artists as critical players in
the making of contemporary global culture is
a part of the project, more particularly a case
study of Southeast Asian artists. So I began
to travel to exhibitions and biennales in the
region to see some work and started talking
with artists and curators. Perhaps because I am
a historian, I was immediately taken by what
artists are doing with history in their work.
Take for instance Thao Nguyên Phan’s
2019 Mute Grain.1 It explores the famine that
gripped northern and central Vietnam in
1945 and killed as many as three million
people. The famine has not played a major
role in the ways in which most historians
have told the history of modern Vietnam. In
that sense, Phan is taking an event out of the
shadows to show the central role it played in
the lives of so many Vietnamese families at
mid-century. Some of the materials Phan is
working with are oral histories with survivors
conducted by Vietnamese historians in the
1950s. We hear those voices, and they are
powerful. But at first this dimension of Mute
Grain appears to work in more familiar ways,
familiar at least to historians. Oral history is
part of our more conventional tool kit. But in
Phan’s hands, it is layered into something far
more complex. Borrowing from Vietnamese
folktales and chronicles, she crafts a narrative
of a young woman who becomes what the
Vietnamese call a hungry ghost unable to
pass on to the next life after she dies from
hunger. Phan visually narrates this story in
a kind of magical realist style that is both
simultaneously beautiful and quietly offers
fundamentally new ways of understanding
the everyday meanings of the famine. Weng,
to use one of your terms, Phan addresses
her audiences in ways historians often seem
unable to do. I want to try to think about
how to get where Phan gets in her work in my
own. My hunch is that your notion of scale,
or fitting into a context or space, may be a
generative way of starting to get there.
lwc — I’m so glad you mentioned Mute Grain.
I encountered the work at the 2019 Sharjah
Biennale. Our mutual friend, Zoe Butt, was
one of the Biennale’s three curators, and
Phan’s work was part of Zoe’s assembly of
projects. I worked with Zoe on her all-day
March Meet symposium, and during my
short visit to Sharjah, didn’t get a chance to
properly look at Phan’s three-channel video
and installation. I must find a way to see it
again. From what you say, it sounds like Mute
Grain is a great example of an artwork that
can help us think around the concepts of
“address” and “scale.” Although, for me, when
it comes to my own chosen examples, they
don’t so much illustrate my ideas about art
writing; rather, I hope they can function to
test those ideas.
One way to articulate this idea I’ve
put forward, of art criticism as a practice
without methodology, is through a discussion
of the use of anecdote. Art historian James
Elkins has talked about the excessive
citation of Walter Benjamin—there was a
time when it seemed like every other article
on contemporary art would mention him,
regardless of whether the text was referring to
art from Western Europe, East Africa, North
America, or South Asia. I too have been guilty
of this, but, in my defense, I still maintain
that Benjamin has been especially helpful
for me in thinking about visual culture in
Singapore. When I was based there, I regularly
wrote about how the island city-state has
imagined itself as an amalgamation of the best
from the East and the West—the inheritor
of the great traditions as well as the latest
technologies—and that, by offering itself as a
paradigm of “New Asia,” it staked a claim as
being part of the avant-garde of the next stage
of global capitalism. It was in this context that
I cited Benjamin’s critique of progress and
conventional historiography (which presumes
a cumulative and progressive narrative).
There’s that quote from his Arcades Project:
“Anecdote brings things closer to us in space,
allows them to enter into our lives. Anecdote
represents the extreme opposite of history—
which demands an “empathy” that renders
everything abstract. Empathy amounts to
the same thing as reading newspapers. The
true method of making things present is:
to imagine them in our space (and not to
imagine ourselves in their space).”2
In one particular essay, I contrasted
promotional material from Channel
NewsAsia—the Singapore television network
with ambitions of becoming the CNN for
“Asia”—with a discussion of some productions
by TheatreWorks and two artworks, one by
Amanda Heng, and the other by Simryn Gill.3
I don’t have the space to get into a description
and discussion of the artworks here, but let
me share this image of CNA’s Asian-news-by-
Asian-reporters-for-Asian-viewers branding-
cum-ideology. There was this tv commercial
from the early days of the channel: a picture
frame hovered over a blank white screen,
inside which flashed different images of
“exotic” Asian women, such as the Padong
of Burma who wear brass rings around their
necks. And the tagline? “It takes one to know
one.” I’ve argued that these orientalizing and
self-orientalizing gestures have been pretty
standard practice for the mainstream media
and government in Singapore. Pace Benjamin,
you could say that to imagine ourselves in an
Other’s space is to colonize that Other space.
Whereas with some artists, like Heng and
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Gill, their work often includes gestures that
invite the Other to inhabit “our” space, which
can then radically open it up. The suggestion
here is that anecdote can be a useful approach
for encountering difference, precisely because
it opens up our perceptions of Others, rather
than framing Others through our own
narratives.
Of the world’s regions, Southeast Asia
is perhaps the most evenly divided in terms
of archipelagic and continental land areas.
In another essay of mine, which offered
reflections on curating in Southeast Asia, I
took up these tropes of islands and continents
to discuss how curators have intentionally
or inadvertently attempted to represent the
region.4 I suggested a pedestrian view from
the ground is like an anecdotal one, while
an airborne view from above is thematic.
Moreover, an island perspective is akin to
an anecdotal one, and the continental view
is thematic. When you’re on an island, you
need only walk around and signs of the sea
are never far from sight. But for a proper sense
of a continent, you have to imagine looking
out from a plane window to appreciate its
extent. And, after some thorough surveying,
when you see a pattern across a continent,
then you may have a persuasive argument
for a theme. In comparison, what happens
in one island may not apply to the next: an
anecdote does not offer enough evidence for
a general tendency. Instead, sometimes what
it does offer is an example of an exceptional
specificity. But how often have you come
across a text where an anecdote is recruited
merely to illustrate an already constructed
argument, which, sadly, happens all too
often in exhibitions and essays that aim to
make representations about Southeast Asia,
or any other region or community. A set of
observations becomes overgeneralized and a
certain feature is then asserted as the defining
characteristic of artistic practices of some
group, containing and reducing the complex
diversities and disparities of the region within
a singular framework.
How many times have you seen a show,
or read an essay, where the artworks were
used mainly to demonstrate the curator’s or
critic’s theme or argument? In such cases, the
theme and argument speak at the art. But the
314
job of the curator or the critic is not to speak
at but to art. The preposition matters: the
“to” invites a conversation, as opposed to the
one-sided broadcast the “at” insinuates. What
makes a conversation is not the talking but
the listening. And I like to think of the practice
of art writing and criticism as a practice
of listening. I don’t think I’m an especially
skilled listener, but I am a committed one.
And one of my favorite spaces for listening
is the anecdote. As for “address” and “scale,”
I suppose one could say that my preferred
modes of address stay close to the ground; I’m
interested in the conversational, the lateral,
the adjacent. I’m less interested in looking and
speaking from above, as if I could presume
to survey the entire field or represent what’s
happening in the scene. It’s not that I don’t
consider big themes or issues—I regularly
do—but I typically approach these through
the scale of the personal, and tend to eschew
the global. I don’t think the accumulation of
anecdotes I collect should ever build up into
something larger, like a methodology, a system
of thought. As a critic who still reads and
thinks a lot about theory, I’m not trying to be
like a physicist, and chase after some unified
field theory of the universe of art. So, rather
than drawing conclusions, my own penchant
for using anecdotes in criticism is to interrupt
the tendency to generalize through a close
reading of specific cases—to prompt debate
and discussion by challenging assumptions,
rather than propping up positions. For
Benjamin, anecdote could lay bare the writing
of history as a reconstruction, not of the past,
but of a present. For me, writing about art,
I have found that anecdote can offer ways
of interrupting our habits of constructing
narrative closures, and instead, anecdote can
remind us to keep the story open-ended, and
multifarious.
Art criticism is not something I would
consider a discipline—an example of which
is art history. It’s a mongrel practice, like art
making. If you want to become an artist,
you simply start making art; likewise, to
become an art critic you start writing about
it. And there are so many ways and different
methods to try and experiment with. In
both cases, making art, writing about it,
it’s not easy, but you keep practicing. Yes,
Vandy Rattana, Monologue, 2015. Single channel HD video: 18:55 mins, color, sound. Co-production Jeu de Paume,
FNAGP.
in many cases, critics and artists do go to
school, but these excursions into the academy,
while recommended, are not required.
When I think of how anecdote insists on
the particular, I also think of anecdote as
a form of, or rather, a particular instance
of practicing. To get back to my opening
anecdote about the senior artist and the
advice to “just practice.” When it comes to
my own writing, I don’t think “practice makes
perfect.” Sometimes you practice not to get
better, but simply to practice. And to repeat.
And sometimes to repeat with a difference.
I recently read a wonderful interview with
the Arabic novelist Elias Khoury. He said
that repetition is central to the way he thinks
about literature: “Repetition is, I might say,
a way of insisting that every story contains
many stories inside it. The same story can
be told in any number of different ways, of
course. My novels try to suggest this richness,
even though I can tell only a limited number
of versions. In other words, I’m a student of
Scheherazade—I don’t tell the story, I tell how
the story has been told.”5
mpb — “The true measure of making things
present is to imagine them in our space.”
Yes! And I see where you want to go with
Benjamin’s notion of the anecdote and the
kind of work it can do to fundamentally shift
our perspectives. Your discussion immediately
reminded me of the work of Vandy Rattana.
In a sense, he brings what you term an
“island” perspective to the contemporary
epigones of the past in mainland Southeast
Asia. I first encountered Rattana’s work
at Patrick Flores’s Singapore Biennale in
November 2019. It was a video piece titled
Monologue.6 I will confess it took me some
time and thought to situate what he was
doing, and in truth, I think I am still trying
to take in the full implications of his method.
As you will see, I am less willing to give up on
method qua method than you are!
In Monologue, we initially see a
landscape in northwestern Cambodia
with a rice field in the center of the frame
surrounded by a grove of mango and palm
trees. The landscape functions in the film in
some of the same ways you ascribe to island
perspectives. It is a windy day, and we can
hear the wind, sometimes quite loudly, rustle
through the leaves and branches against what
is a bright and brilliant sky. Rattana finds
the field by following a hand-drawn map his
father had made for him. It plots the location
of the grave of his sister, who died before he
was born. She rests between two beautiful
mango trees, though Rattana does not quite
know where. “Here?” he speculates as the
camera pans around the space. “Or . . . over
315
there?” And “why,” he asks, “am I constantly
thinking about you?”
The camera sits in the space between
the two trees, and Rattana talks to his sister
in almost stream-of-consciousness style.
“They are Pum Sen mango trees,” he tells
her, just like the ones at the family house
in Phnom Penh. “They are sour when still
green but when mixed with fish sauce they
are exquisite and pair wonderfully with
grilled fish.” He also tells his sister about the
rice farmers working the fields in front of
the mango grove. The scent of the mango
promises a good harvest this year. He wonders
if his sister’s body helped fertilize the fields we
see the farmers cultivating.
Rattana’s only direct memory of
his sister is a photograph, in which she is
“motionless all the time.” He has never
“seen her crying in the photograph.” “Why,”
he asks, “do you cry now?” The afternoon
begins to fade, and Rattana collects a bamboo
branch, some fragments of soil, and a mango
tree branch from her gravesite. We see the
items spread out on a white cloth, white the
color of death in Cambodia. As Monologue
ends, the sun slowly sets between the two
mango trees.
About halfway into the almost-19-
minute Monologue, we come to realize it is
telling another kind of story, too. Rattana’s
sister, he relays in passing, is among 5,000
people who are buried in the rice field. What
he never directly says is that they are part of
the estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million victims of the
genocidal Pol Pot regime that ruled Cambodia
from 1975 to 1979. “The year 1978 showed itself
here,” Rattana tells us as the video opens but
that is as far as he goes to situate time and
place. For most Khmer viewers, that is enough.
I am struck by how Monologue works
so differently than many of the more official
sites of historical memory about the Pol Pot
era in Cambodia. Cheung Ek, just fifteen
kilometers outside of Phnom Penh, is among
the largest mass graves that make up what
are often called the Khmer Rouge killing
fields. It is now a tourist site. There are skulls
on view and reenactments of killing for
spectators. In Phnom Penh, the Tuol Sleng
Museum occupies the site of the S-21 prison
where 20,000 Cambodians were detained and
316
tortured by the Khmer Rouge in what was a
network of similar torture centers across the
country. It was established by the Cambodian
state to chronicle the history of the genocide.
Tuol Sleng is a complex site, and one, like the
museums and memorials on the sites of the
Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau,
that can be a difficult place for visitors.
Art, in a manner of speaking, has a
prominent place at Tuol Sleng. Some of its
walls are covered with paintings by Van
Nath, a celebrated Cambodian artist and one
of a handful of survivors of the prison. The
paintings recreate scenes of torture. There
are also striking black and white photographs
of victims. When each prisoner first entered
S-21, they were individually photographed
by their captors. Some of these photographs
are displayed at Tuol Sleng, but more
controversially a group of them were shown at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York in
1997 where the line between the photographs
as aesthetic objects and the documentation of
terror was sometimes blurred.7
I don’t mean to say that Monologue
offers a more important or deeper historical
truth than do official sites such as Cheung
Ek or Tuol Sleng. But they have proved so
central to the ways in which the genocide
is remembered in contemporary Cambodia,
operating as a kind of Bourdieusian doxa,
that these sites often make it difficult for
scholars and publics to find alternative or
adjacent ways to make meaning of the recent
Cambodia past. In a sense, the grave of
Rattana’s sister is more commonplace than
those better-known sites of memory. There are
thousands of unmarked mass graves from the
Khmer Rouge era around Cambodia, often
on the same kind of fertile agricultural land
where Rattana’s sister is buried.
Monologue does not strike me as aimed
so much at recovering a transcendent historical
meaning for these ubiquitous spaces, although
at moments Rattana goes in those directions.
Most often he invites us into a singular
space, and his own efforts to grapple with the
interplay of the public and private meanings
he finds in it. Rattana, for example, makes
clear that his father and mother are still living
and that the bamboo, soil, and mango branch
he collects at his sister’s grave are meant for
them. But he chooses not to say how it is that
his father and mother survived the Pol Pot
years when his sister did not. He also tells us in
the early 1980s “desperate men” started to dig
up the graves, “seeking their fortune” only to
find “the putrid smell of newly unrecognizable
remains.” He talks about these men with
empathy. Nonetheless, he asks his sister, “did
they dig in your place too?” Through the
choices Rattana makes in structuring his
elliptical narrative and in the arresting visual
landscape he places around it, Monologue
constantly pushes viewers to think hard about
the meanings of the past and the present.
As you can tell I have a strong
appreciation for the work. But I also think
it offers a method, one that can potentially
travel from the visual arts back to people like
me who write history in more conventional
ways. I am still struggling to find the right
words to describe it, but there is something
about the intimacy running through
Monologue, a sensibility more fully appreciated
by watching the film in its entirety, that
points toward an entirely original path
forward in making sense of the past.
lwc — Mark, I’m very grateful for the
receptivity you’ve shown in this dialogue.
Grateful for the conversation in the first
place. Though the point isn’t about whether
you and I are converging in agreement or
not, but that after I put something out
there, you take it and really go with it. I’ve
been speaking abstractly, and in response,
you’ve offered concrete readings of artworks.
Again, at stake here is that these examples,
or anecdotes, if you will, of Vandy Rattana’s
and Thao Nguyên Phan’s works, they do
not illustrate, so much as test the concepts
and arguments we’ve been discussing. I
suppose one could say that anecdote can be
a particular form of address—in how it both
speaks to something, and, also, how it locates
something, somehow—a particular form like a
method, an approach. I’m all for the plurality
and proliferation of methods; my position is
that I’m skeptical when someone, explicitly
or inadvertently, claims that these pluralities
build up to a systematic methodology.
I have a deep respect for the work
historians do, to recover the past, so to speak.
I suppose, as a critic who’s mainly interested
in contemporary art, I don’t quite bear the
same weight of that responsibility. But I am
committed to speaking and listening to the
past, because I recognize that to speak of or
from the present always entails exactly that.
mpb — I share the skepticism, Weng. I want
to close out my side of the conversation with
one more anecdote. An old friend, an editor,
told me a long time ago that it was best to
avoid landing a piece of historical writing
in the present. The danger, she said, is that
you hope what you write has a long shelf life,
and you never know how the “now” will read
five, ten, or twenty years on. You and I aren’t
strictly writing history here, so the admonition
may not be completely germane. But we are
writing about history, and I think it is critical
to remind future readers of the moment in
which we are doing so. We are in the second
year of a global pandemic, one which has put
pressures on all of us in different and often
very difficult ways. In our case, the pressures
are more modest, but they are still present and
worth noticing. We had started to build an
intellectual friendship as we met and talked
in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur before the
pandemic came down about the concerns that
drive each other’s work around contemporary
Southeast Asian art. I am grateful to the
Gray Center for allowing us to continue that
conversation in this form. I look forward to a
time when we can again do the same in person.
317
NOTES

1 7
Thao Nguyên Phan, Mute Grain, Lindsay French, “Exhibiting Terror”
2019. Three-channel video, black in Truth Claims: Representation and
and white, sound. 15:45 minutes. Human Rights, ed. Mark Philip
Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Bradley and Patrice Petro (New
Foundation. Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2002), 131–55.
2
Walter Benjamin, quoted in Richard
Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener,”
Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics,
History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989),
13–37.

3
Lee Weng-Choy, “Authenticity,
Reflexivity & Spectacle: or, the Rise Like stacking Russian dolls, the Gray Center’s FarBar program
of New Asia is not the End of the engaged curator Zoe Butt through a project that might be
World,” in Theory in Contemporary described loosely as a form of nested curation, whereby she
Art since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur and connected FarBar to Pollination, a multi-faceted curatorial
Simon Leung (Oxford: Blackwell endeavor that took the form of conferences, screenings, and
Publishing, 2005; Second Edition, exhibition in 2021 and beyond. In this issue of Portable Gray,
2012), 338–353. we share a pivotal text from the Pollination website titled
“The Hunters,” by Kittima Chareeprasit and LIR (Mira
4 Asriningtyas and Dito Yuwono). Here, the curators draw on
Lee Weng-Choy “Metonym folklore and the work of artists to think through the ethics of
and Metaphor, Islands and capitalist and industrial-scale consumption in relation to the
Continents: Reflections on Curating environment by focusing on particular locales in Southeast
Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia—concerns that can be extrapolated to the environmental
Asia,” in Charting Thoughts — Essays predicament that affects the entire planet.
on Art in Southeast Asia, ed. Low Sze
Wee and Patrick Flores (Singapore:
National Gallery Singapore, 2017),
336–347.

5
Elias Khoury, “The Art of Fiction
No. 233,” The Paris Review, 2021,
https://www.theparisreview.org/
interviews/6940/the-art-of-fiction-
no-233-elias-khoury (accessed 18 July
2021).

6
Vandy Rattana, Monologue, 2015.
Single channel HD video, color,
sound. 18:55 minutes. Co-production
Jeu de Paume, FNAGP.

318 319
 The Hunters 1

The Hunters
Kittima Chareeprasit and LIR The Hunters
Once upon a time, there were two mighty hunters: Barata, living under
an active stratovolcano where elephants freely roamed the island of
Java1 in Indonesia, and Ta Jung Kung Dang Daeng (ďĬĂİľāüİľāĎīāķĎā), who
wandered around what is now known as Thailand and Laos, along the
1
Java (Indonesian: Mekong2, where Naga3 slept peacefully under the river.
Jawa, Indonesian
pronunciation:
΀ণĚࢯĂǁĂ΁͖:ĂǀĂŶĞƐĞ͗ė
Barata’s story came from a time before Kingdoms were named and cities
ĺ€^ƵŶĚĂŶĞƐĞ͗Ϳ is divided, where there were more elephants than humans in Java. As men
an island of Indonesia,
bordered by the
tried to build civilization on the island, they started to hunt elephants
Indian Ocean on the down, declaring war, pushing them further into extinction. Of all the
south and the Java Sea
on the north. With a hunters, there was one man stronger than the others and respected by
population of over 148 many. His name is Barata4. He is fearless and killed more elephants than
million (Java only) or
152 million (including anyone ever had. Celebrated by many, he married the prettiest woman
the inhabitants of its
surrounding islands),
and settled in the village under the volcano. Men all over the island
Java constitutes continued to hunt the elephant down, while villages were built and fa-
56.1 percent of the
Indonesian population
milies expanded. One day, a young high-spirited elephant accidentally
and is the world’s stepped on, and killed, Barata’s only daughter. Heartbroken and lost, he
most-populous island.
Formed mostly as the 3 realized that only by saving the lives of elephants would he gain peace
result of volcanic erup- In Thai-Laotian beliefs, of mind once again. So, he retreats to the far end of the volcano where
tions from geologic EĈŐĂƐare consid-
subduction between ered the patronage wounded elephants come to die, to heal them. One day, there is only
the Sunda Plate and of water. EĈŐĂƐ are one remaining wounded elephant alive. Barata tells the elephant that
Australian Plate, Java is believed to live in
the 13th largest island either water bodies or the only way to keep him safe is to cast a spell to turn him into a tree, as
in the world and the in caves. According
ÚFTH
LARGEST
IN
)NDO- to a popular legend,
the hunters will not stop until the last elephant falls down and dies. For
nesia by landmass at the Mekong River in years, this elephant lived as a white banyan tree and Barata lived inside
about 138,800 square northeastern Thailand
kilometres (53,600 sq and Laos was said to of it. However, civilization caught up with him.
mi). (source: https:// be created by two
en.m.wikipedia.org/ ŶĈŐĂ kings slithering The land is now brimming with a human civilization, with the need for
wiki/Java) through the area, thus
creating the Mekong more and more land, higher up to the farthest side of the volcano. A
2
The Mekong, or
and the nearby Nan
River. The Mekong is
road had to be built and the white banyan tree was in the way. It was
Mekong River, is synonymous with the ordered to be cut down. At that time, there were no more hunters, but
a trans-boundary UNEXPLAINED
ÚREBALLS

river in East Asia and phenomenon which
there were men with axes who came to kill the tree. However Barata,
Southeast Asia. It has long been believed who lived inside the tree, was very powerful. With every attempt, the
is the world’s tenth to be created by the
longest river and the ŶĈŐĂƐ that dwell in the life of one man was lost. “The tree is sacred, leave it alone”, says one
sixth longest in Asia. river. (source: https:// lady with a gifted eye, who could see the elephant, and Barata, inside
Its estimated length en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
is 4,909 km (3,050 NĈŐa) the white banyan tree. But no, just like the hunters before them, the
mi), and it drains an
area of 795,000 km2 4
men with axes did not listen, thinking nothing is too sacred compared
(307,000 sq mi), "ARATA
IS
THE
ÚCTIONAL
to providing for their family. So, they try to cut the tree anyway. Barata
discharging 475 km3 elephant hunter
(114 cu mi) of water character in “Merapi
realizes it is time to set the elephant free. So, he casts another spell and
annually. From the Omahku” (Merapi together, he and the elephant walk all the way to the highest point of the
Tibetan Plateau the My Home) book by
river runs through Elizabeth D. Inandiak. volcano, beyond human reach. One day, the elephant could not con-
China, Myanmar, Laos, 4HE
ÚCTIONAL
STORY
tinue the journey, so Barata casts yet another spell to turn the elephant
Thailand, Cambodia, reimagines the birth
and Vietnam. The of a sacred white into a stone forever. Sometimes, when the night is still, you can still hear
extreme seasonal vari-
ATIONS
IN
ÛOW
AND
THE

banyan tree and the
elephant stone that is
the sound of an elephant calling in the distance and a blurry sighting
presence of rapids and present in real life at of Barata, as he roams the peak of the volcano. The story of Barata the
waterfalls in the Me- Kaliadem– a village at
kong make navigation the slope of Mount.
ELEPHANT
HUNTER
IS
A
ÚCTITIOUS
ONE
BUT
AN
ELEPHANT
STONE
SIMILAR
TO
THAT

DIFÚCULT
%VEN
SO
THE
Merapi.Yogyakarta. OF
THE
ÚCTIONAL
BOOK
CAN
BE
FOUND
IN
+ALIADEM
VILLAGE
SURROUNDED
BY

river is a major trade 4HE
ÚCTIONAL
ÚGURE
OF

route between western Barata portrays one of hundreds of lava tour jeeps and tourists.
China and Southeast MANY
ANCESTRAL
ÚGURES

Asia. (source: https:// known by villagers )N
ANOTHER
NOT SO FAR
PART
OF
THE
WORLD
THERE
IS
ANOTHER
PROLIÚC
HUNTER

en.m.wikipedia.org/ around the Mount.
wiki/Mekong) Merapi area. His name is Ta Jung Kung Dang Daeng. This hunter was of such great

ofhuntersandgatherers.com

Kittima Chareeprasit, Chiang Mai, Thailand; LIR (Mira Asriningtyas & Dito Yuwono), Yogyakarta, Indonesia
320 © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 321
 The Hunters 2
stature that it is said children could be seen running around in his nose.
One day, the hunter decided he wants to hunt a silver buffalo. Coming
across his prey along the Mekong river, the hunter stalked the buffalo
to a watering hole. As he was preparing to let loose the killing arrow
from his crossbow, a merchant appeared, rowing his boat downriver,
thus frightening the buffalo away. The hunter, angered by the narrow
escape of his prey, concocts revenge against the merchant. With his
great strength and stature, the hunter used numerous large boulders to
The Hunters 3
various tourism sites at its base. A connection between the world of
the human and the non-human, the visible to the invisible, and the
mythical to the ‘real’ world is especially present in Yogyakarta, due to its
proximity to Mount Merapi. Mount Merapi is considered one of the two
most powerful mythical kingdoms in Yogyakarta, connected through
an imaginary axis with the Sultanate of Yogyakarta and the mythical
Queendom of the Southern Sea—an ancient covenant that supports
each other. Around Mount Merapi, the ontological knowledge of Java-
BLOCK
THE
ÛOW
OF
THE
RIVER
STOPPING
ANY
MERCHANTS
FROM
EVER
PASSING
BY
nese cosmology used to coexist with Islamic values, a tradition rooted
the river ever again. in the knowledge of Hinduism and animism. Local people believe that
they are sharing the living space with not only animals and plants, but
Unbeknownst to the hunter however, blocking the river also meant that also with the ancestor spirits, deities, and supernatural beings and pro-
LOCAL
VILLAGERS
WHO
RELIED
ON
THE
RIVER
FOR
ÚSH
WERE
NOW
UNABLE
TO
DO

so. The villagers, wishing for a return to their original way of life, prayed
to the gods for assistance. One of the local deities, having heard their
pleas, takes the guise of a traveling monk and approaches the hunter.
Seeing how the hunter is carrying his boulders by hand, one at a time,
the monk advises him to instead use a bamboo rod to carry multiple
rocks at once instead. To the hunter’s misfortune, the sharpness of the
tectors of nature. Living side by side, it is important to respect and prote-
ct each other to keep balance and reciprocity. Every volcanic eruption,
earthquake, natural disaster, and pandemic is suggesting a new equi-
librium is being scaled, and through the stories passed down between
generations, there is evidence that the world has been resistant and
humans continue to seek control.
bamboo rod cut a slit in his throat, causing him to thrash around in pain /NE
DAY
UNDERTAKING
A
ÚELD
TRIP
AT
THE
BASE
OF
-OUNT
-ERAPI
WE
TRAI-
and agony. In his suffering, the hunter falls into the river and dies. LED
THROUGH
FOREST
THAT
GOT
STRUCK
WITH
PYROCLASTIC
ÛOW
TEN
YEARS
BEFORE

in one of its biggest eruptions. Here, we found how tree trunks were
This folktale of Ta Jung Kung Dang Daeng is the story behind the name burnt, of how the tree fell but the roots were resilient and continue to
given to the area today – Kaeng Khut Khu – which can be translated into GROW
r
SOME
GROWING
HORIZONTALLY
BEFORE
HEADING
UP
TO
ÚND
MORE
SUN

‘cradling islet’. Located in the Chiang Khan district of the Loei province !FTER
A
WHILE
THE
LANDSCAPE
CHANGED
7E
ARRIVED
AT
AN
OPEN
ÚELD
THAT

in Northern Thailand (near the border with Laos), this area has become led to a pasture. Here we found a big tree on the ground. The old white
a prominent tourist attraction in recent times, where the symbiotic rela- bark was like that of an elephant’s wrinkled skin. It reminded us of the
tionship between the locals and their river way of life continues to thri- STORY
OF
"ARATA
THE
ELEPHANT
HUNTER
AND
IT
INTRIGUED
US
)T
WAS
DIFÚCULT
TO

ve. Revisiting the legend of this hunter and the silver buffalo brings to imagine that once upon a time, on the very same island (now home to
mind the modern ‘hunters’ of today, who manifest as massive man-ma- over 148 million people and considered as the world’s most-populous
de structures. Merely two hundred kilometers from the Kaeng Khut Khu ISLAND 
ELEPHANTS
ONCE
RAN
FREE
3CIENTISTS
HAVE
CONÛICTING
OPINION
AS
TO

AREA
THE
LOWER
PARTS
OF
THE
-EKONG
ARE
NOW
STIÛED
BY
THE
8AYABURI
when the Javan elephant (Elephas maximus sondaicus) became extinct,
Dam for the purposes of hydroelectricity production. However, unlike but their presence was described in the carving of Borobudur and in the
the folktale, it isn’t just boat travel that has been disrupted, nor just that SEMI
ÚCTIONAL
BOOK
l-ERAPI
/MAHKU
-ERAPI
-Y
(OME m
WRITTEN
BY

THE
ÚSHERMEN
CANNOT
EARN
A
LIVING
BUT
IT
IMPACTS
THE
NATURAL
ÛOW
OF
THE
Elizabeth Inandiak.
river, leading to unseasonal rise and drop in water levels. This in turn
has produced a devastating impact on the local ecosystem, leading to Smaller scale industry of sand mining under Mount Merapi can be tra-
THE
EXTINCTION
OF
NUMEROUS
ÚSH
SPECIES
AS
WELL
AS
LOCAL
AGRICULTURAL
ced back to the 1980s. Later, the government allowed heavy machinery
ways of life. Even worse than the actions of the folk-tale hunter, these to be used on the river to reduce the volume of this volcanic material
developments have far reaching consequences for the local communi-
ties as well as nature itself.
The Trail of The Hunters
SO
THAT
IT
WOULD
NOT
SPILL
ONTO
THE
FARMERmS
ÚELD
OR
CAUSE
FURTHER
ÛOOD

downstream in the city. If this sand is mined with respect and caution,
balance can be restored. But human greed knows no limit. The sand
MINING
INDUSTRY
TURNS
OUT
TO
BE
A
VERY
PROÚTABLE
BUSINESS
AND
NO
MATTER

how tight the government’s attempt to regulate it, illegal miners con-
tinue to operate. As a result, water reservoirs are gone, water sources
5 We, the curators, followed our curiosity in such folkloric hunters to the HAVE
DRIED
UP
AND
FARMERS
ÚND
GREAT
DIFÚCULTIES
IN
ACCESSING
SUFÚCIENT

Yogyakarta is the cap-
ital of the Yogyakarta forest and along the river. Together with the invited artists, Maryanto WATER
FOR
THEIR
ÚELDS
4HE
REGULATION
FOR
SAND
AND
VOLCANIC
MATERIAL
MI-
Sultanate and served AND
2UANGSAK
!NUWATWIMON
WE
POINT
TO
THE
ÚGURES
OF
"ARATA
AND
OF
4A
ning should actually be reviewed regularly by the government, but a
as the Indonesian
capital from 1946 Jung Kung Dang Daeng respectively, to give ethical insight to the diffe- lot of miners are getting by without the proper documents, thanks to
to 1948, during the
Indonesian National
RENT
ÚGURES
OF
THE
lHUNTERm
TODAY
q
FROM
THE
WATER
COMPANY
TOURISM
IN- LOCAL
MAÚA
AND
CORRUPT
LAW
ENFORCERS
!S
SOON
AS
THEY
RUN
OUT
OF
VOL-
Revolution[1] and dustry, illegal sand mining industry, industrialization, hydroelectric dam canic material in the river, the miners start taking sand from people’s
thus gained its Special
Region status with the
and mega-governmental project. ÚELDS
DREDGING
HILLS
TAKING
IT
FROM
THE
.ATIONAL
0ARK
AREA
AND
EVEN

Sultan as King, as well start stealing sand from under trees (resulting in massive environmental
as Governor of Yogya- In Indonesia, LIR and Maryanto took a trail down Mount Merapi in
karta. (source: https:// damage and casualties). Local people hold rallies, protests, and cam-
Yogyakarta5, an active stratovolcano, walking its forest and sacred water
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ paigns against this environmentally damaging practice, but with no sign
Yogyakarta) source, amidst the sand mining industry that is interspersed amongst

ofhuntersandgatherers.com ofhuntersandgatherers.com

322 323
 The Hunters 4
of success, even after years of trying.
In Thailand, Kittima and Ruangsak follow a trail to the majestic streams
of the Mekong River where numerous dams have been constructed along
the length of the river, with additional plans to blast rocky outcrops to
facilitate transport of commodities, agricultural machinery, as well as
using the river as a power supply. The rapid rate of industrialization
for the purpose of economic gain has unfortunately led to the negle-
ct of ecological conditions, with myriad organisms now facing threat
The Hunters 5
‘Once Upon a Time’
Along the trail of the two hunters, we encountered many more tales,
myths, anecdotal evidence, and folklore. Most of it started with ‘once
upon a time’. Such tales are usually used as a means to pass on ‘local
embodied knowledge’ from one generation to another. ‘Local embodied
knowledge’ is here understood as ‘local wisdom’ within the Indonesian
CONTEXT
OR
AS
lLOCAL
SPIRITUAL
KNOWLEDGEm
WITHIN
THE
4HAI
CONTEXT
"OTH

these attempts at translating local words “kearifan lokal” and ‘ĚijěĮĕīććĬ
of mass extinction. Ruangsak refers to the aforementioned story of Ta đĿħāĐĮľēm
INTO
%NGLISH
ARE
HOWEVER
INSUFÚCIENT
)N
SHORT
lLOCAL
EMBODIED

Jung Khung Dang Daeng, as an allegory for the various forms of natural knowledge’ refers to the practice of learning, whereby the body recei-
exploitation seen today- the construction of dams for the purpose of
agriculture and power generation have become new forms of ‘hunting’,
bringing with them the rapid and unchecked overexploitation of natural
resources, causing an imbalance in the natural order and disruption of
thousands of lives that rely on it.
The Mekong River is a crucial body of trans-boundary water in East Asia
VES
lPRACTICEm
IN
SPECIÚC
SITES
WITH
SPECIÚC
RITUALS
)T
IS
UNDERSTOOD
THAT

the experiential knowing of knowledge and its continuous presence in
community – via oral storytelling, spiritual or religious ritual, folkloric
superstition – are undervalued or little taught within the dominant cul-
tural memory of both countries.
The phrase ‘once upon a time’ is used to introduce a narrative of past
AND
3OUTHEAST
!SIA
ÛOWING
DOWN
FROM
THE
4IBETAN
0LATEAU
THROUGH

China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Spanning
approximately 4350 km in length, the river is a source of nourishment
for the over 70 million lives in various Southeast Asian countries as well
as the diverse range of diverse organisms. In Thailand, the Mekong acts
events or of something out of one’s imagination. From the stories we
heard along the way, we could easily imagine a Naga as a mythical
being, but when pondering the fact that extinction could turn the Javan
elephant into a mythical being, is something unthinkable for us. Along
the way, we found ourselves using that phrase a lot more. Underta-
AS
A
NATURAL
BORDER
ÛOWING
THROUGH

PROVINCES
IN
THE
.ORTHERN
AND

North-Eastern regions. Local communities that live along the river also
contain their own myths and legends regarding the river, folktales that
relate to the unique ways of life and physical properties of the area.
Following the trail of Ta Jung Kung Dang Daeng, Kittima and Ruangsak
learn more of how this mythical story told since before the birth of the
Thai nation, has greatly motivated tourism today for the Chiang Khan
KING
ÚELD
RESEARCH
WAS
NOT
THE
IDYLLIC
LANDSCAPE
WE
EXPERIENCED
DURING

our childhood. Every now and then we would say, “Do you remember,
once upon a time when we were young we could swim in this river and
now it has almost dried out?” We saw an alteration of nature to the point
that we didn’t recognize what was once our childhood playground, due
to years of continuous extraction of the land and river.
Such changes became the main concern for both invited artists. Through
district of the Loei province, where this tale rests. With picturesque vie-
ws of mountains, stone tributaries, and rocky crags that separate the
two sides of the Mekong river (acting as a borderline between Thailand
and Laos), the journey begins with a July 2019 news story concerning
the unnatural drought of Kaeng Khut Khu, an area in Loei province, as
HIS
ÚELD
RESEARCH
2UANGSAK
EXPLORED
THE
TRANSFORMATION
OF
THE
-EKONG

River’s physical ecology, and the effects of over-damming on the lives
of those living alongside and within. The installation ‘Excavated Gods’
raises questions regarding the rapid changes occurring around the bios-
pheres surrounding the Mekong River, this diorama visualizing landsca-
A
CONSEQUENCE
OF
THE
CONSTRUCTION
OF
THE
3AIYABURI
$AM
THE
ÚRST
OF
ITS

kind in the lower Mekong area that is closest to the Thai border.
This disruption to the river’s natural cycles led to a phenomenon known
as ‘hungry water’, where the color of the Mekong river turned blue as a
result of the lack of minerals and silt. The newly-operational dam isn’t
pes found along the river’s length, a total of 858 kilometers from Kaeng
Kut Ku in Loei province – the birthplace of the Ta Jung Kung Dang Da-
eng myth – to the edge of Thailand’s Mekong River boundary in Khong
Chiam district, Ubon Ratchathani province. The artist skirted along the
Mekong’s edge, stopping in various districts along the way, witnessing
the increasingly volatile and unpredictable changes in the river’s water
THE
ONLY
FACTOR
INÛUENCING
THE
HEALTH
OF
THE
-EKONG
WITH

MORE
levels. These changes are conclusive proof that the ecosystems along
DAMS
LOCATED
UPSTREAM
IN
#HINA
WHICH
HAVE
AFFECTED
THE
WATERmS
ÛOW
the Mekong’s edge have been transformed. The artist collected carca-
for the past decade. In July of 2020, we were able to travel to the site
DWELLING
OR-
of the Ta Jung Kung Dang Daeng folktale, to see with our own eyes the
changes that are occurring, looking through Google Earth for our next
destination – from the site of the myth’s origins to what is considered
to be the deepest segment of the Mekong, known locally as ‘Mekong’s
Belly Button’, in Bueng Kan province. Many areas we observed have
become utterly transformed compared to the satellite images, with te-
stimony from the local populace to the changes that are merely begin-
ning, with an endpoint no one can predict. The construction of the dam
is therefore an example of the mass-exploitation of nature that has been
perpetuated by humans as ‘hunters’.
ofhuntersandgatherers.com
324
SESS
OF
DEAD
ORGANISMS
FROM
VARIOUS
SPECIES
OF
ÚSH
LAND
ganisms, shells, to freshwater vegetation that has become all but extinct
from the loss of seasons. These remains are then used to form the base
of the exhibited diorama.
The artist initiated this research by saving digital images of satellite
imagery used to indicate soil levels and topography, before creating a
structural framework for the diorama using pulp paper and covering it
with soil samples collected from the various areas he surveyed. He then
recreated the Mekong River using a special type of blue paint found in
local paintings found in the Esan region, which is mixed with a pow-
der paint extracted from minerals found in China, where the 11 dams
ofhuntersandgatherers.com
325
 The Hunters 6
erected in the river’s headwaters have had profound effects in the areas
downstream. The animal remains used to form the foundation of the
diorama acts as an under-layer meant to represent the rich biodiversity
that is currently being destroyed by human hands, as it is these very
organisms that were responsible for the abundance of life in the area.
In other words, this installation acts as a monument dedicated to the
verdant environments and lifeforms, all of whom have long acted as the
protectors of the Mekong River’s natural balance.
Beside this installation is a glass sculpture ‘17 million years – 57 years’,
which acts as a time capsule that preserves the Cladophora algae, a
symbol of the Mekong River’s dwindling wildlife. Cladophora is a type
The Hunters 7
puter contrasted with images of the very real crisis occurring along the
RIVERmS
SHORES
TODAY
)T
IS
PERHAPS
TOO
SOON
TO
EVEN
DEÚNITIVELY
CALCULATE

THE
OVERALL
DAMAGE
INÛICTED
BY
THE
EXTINCTION
OR
DISAPPEARANCE
OF
NU-
MEROUS
SPECIES
ACROSS
SUCH
A
WIDE
AREA
2UANGSAKmS
ALTERNATE
CHRONICLE

aims to shine a light on the impact of pursuing natural resources by
corporate entities, who have mercilessly exploited this 4000 kilometer
river (eg. construction of hydroelectric power plants).
For Maryanto, he collected fables and ghost stories that were experien-
ced by people along the river under the volcano where the sand miners
continue to operate. These fables and ghost stories embrace the myths of
Mount Merapis’ native animals, often told when people gather around
of fresh-water plant found in the Mekong River and is considered an
indicator of a healthy ecosystem. A rich source of nutrients for the dry
season, it was once a crucial economic crop for locals that made their
homes along the river bank, both in Thailand and Laos. Cladophora can
be naturally found growing on the rocks and beaches of the Mekong,
ÚRE
INSIDE
A
TENT
OR
GENERAL
SOCIAL
INTERACTION
-ARYANTO
THUS
CHOSE
TO

create several ‘tent-like’ interactive installations, the surfaces of these
‘tents’ covered in his ink paintings that, once sitting within, you begin to
hear voices that share the tales of Merapi’s spirit and ghost community.
4HIS
INTERACTIVE
SOUND
INSTALLATION
TITLED
n.EK
7ANI
/JO
7EDI
7EDI

though the formation of a dam on the lower reaches of the river – com-
bined with the impact from 11 other dams constructed upriver in China
– have led to tumultuous water levels in the river since 2019, in turn
stunting the growth of Cladophora, resulting in smaller growth compa-
Nek Wedi Ojo Wani-Wani” (If You Dare, Don’t be Half-Hearted, if You
are Afraid, Don’t Act as if You are Brave) invites the audience to listen to
memories of villagers while sitting inside the tent that depicts the mythi-
cal animals surrounded by sayings written in Javanese alphabet . The
RED
TO
BEFORE
)N
THIS
TIME
CAPSULE
THE
ARTIST
ATTEMPTS
TO
REÛECT
SEVERAL
particular, almost iconic, style of mythical animal painting was taken
methods of how this water system has maintained its natural abundan- FROM
A
*AVANESE
FORTUNE
TELLING
BOOK
KNOWN
AS
l0RIMBONm
ce,that has been cultivated over millions of years (though hugely deci-
MATED
IN
THE
LAST
ÚVE
DECADES
THUS
PRESERVING
A
RAPIDLY
DISAPPEARING

symbol of life in the Mekong.
The other tent-installation titled “Urip Iku soko Sopo?” (Who Gives Life?)
present a low tent structure typical of sand miners’ temporary shelters
for their tools such as hoe, scoop, and the gravel or sand itself. Inside
For the exhibition, the artist has collected samples of Cladophora from THE
TENT
THERE
IS
ANOTHER
SOUND
PIECE
THAT
REÛECTS
-ARYANTOmS
CONCERNS

the Loei Inland Aquaculture Research and Development Center, Loei of the impact of sand mining on the destruction of nature along the ri-
0ROVINCE
MIXED
WITH
WATER
FROM
THE
-EKONG
2IVER
2UANGSAK
CHOSE
ver at the slope of Mount Merapi. Inside the tent is a sound piece, one
to display the sample in a double-layered borat-silicate vial, a highly STORY
WITHIN
SHARES
HOW

TRUCKS
WERE
BURIED
BY
THE
MUDÛOW
SHARED

HEAT
RESISTANT
GLASS
USED
IN
SCIENTIÚC
EXPERIMENTS
!NY
MATERIALS
PLACED
by a local villager (one of the paintings also depicts this moment), this
within the vial will be able to maintain a constant temperature, leading memory sharing how nature often gives warnings of exploitation in the
to increased longevity and permanence. The vial is placed on a carved
wooden sculpture of a Naga, believed by many Southeastern cultures to
be the guardian deity of the aquatic realm responsible for maintaining
the abundance of the Mekong River(this wooden Naga head sculpture
is also commonly used as an ornament for the mandolin, a musical in-
strument local to the Esan region).
In addition, ‘Beyond Blue’ presents video documentation sharing pho-
tographic information from satellites, contrasted with photographs of a
rapidly changing Mekong riverside landscape. The genesis of this pro-
ject came about when the artist noticed photographs of the Mekong
River turning blue, an unprecedented phenomena. Locally referred as
‘hungry water’, this occurs when a body of water lacks the essential mi-
nerals and sediment as a result of constructing dams on the river source,
turning the Mekong’s once mineral-rich brown waters a turquoise blue
FORM
OF
MUDÛOWS
THAT
DROWN
TRUCKS
OR
EVEN
TAKING
THE
LIVES
OF
MINERS
0EOPLE
WHO
BELIEVE
IN
A
FORM
OF
ECOLOGICAL
WISDOM
WOULD
ACKNOWLED-
ge Mount Merapi eruption cycle as a blessing, a cycle for renewal, and
prosperity. After every eruption, the soil will become more fertile than
before, the next crop will be better, and the volcanic material can be
taken in moderation. Smaller scale sand mining industries can be traced
back to the 1980s. Later, the government allowed heavy machinery to
be used on the river to reduce the volume of volcanic material so that
IT
WONmT
SPILL
TO
THE
FARMERmS
ÚELD
OR
CAUSE
MATERIAL
ÛOOD
DOWNSTREAM
IN

the city. If the volcanic material is being taken cautiously, balance can
be restored. But human’s greed knows no limit. Massive mining activiti-
es are thus considered a form of non-compliance with Nature.
The painting titled “Sing Bahurekso Gunung Merapi” (The Sovereign of
that resembles ocean water. In Ruangsak’s diorama, the image of dying
(OMONOIA
RIPARIA
A
TREE
DEPENDED
UPON
BY
THE
MIGRATING
ÚSH
COLONIES

DURING
ÛOODING
SEASON
IS
PROMINENTLY
FEATURED
FOR
IT
HAS
BEEN
DECIMA-
ted from unseasonal movements of water. Ruangsak was also interested
in how satellite images can paint a picture completely at odds with rea-
-OUNT
-ERAPI 
IS
THE
ÚRST
ARTWORK
YOU
ENCOUNTER
UPON
ENTERING
THE
GAL-
lery space, exposing the multi-imaginary of Mount Merapi, depicting an
accumulation of differing eruption images of this volcano, alongside lo-
cal memories. “Ojo Adigang Adigung Adiguna” is a large-scale painting
EVOKING
THE
RIVER
ÛOW
OF
-OUNT
-ERAPImS
VOLCANIC
MATERIAL
AFTER
THE
BIG

LITY
4HIS
VIDEO
WORK
REÛECTS
THE
CONÛICTING
TRUTHS
THE
UNSUSPECTING
PIC- eruption in 2010. The lanes of the roads, engineered by mining trucks,
tures gained through scrolling along the Mekong’s length on the com- have become part of the landscape, a manifestation of the arrogance
of humans who desire to colonize and conquer nature. This man-made

ofhuntersandgatherers.com ofhuntersandgatherers.com

326 327
 The Hunters 8 The Hunters 9

landscape is devoid of humans, however their tools symbolize the do- About ‘Of Hunters and Gatherers’
minance of industrialization over man’s previous respectful relationship
with the inanimate world. Three other paintings further expose illegal /N
THE
DAY
WHEN
OUR
ÚRST
IN
SITU
MEETING
FOR
0OLLINATION

STARTED
THE

sand-mining activity and how this particular trade carves the landscape ÚRST
#OVID

CASE
IN
)NDONESIA
WAS
ANNOUNCED
)N
4HAILAND
IT
WAS
AN-
ALONG
THE
VOLCANIC
RIVER
)N
THESE
IMAGES
THE
DENIAL
OF
THE
HUMAN
ÚGU- nounced a few weeks before. The crisis escalated to a global pandemic
res is violently felt. The spatial feel of the painting gives you a sense of status and a global collective experience, highlighting the performance
being in a strange landscape that is hard to distinguish as man made or of a system and governments’ capability in facing critical moments. At
NATURAL
4HE
PERSPECTIVE
IS
ÛAT
AND
THE
CHARCOAL
IS
BLURRED
GIVING
THE

sense of a folklore scenario that is almost abstract. The street that the
SAND
MINERmS
TRUCK
MADE
LOOKS
INDISTINGUISHABLE
WITH
THE
RIVER
ÛOW
BUT

once you see it in detail, it triggers curiosity: why so many trucks? where
is everybody? what is going on?
the same time, the pandemic cannot be separated from the environ-
mental crisis of the earth. What was once infecting animals7 transmit-
TED
TO
HUMANS
AND
SOON
MUTATED
TO
MANY
SPECIÚC
DIFFERENT
STRAINS
IN

response to human mobility and movement, the virus can be seen as a
form of strike imposed by the earth to push pause for degrowth. As bor-
ders close and lockdowns are imposed, mobility is restricted for a better
)N
THE
CONTEXT
OF
THIS
l0OLLINATIONm
PROJECT
lLOCAL
EMBODIED
KNOWLEDGEm

is particularly explored in relation to ideas of human ecology and its
natural environment. We want to understand how the practice of ‘lo-
cal embodied knowledge’ seeks to balance human desire with aware-
HUMAN
ALIKE
)NSTEAD
OF
ÛYING

ness of repercussion, attempting to present ways in which the impact
of human production can/should be measured sustainably. It is time
to reconsider our life of consumption by reintegrating ourselves with
nature. The question on how to cope with our ecological crisis might
be hard to answer, but we must acknowledge it as a consequence of an
accumulation of our extractive habits, our reliance on industrialized so-
ciety deemed a fundamental element of modern life. How to cope may
be answered by studying the multiplicity of context that we decided to
leave in order to attain the singular concept and knowledge of modern
living, this multiplicity of context, which we refer here as ‘local embo-
died knowledge’, becoming largely marginalized by the imposition of
7ESTERN
SCIENTIÚC
THINKING6.
‘The Hunters’ is an exhibition that strives to understand the relationship
between humans and their natural surroundings, referring to learnings
cause. Instead of widening the geographical scope of our research, we
try to dig deeper and primarily focus on ‘local embodied knowledge’
and how to balance human desire with its object that measures im-
PACT
SUSTAINABLY
TO
BOTH
HUMAN
AND
NON
across the sea and widening the geographical scope of our research, we
follow local trails of rivers and mountains, sinking island and backyard
cemetery, to the home garden and deforestation cases across South East
Asia, and other environmental issues closer to home.
‘Of Hunters and Gatherers’ proposes we intertwine with nature, promp-
ted by the artistic methodologies of Maryanto and Ruangsak Anuwat-
wimon, explored as an exhibition titled The Hunters, at the MAIIAM
Contemporary Art Museum in March – April 2021. Simultaneously, the
idea of local embodied knowledge is being investigated further through
a discursive online symposium, titled The Gathering, co-hosted by
Selasar Sunaryo Art Space and The Factory, which will also launch a de-
dicated project website, titled ‘Of Hunters & Gatherers’, at in May 2021
with contribution from Tita Salina, Sutthirat Supaparinya, Prilla Tania,
The Forest Curriculum, Wut Chalanant (artists); and Elizabeth D. Inan-
GAINED
THROUGH
BODILY
EXPERIENCES
UNDER
SPECIÚC
CIRCUMSTANCES
AS
diak, Adam Bobbette, JJ Rizal, and Napak Serirak (writers, academics);
well as those passed down orally from one generation to another in as well as contribution from the artists Maryanto and Ruangsak Anuwat-
the form of local rituals, ceremonies, and beliefs in the supernatural. wimon and curators Kittima Chareeprasit and LIR (Mira Asriningtyas &
The artists have immersed themselves in these local cultures, learning Dito Yuwono). Edited by Zoe Butt and Lee Weng Choy.
FROM
THEIR
STORIES
REÛECTING
THEM
WITHIN
THEIR
ART
4HIS
EXHIBITION
ALSO

presents the artistic research processes of these two artists through in-
terviews conducted with the locals of the Mekong area, travel footage
from the walks under Mount Merapi, artist sketches, as well as research
documents, curator’s research report, articles, and general comparative
texts. Also on display is a video recording of a conversation between
the two artists, further unpacking their art with regard to this notion of
the ‘hunter’.
While we may commonly refer to our natural surroundings, through
7
musings of ‘remember what this place used to be like?’, we need to https://www.ncbi.nlm.
register such nostalgia with social agency, acknowledging our own role nih.gov/pmc/articles/
PMC7487339/ and
in the destructive transformation of nature. In a way, local embodied https://www.nature.
com/articles/s41467-
6 knowledge is a kind of tool that prompts such awareness, the merging of 020-17687-3 The
This is referring to the
idea of pluriversality
local hunters into mythical creatures a way for us to refer to the majesty COVID

CASE
WAS
ÚRST

suspected to be car-
by Walter D. Mignolo of volcanoes and rivers, with respect. ried and transmitted
in his book “The
from animal to human
Darker Side of Western
although the role of
Modernity” (Duke
animal in this case
University Press:
turns out to be still up
Durham & London,
for debate.
2011)

ofhuntersandgatherers.com ofhuntersandgatherers.com

328 329
 REGISTER OF DEEDS
Patrick Flores

To reflect on art is inevitably to explicate the encounter

between the sensitive body and the animate world. Such an
embodiment and an enworlding prompt the art historian and
the curator to annotate this encounter that may condense
in the fraught category of the “aesthetic experience.” Surely,
to the degree that the latter formulation tends to assume a
transhistorical and cross-cultural1 nature, the “aesthetic”
needs to be unhinged from the “experience,” which in turn
requires a “local moral world” to instill its agency. The
ethnographer and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman regards
“felt experience” as an “intersubjective flow,” a “medium
between and within persons that is the condition, as well as
the achievement of, actions and transactions.”2 The flow and
the medium are situated within “local worlds” that must be
“understood as moral worlds . . . recreating what is most at stake
for us, what we most fear, what we most aspire to, what we are
threatened by . . . or the ultimate meaning, of our living and
dying.”3
This procedure may have informed my efforts from
2004 to 2006 when I decided to put together five small
exhibitions titled Danas at the Small Gallery of the Cultural
Center of the Philippines, specifically to probe what it takes
and what it means to mediate the aesthetic in thinking
through the affective implications of cultural production,
with the word “culture” proposing its own trouble even as its
normative effect is delayed or frustrated via the activity of
“production.”
In revisiting the Tagalog word danas as the working
translation of experience, I was led to the concepts of
experience and experiment from a nineteenth-century
dictionary.4 But in further probing the term, I realized that
danas could be layered with the cognate damdam, or feeling,
which ramifies as sentiment, intuition, sensitivity, sympathy,
as well as malady.5 I am struck by how experience dilates
from an index of the aesthetic to an ethical possibility of
co-passage, or going through a situation together. The co-
implication of the aesthetic and the ethical is a vital step in
overcoming a tenacious binary between feeling and doing.
In this regard, certain Philippine languages offer terms that
enmesh object and condition (butang); likeness and reflexivity
(lic-ha, likha); hearing and sentiment (bati); around-ness and
awareness (kalibutan). The anthropologist Jean Paul Dumont,
working on the island of Siquijor in the central Philippines,
had sought to draw out the “ethnographic traces of an island”
through vignettes. The word vignette is salient, because in
Dumont’s reckoning, ethnography emerges from the nature
of narrative, reminding us of the Spanish word relación which Above: Danas: Sapin, 2004, installation. Courtesy of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Visual Arts
is at once story and relationship, a poetics in the theory and Museum Division. Below: Danas: Sinsin, 2004 (with the work of Rodel Tapaya, MAPagpanggap, 2004,
of Edouard Glissant. According to Dumont: “I propose a installation). Courtesy of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Visual Arts and Museum Division.

Patrick Flores, University of the Philippines

330
© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 331
 plurality of images—vignettes—that superimpose themselves
upon each other to create an out-of-focus ensemble, since
cultural contours are never sharp and stories never straight.”6
The use of vignettes is interesting, because the word denotes
architecture and image: “an ornament of leaves and tendrils”
in buildings and a “portrait showing only head and shoulders
with background gradually shaded off; character sketch.”7 I
am drawn to this elaboration of form as well as its sheerness,
or mereness. To this rumination, he tosses over the Visayan
word hulagway, which is generally a picture (description,
imagination). It is composed from hulad, which means to
depict and to translate; and dagway, which pertains to face and
appearance as well as to subjunctive moments as signaled by
the adverbs perhaps or probably.8
In 2011, I curated Bisa: Potent Presences at the
Metropolitan Museum of Manila. It was a response to Self and
Other: Portraits from Asia and Europe (2008), an initiative by
the Asia-Europe Museums Network, helmed by encyclopedic
museums in London (British Museum) and Osaka (National
Museum of Ethnology), that intuited personhood and
otherness in human figuration, or the figuring of the human.
It dwelled on portraiture and through it, the question of
being human and of being different. Brian Durrans of the
British Museum in the catalogue points to the perpetuation of
prejudice in representation but also to the acknowledgement
of otherness, asserting that “none of us is suddenly among
strangers.”9 I conceive of the self as a disposition, always a
stance toward something besides it, put in place by a habit that
it betrays, “errant in form but firmly rooted in its essence”10
in the poignant words of the Cuban baroque philosopher
José Lezama Lima. The word bisa, which roughly translates
as efficacy or charisma, is the spirit that animates the world
in which the self gains presence in light of others, without
whom the self becomes singular and never really selfless. This
investigation on the spirited making of reality’s many vital
signs demands yet another act: to sense the world and its
limits and to struggle for its potential/potency. In sensing the
world, I implicate time as part of the environment in which
the self leaves traces in others; lives among others; transforms
through others; and longs for others: Ibayo/Afterlife; Ganap/
Here and Now; Tuwina/Time and Again; Dayo/Far and Away.
Reviewing time within the COVID-19 contagion makes us
think about the unnerving term emergency within a day-to-day
uncertainty. Ben Anderson sustains such a notion when he
says that “what is produced by the government of emergencies
are ‘everyday emergencies’ in three ways: emergencies happen
to and within the everyday, future emergencies exist as
possibilities within the everyday, and attempts are made to
drain emergencies of their eventual qualities.”11
Above and below: Bisa: Potent Presences, installation, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, 2011. Photos: MM Yu If time fleshed out the tropes in Bisa, it was facture or
making that inflected the program of Danas. The exhibitions
were meant to converse across conventionally marked

332 333
museological spaces and para-sites within the hallowed ground
of a cultural center of the nation-state, cast by the First Lady
Imelda Marcos as the Parthenon rising from reclaimed land in
1969. They were advanced provisionally as part of the project
of gleaning insight in the predicament and anxiety of post-
colonial embodiment: sinsin (intricacy), sapin (layer), diskarte
(strategy), ginhawa (well-being), and palabas (performativity).
This was, however, not to be a formalist operation; it
was a figurative one and, therefore, decidedly tropic. In
furthering to craft the form of experience, I take the cue from
anthropologist Tim Ingold who discerns facture, echoing
Kleinman, in terms of “fields of force and flow of material”
and chooses weaving as the modality “in which practitioners
bind their own pathways or lines of becoming into the texture
of material flows comprising the lifeworld . . . in an ongoing
generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory,
and rhythmic.”12
The fascination with language inheres in the
conceptualization of bisa. In the work of Philippine scholar
Prospero Covar on Melencio T. Sabino’s book Karunungan ng
Dios (Wisdom of God, 1955), the energy infusing the amulet,
for instance, comes from the conscientious utterance of
esoteric words. Covar claims that “life is word”13 and that
nothing happens without it, as it is in the Bible, which is one
of the sources of Sabino’s ideas. Furthermore, he teases out
potensiya as a salient rubric, perhaps a translation of potency.
For him, potensiya can only be achieved and replenished
through a pure heart, inner self, and spirit; and the faithful
performance of rituals. It is best understood in animist terms
in which nature is lively and is sustained by taking care of it
and subjecting it to tests.
In this revisit to two exhibitions, I reconsider their
propositions. At that time, I was interested in the relationship
as well as the gap between language and discourse, on the
one hand, and expression and affect, on the other. I might
have been pressured then by the need to articulate a distinct
Philippine sensing and to delineate this distinction in a
particular idiom or lexicon. I understand this interest to
stem from the post-colonial burden and the fretfulness over
identity and representation, alongside the desire to critically
complicate aesthetics as a purportedly universalizing
discipline that governs the senses and ultimately the history of
art of an archipelago colonized successively from 1521 to 1945.
As an art historian, I continue to be drawn to these tricky
questions that never fail to tempt locality and translation,
the modernity of self-consciousness and the elusive condition
of materialization to constantly emerge, at times in a double
bind, and at others in an irresistible welter. together during the lockdown in the Philippines at the onset
In curating the said exhibitions and in ruminating on
these exhibitions through documentation, I proceeded from
the view that curatorial work looks after materials, and as
such takes on an ethical nature that begins with attentiveness
334
to the liveliness of these materials and moves toward the
rightfulness of their presence in the world. When these
materials speak to conceptions of sensing and subjectivity,
the ethical and the aesthetic tend to touch a delicate point
of contact in the materialization of what is right and what
is good, or what is done well for the common good. I would
like to protract the effect of this contact and perhaps delay
its assimilation into the typifying discourse of culture, or
an ideological ideal, or the importunings of populism and
realism. Through curatorial work, the art historical obsession
to name and explain is foiled by the inclination to let things
play out and take in atmospheres of relations, in an ecology
that releases these so-called beautiful things from their
supposed nature.
But what happens when the motivation to document
intervenes through the accumulative character of the archive?
To resist the tendency to amass in the name of assembly,
or to keep as a mode of kinship, inspired me to reach out to
equivalent gestures of sensing, to comparable urges to mark,
remember, and historicize nimble materials of permeable
origins in pandemic time. Such a moment in which the local-
moral-worldly and the affective mingle with the expressive
becomes more palpable in the context of a global health
crisis in which affections and urgencies are exceptionally
rendered more difficult and in a way more critically present.
Thus, instead of the archive constricting into a device of
extraction and sedimentation, it is made to turn into a more
fluid situation for reciprocity. It is in this spirit of convergence
that a documentation of my curatorial efforts on local affect
(danas) and potency (bisa) open up to the lockdown endeavors
of Rocky Cajigan, Jason Dy, and Mark Salvatus to convene
the project Register of Deeds: An Archive of Instincts. The
officialese “register of deeds” is a bureaucratic commonplace:
a repository of land titles and the history of their circulations.
It is an inventory of property and a dossier of accumulation
and wealth. Refunctioned from its status as inventory and
designed by Mica Cabildo, the “archive of instincts” is less
authoritative. It is meant for digital dissemination, easily
accessible, and prone to amendments and addenda, as well
as possible interaction, a testimony to the time in which its
everyday/emergency was vivified.
Paramount in the Danas and Bisa exhibitions was the
mixture of materialities and technologies and therefore of
values assigned to the creative form, whether customary or
contemporary, mass-mediated image or academic document,
item from memorabilia or colonial painting, among others.
Such a variegation would dialogue with forms cobbled
of the COVID-19 panic in March 2020. The contact zone
was either the living and work space, on the one hand, or
the digital sphere, on the other. These sites involved stimuli
and potencies, too, forces that burrowed deep into the
335
336 Rocky Cajigan, Ration Series, 2020, digital images 337
338 Jason Dy, Arrange / Enliven Documents, 2020 and ongoing 339
340 Mark Salvatus, Home Exhibition for Yoji (project), 2020, digital images 341
personal and also elaborating beyond it, locked down and
yet permeating. The pandemic, therefore, would attune the
archive, through the immediate and dispersive dynamic of the
intimate and the digital, which is reiterated by reading and
research via art history and curatorial work.
In the process of archiving the Danas and Bisa and
the projects of Cajigan, Dy, and Salvatus, the effort reverts
to experience, which summons commiseration with
illness within a local moral world. Kleinman’s image of
“interpersonal reticulums”14 extends to the ethnography
of illness, specifically in the “microcontext of experience”15
of “contingent misfortune or routinized misery to which
we give the perennially resonant name ‘suffering.’”16 I
prefer the term “sufferance,”17 an interlocution of Gerald
Vizenor’s “survivance.”18 In my collaboration with the artists,
the density of their quotidian experiments enlivens the
“collective,” which is intuitively ethnographic, inherently
archival, and generatively anecdotal and annotative within
the local moral world of illness and suffering, of persistent
sensing, and sufferance/survivance.
Salvatus’s Home Exhibition for Yoji was a plot hatched in
the constraints of the pandemic. His son Yoji’s physical classes
were suspended so he was confined to the house, interacting
with his parents, his toys, his phone, playing games. In May
2020, Salvatus started to present everyday objects to Yoji in
the form of “temporary constructed objects as sculptures and
installations in different parts of the house.” He would then
let him decide if the contrivance was good or bad via a thumbs
up or thumbs down sign. “It’s an act of play,” according
to Salvatus, who confides that in this scenario, “the home
becomes the micro-ecology. It’s the psychological, spatial, and
material we share . . . The objects were made only for a day, by
attaching and installing temporarily, unsecure and precarious
. . . A life that we continuously fix and shift to be able to
survive.”19
For his part, Jason Dy, a Catholic Jesuit priest,
conjured his own micro-ecology in his work place: “When
Radyo Katipunan, a campus radio of Ateneo de Manila
University, needed assistance for the daily online masses
last March 2020, I volunteered. I helped out in setting up
the studio as an alternative set-up for the liturgical space
when the university church and chapels were closed to the
general public. To show solidarity with the people during the
lockdown, we posted prayer intentions on the studio wall with
a short prayer—‘Heal Us, Lord.’ Part of this liturgical set-up
was flowers. This is the impetus of the floral arrangement
that became an art project entitled Arrange/Enliven.” Dy, as
an artist and a priest, was concerned with “the pastoral and
spiritual dimensions of the ritual,” on the one hand, and “the
design, set-up, and lighting as well as how to enliven the online
liturgical celebrations each day,” on the other. He further
recounts: “Slowly within the octave of the Easter celebration,
342
the floral arrangements were slowly appreciated by the online
parishioners and the daily postings on social media gained
some followers. These responses encouraged me to turn this
act of decorating into an art project that is fundamentally
about floral arrangements to enliven the daily online rituals
and prayers of the Catholic Christians. In a sense, this art
project without foregrounding itself as art became part of my
ongoing art interest in responding to the changing religious
and cultural situations.” Appropriating the visual languages
of Dutch painting, Ikebana, van Gogh, and contemporary
artists like Andy Goldsworthy and Anya Gallacio, he was
able to create “three hundred and sixty-one posts of floral
arrangements. It has been a practice of beholding the
beauty of plants and flowers, harnessing this beauty into
some arrangements to enliven the daily online prayer and
communal ritual, contemplating on the fruitfulness and
fragility of life, and nurturing one’s creativity in order to
thrive in this new order/disorder.”20
Finally, in Rocky Cajigan’s Ration Series, “the
images are paintings of food bought from the market while
in lockdown in San Juan, La Union.” Alongside them are
“annotations, written as links to news articles and journal
entries . . . made months after in an attempt to process the
‘shared conditions of struggle,’ as in the precariousness of non-
mobility and being away from ‘home,’ and the roles that small
communities contribute in large-scale crises.” Of interest is
how painting, journalism, and diaries configure a sequestered
neighborhood or quarter during the pandemic. That it
involves the basic necessity of food in a convivial place like the
market makes it acutely poignant.
In bringing together Danas, Bisa, and the projects
of Cajigan, Dy, and Salvatus within the context of a
mutating archive, the work of Matthew Rampley on the
wonderfully elliptical Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin
and Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby Warburg proves instructive.
The argument around the modality of gathering is central
in figuring out how art historical and pandemic time
coordinates materialities that are also localities; or how
the latter limn the time of art history and the pandemic in
terms of the dialectical image (Benjamin), cultural space
(Warburg), and if I may add, the memory of place (Pierre
Nora) and the concept of kalibutan (cosmos and cognition)
from the islands of the Visayas in the Philippines. The word
kalibutan derives from the circle at the same time that it
may mean consciousness and the unknowing. It is, therefore,
aroundness and awareness, as well as incognizance. To the
question of how elements of an archive accrete and invoke
the sensible, Rampley states that Benjamin and Warburg
were uneasy about how modernity had radically oriented the
“representation and experience of space and time, in which
both material and conceptual shifts had brought about a
collapsing of space (and time) into a visual simultaneity.”21
343
This coincidence was for Benjamin the “wide range of NOTES
literary sources . . . quotations from contemporary critical
literature and also personal correspondence.” This “literary 1 10 19
montage,” in the words of Benjamin, had “nothing to Tom Ingold, ed. Key Debates in José Lezama Lima, “Baroque Mark Salvatus, unpublished notes.
tell. Only to show.”22 For Warburg, the concurrence was Anthropology (London: Routledge, Curiosity,” in Baroque New Worlds:
verisimilarly a montage of “images of classical motifs and 1996). Representation, Transculturation, 20
their reappearance and transformation in the Renaissance and Counterconquest, ed. Lois Parkinson Jason Dy, SJ, unpublished notes.
also during Warburg’s lifetime. They included cosmological 2 Zamora and Monika Kaup
maps, classical myths such as the legends of Heracles or Arthur Kleinman, “Local Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 21
the Judgement of Paris, and the integration of classical of Suffering: An Interpersonal 2010), 213. Matthew Rampley, “Archives
forms into Christian narratives.”23 Their archives thus were Focus for Ethnographies of Illness of Memory: Walter Benjamin’s
supplements to the sense of loss of reflexive distance and the Experience,” Qualitative Health 11 Arcades Project and Aby Warburg’s
refutation of coherent linear temporality. In this illuminating Research 2 (1996): 128. Ben Anderson, “Emergency Futures: Mnemosyne Atlas,” ed. Alex Coles,
confusion, according to Rampley, Warburg insinuated the Exception, Urgency, Interval, in De-, Dis-, Ex Volume 3 The Optic of
“iconography of the interval” in which “iconography was 3 Hope,” in Sociological Review 65, no. 3 Walter Benjamin (2011): 96.
less a process of identifying visual texts than of mapping out Kleinman, “Local Worlds of (Feb 2017): 463–477.
their transformation and sublimation—from primitive mythic Suffering,” 129. 22
symbols to abstract allegories.”24 I have remarked on this 12 Rampley. “Archives of Memory,” 100.
prospect of the interval through the Indic Philippine word 4 Tim Ingold, “The Textility of
antala, which is a delay and at the same time an opportunity.25 P. Juan de Noceda and P. Pedro Making,” in Cambridge Journal of 23
Rampley’s analysis is germane in grasping the “material de Sanlucar, Vocabulario de la Economics 34 (New York: Oxford Ibid, 99.
change in the experience of time and space, and an epistemic Lengua Tagala (Manila: Imprenta de University Press, 2010): 91.
shift in historiographic method.”26 Ramirez y Giraudier, 1860), 380. 24
In Warburg’s schema, the “pictorial montage reflects 13 Ibid, 99–100.
his understanding of culture as a memorial space, in which 5 Prospero Covar, “Potensiya, Bisa,
visual and other symbols function as an archive of juxtaposed Pedro Serrano Laktaw, Diccionario at Anting-Anting (Decoding Belief 25
memories.”27 As opposed to Benjamin’s figural articulation, Tagálog-Hispano, Segunda Parte Systems Encoded in Folklore),” Patrick Flores, “Revisiting the
Warburg literally puts images in proximity or adjacency to (Manila: De Santos y Bernal, 1914), in Asian Studies 18 (Quezon City: ‘developmental’ and reconsidering
perhaps yield what Foucault regards as the “sudden vicinity 204–205. University of the Philippines- the ‘alternating,’” in How Institutions
of things.”28 In Salvatus’s scenario, disparate domestic things Diliman Asian Center, 1980): 71. Think: Between Contemporary Art and
are pieced together, improvised as it were, to form something 6 Curatorial Discourse (Switzerland:
else, and then are disassembled after the judgment of a child Jean-Paul Dumont, Visayan Vignettes: 14 LUMA Foundation, 2017).
to repair to their ordinariness. It is tempting to consider it a Ethnographic Traces of an Island Kleinman, “Local Worlds of
kind of Levi-Straussian bricolage or a Brechtian refunctioning, (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Suffering,” 129. 26
which it is at certain levels. But it may well be a kind of University Press, 1992), 1. Rampley, “Archives of Memory,” 113.
Pahiyas, too, a tradition in Salvatus’s hometown of Lucban in 15
which during May, households profusely festoon the facades 7 Ibid, 131. 27
of their residences largely with agricultural produce and Dumont, Visayan Vignettes, 1. Ibid, 112.
multi-colored rice wafers shaped into leaves and chandeliers. 16
At the end of the festivities, the “installation” is taken down, 8 Ibid, 129. 28
its harvest given away, and the wafers fried and eaten. It is in Ibid, 2. Michel Foucault, Preface, in The
this conversation around regeneration that Register of Deeds: An 17 Order of Things (Paris: Editions
Archive of Instincts seeks to take part, offering the vernacular 9 Patrick Flores, “Postcolonial Gallimard, 1966).
cosmologies of danas and bisa, which have become attractive Brian Durrans, Preface, in Self and Sufferance,” in Filozofski vestnik 23
sympathies, as well as the subtle sensibilities toward scarcity in Other: Portraits from Asia and Europe (2016): 93–109.
the everyday/emergent kalibutan that suffuses the hopefully (Osaka: The Asahi Shimbum, 2008),
viral archive. 11. 18
Gerald Vizenor, Survivance:
Narratives of Native Presence
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2008).

344 345
 bsm — We experiment with the camera to
get another sense, another sense of seeing the
world. I’m still stuck on the many different
human ways of seeing the world, I feel like we
haven’t even explored those thoroughly . . . .
In your work, Sid, you use the camera a lot,
but what the camera is capturing is not what
you expect. There’s a lot of new experience
and information that you’re getting from the
image itself.
sn — We want to use the camera in order
to bring out aspects to which our eyes are
insensitive. There are obvious ones: some
objects can be too small for us to see, so
you can use a macro-lens, or something is
happening too rapidly for the eye to see so you
CAMERA SENSE can use a high-speed camera, or something
can even be too slow for us to see, and for that,
A Conversation with filmmaker Beatriz we can use time-lapse photography. So these
are very different viewpoints that I wouldn’t
Santiago Muñoz, physicist Sidney R. Nagel, have captured just by looking. The optics of
the camera allows us to see, especially in the
and neurobiologist Jennifer Ding scientific image, what is insensible.
bsm — Maybe the question for me is about the
thing that can’t be seen: subjectivity.
Back in February 2021, on an evening during some of the darkest days of the pandemic, we brought sn — I am not trying to be subjective. I want
together over Zoom two scientists and a filmmaker to talk about optics—seeing what cannot be to capture the reality of the situation, that is
seen with the naked eye, seeing from the perspective of, say, a mouse or a cow—and to wonder my job as a scientist.
about whether it is ever possible to assume the perspective of another living being and experience a
different way of sensing the world around us. They came to very few conclusions but nevertheless jd — In order to make effective images, they
raised thought-provoking questions. The following is an excerpt from their conversation. need to show something we care about . .
Each has also contributed some of their own images and thoughts on the topic of vision. . . I think that relates to perception more
than objectivity. For example, our eyes are
more in tune with edges. We think they are
important. Maybe the way to gauge whether
a scientific image is useful is if it conveys
needed information. Aesthetically, I think
anything can be beautiful. But to have
scientific utility, I think we need to take away
something from the image to contribute to
our understanding.
besides simply transmitting information. I
don’t have an answer. I’m just thinking about
all of this other stuff happening in the image
that does not have to do with science or
objectivity.
jd — Vision, itself, is not an objective practice.
It is shaped by evolutionary factors and
cultural factors as well. There are lots of
ways that it is shaped by experience and by
intrinsic biology.
For example, different cultures have
different words for different colors, so this
affects the ways in which we see color. Some
societies may have one specific word for
blue and one word for dark blue and those
are two separate categories. Depending on
where you were raised, you will see things
differently and you will mentally categorize
things differently, too. . . . People don’t have
the same visual experiences. Vision can’t be
objective. It’s always subjective because it’s a
construction of what you believe reality to
be. And because it’s a construction, it can be
affected by your thoughts and experiences.
Seeing is not a passive process.
sn — The ability to see is a practice. It doesn’t
just come naturally. It takes practice to
enhance that ability.

bsm — Beyond the information it contains

or transmits, there are choices made, formal
decisions about the materiality of the image,
for example with the COVID-19 image [the
iconic spiky, red ball]. It is meant to have
an effect. We visualize the virus in a really
concrete way. It is meant to do something

Jennifer Ding, University of Chicago, USA; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Sidney R. Nagel, University of Chicago, USA
346
© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 347
 BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOZ

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, That which identifies them, like the eye of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Oneiromancer, 2017.
348 the cyclops, 2016. 3-channel HD video, sound. Duration 8:00 HD video, color, sound. Duration: 26:00 349
 Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gosila, 2018. 16mm transferred
350
350 to digital, HD video, color, sound. Duration: 10:00 351
351
 Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Binaural, 2019. 6-channel, 16 mm Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Laurel Sabino y Jaguilla, 2019,
352
352 film installation, color and black and white, silent. Loop HD video, color, sound. Duration: 11:00 353
353
I just returned from two weeks in the Pacific. I am in the
airport. I have been traveling back home from Honiara airport
to San Juan. Tropic to Tropic. I was in the Solomon Islands,
to be precise, though that is not precise at all as it names a
huge land area of about 30,000 square km that comprises also
many atolls as well as the ocean between and around. Of all
the places I have ever been or seen, it is the most liquid. The
sea is the playground, freeway, main food source, mythical and
spiritual ground (though this might seem contradictory).
I had to constantly remind myself that I was very far
away from home, as far away as could be. How uncanny that
in the Pacific tropics and in the Caribbean we move with the
same rhythm, that logically the houses take the same shapes,
raised from the ground, of course, to be away from all sorts
of critters, to be cool, and to create another outdoor shaded
space, among other reasons. That the palm-frond roofs are
weaved in the same way, that we have the same histories of
colonialism, the same American military trash in the waters.
In Honiara, the biggest town we went through, and only for
a few hours, students in their uniforms walk slowly and avoid
the early afternoon sun. I felt at home. Same sweat, same road.
We were in areas remote to us but not to themselves.
There are some remarkable differences, though, with
what I know:
Children of all ages and gender manage their dugout
canoes through distances that would be frightening to most
adults. I was most impressed by two seven-year-old girls
crossing island to island on a tiny canoe. I could have lifted
each one with one hand, their bodies were perfectly balanced,
only one of them rowing. People get on canoes as they would
a bike, fully dressed, and they arrive everywhere completely
dry. Rowing from place to place does not mean that you will
get wet.
I asked a few basic questions of a canoe maker: Everyone
knows how to make a canoe—father, uncle, mother—each
family member must know how. The fruit of the tree Atuna
racemosa is used for caulking, the seed is made into a paste.
The tree that is used to make the canoe is called tau tau on
one island but something else on another island. On the last
night I was there, I learned from another rower with a bright
blue patch of caulking on his canoe that melted Crayola
crayons will also work in a pinch.
If you have the time to go all the way to the Solomons,
you’d better bring some goods and not just money. Money
is an almost useless placeholder. People would much rather
trade a carving for a wetsuit or a good knife. Money is maybe
just another long trip to town to buy what is needed, probably
batteries or a dress. One man looked up to D on our boat
and, with one hand on the paddle the other on the USB stick,
said to her, “More music please” and then, “You have African
gospel?” Yes, D had some African Gospel.
And the sky! One moonless night we spent in a very
354
dark ocean night, was so gloriously filled with stars that I
finally was able to make some sense of the myth from my side
of the world. The stars were brightly reflected in the water,
creating a disorienting double landscape. You really could
confuse the stars with something lurking brightly below
a canoe. In Caribbean mythology, Anacacuya, in a canoe,
mistakes a starry reflection for a large beautiful shell in the
water and dives in for it. He drowns. I had never understood
the confusion of star for shell, until now. I was completely
unfamiliar with the atoll geology, but every time we visited
a small island that had already been through devastating
logging fifteen perhaps or even twenty years ago—there and
only there—I could recognize the tree species. What the place
looks after it has been wiped out . . . that is something that
I recognize. I see maga, maría, mangle rojo, a jackfruit or
two, coconut palm of course, and almendros, lots and lots of
almendros.
Next time I will bring a hammock to trade.
***
Stills from Otros Usos, shot from the old fuel dock on
the Roosevelt Roads US Navy Base in Ceiba, Puerto Rico.
The dock is a mile-and-a-half-long structure once used to
service battleships and now used by fishermen as a new shore.
The view from the dock is Vieques Sound and the island of
Vieques. If the 50mm lens attached to my camera produces an
image that seems to reproduce the military footprint, perhaps
the same view reflected as different planes in a mirror may
hold a different shape, one that folds, that breaks and possibly
begins to transform our associations with this landscape, so
overwhelmed by aerial images and the visual repetition of
domination.
—beatriz santiago muñoz
355
 SIDNEY R. NAGEL

h(z,t) = f(t) H[(z-z)/f(t)ß] Sentience and science

I have grappled with equations to get them right
And wrestled with data on a restive night.
I have struggled to do an experiment
That yields up nature’s full intent.
Three drops in the process of breaking apart By such a fight,
truth emerges into light.

These efforts propelled me on a quest

To where facts and theory coalesced.
They reveal a unity of the experience at hand
That leads to where I understand
What I, at best,
before had only guessed.

Yet another wonder is in store

Sidney R. Nagel with Itai Cohen
Taken from: I. Cohen, S. R. Nagel,
Phys. of Fluids 13, 3533 (2001).
Sidney R. Nagel with Xiangdong Shi
Sidney R. Nagel with Itai Cohen
Emerging from that selfsame core.
Incomplete, I gaze at shape and image
To find a clear but different message:
There’s something more,
a sense of splendor to explore.
That awareness has for me a visceral appeal –
This blend for which I’ve hungered captures an ideal.
The image reaches something true: distinct
From what science tells – yet is clearly linked.
Both are real,
and together reflect better what I feel.

—sidney r. nagel

356 357
 JENNIFER DING

Dissection of a mouse eye under the microscope. The clear sphere

Act of dissection including dissection tools. Dissections of in the middle is the lens, and the spherical cup on the left is the
358 eyes have to occur in the dark. Photo: Anton Auth rest of the eye, including the retina. Photo: Anton Auth 359
One can find many parallels between the biological structures
of our eyes and the machinery of cameras. The hole of the
pupil is analogous to a camera’s aperture, controlling the
amount of light that enters the eye. Lenses in both the eye and
the camera serve to focus the image into sharp relief. Neither
the eye nor the camera is a perfectly impartial reporter of
reality, however. Rather, their construction has evolved to suit
the individual needs of the observer.

In nature, the structure of the eye across different animals

varies based on each animal’s ecological lifestyle. Predators,
including humans, owls, and wolves, have front-facing
eyes, which allow them to evaluate the depth of their prey.
Alternatively, prey animals have eyes on the sides of their
head, which vastly increases the size of the visual field to
help them detect predators. The shape of the pupil also
yields information about the behaviors of the animal; round
pupils are common in predators that chase down their prey,
while ambush predators like cats or snakes, which lie in
wait until pouncing on their prey, have vertical slit pupils.
Grazing animals such as sheep use horizontal pupils to scan
the horizon for danger. The specialized structures of the eye
optimize the visual features each animal needs for survival,
leading to a different experience of reality for each species.
Likewise, cameras have been modified by artists and laypeople
alike to amplify features of interest to the photo-taker. Our
interpretation of the world is heavily influenced by the
physical tools of seeing, and altering these tools can help us
glimpse other worlds adjacent to our own.

—jennifer ding

360
 NEOLOGICON:
A COSMIC CODEX FOR
ANTHROPOCENIC ALTERATIONS
Time Extraction Unit (TEU)

A close encounter of the 1st kind is the sighting of anomalous aerial

phenomena, like catching a glimpse of aurora borealis in the tropics.

001. When it comes to resource acquisition, the Old is

nomadic, hunting and gathering across geographies and
regenerating with resources extracted from the nonhuman
world. The Modern is colonial, subsuming the earth yet
remaining at its point of departure, transferring resources
from the periphery to its center and from the liquid depths to
the scorched surface. The Contemporary moves across time
rather than space, cross-contaminating the future with the
past. Organisms holding solar energy condensed since time
immemorial are suffocated out of place, forced through layers
of time, to exit onto the future’s epidermis. Extracting the past
deprives the future, as this violent encounter, in turn, eats
away at human and more than human times.

A close encounter of the 2nd kind is an event in which a physical effect

is alleged, like the eruption of snow crystals in mid-summer.

002. The future collapses into the present and

encounters a bulk of information containing a plethora of
neologisms, descriptions, sketches, diagrams, and visions
of microorganisms, climate phenomena, and forms of
ecological collapse currently untraceable to any past or
present occurrences or archives. Thus, we have baptized our
encounter with the future, Neologicon. By deciphering the
scrambled bits of data, it became evident that this manuscript
speaks of species-level historical shifts. Linguistics enables us
to navigate the cross-species erosion through time and space.
Following cues provided by language, we dissect the words
down to their roots to trace their possible evolution, use, and
semantics and visually interpret a fraction of the infinite
futures, wherein these words were possibly first conceived to
speak of yet unknown entities and spaces.

A close encounter of the 3rd kind is contact with an entity that is

summoned due to the impact of human activity on the planet.

003. Although still impossible to date the manuscript, we

concluded that the texts could have only been written in
Beirut, the ancient city of the future, and a radically enclosed
space where nothing enters or leaves but rather erupts into
existence and vanishes. The inconclusive outcome of Lebanon’s
protracted meltdown has surfaced (im)material ruins that
are slowly being eroded by the unholy state-market alliance.
As this unwanted past dissipates, the city transforms into a

Time Extraction Unit, Beirut, Lebanon

© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 363
heterotopia, envisioned as a pure commodity. While the city’s
outskirts become toxic wastelands, implanted memory and
ethnographic fictions embed themselves within Beirut’s urban
fabric and biotope. Neologicon internalizes and shifts through
these (im)material ruins and proposes speculative mappings of
the city at the accumulative and the ecological interstice.
A close encounter of the 4th kind is when witnesses of freak weather
patterns experience a transformation of their sense of reality.
004. The intrinsically linked histories of Beirut’s human
and nonhuman inhabitants, of its peripheries, of the Middle
East and its phantom limbs, reveal themselves as sacrificial
landscapes. These ravaged landscapes die so other places can
live, topologies, where time is weaponized against the many,
364
and structures-becoming-artifacts, are beacons of unrealized
excess of a bygone era. While expendable hands are not only
leftovers from our tactile past, they are memories of a future,
of what is left behind when the planet violently finalizes its
migration from the biosphere to the technosphere.
A close encounter of the 5th kind is observing the species-level
extinction of entities in real-time.
005. The retrofitting processes of abandoned cities, downtown
Beirut for example, is a rupture in time. Consequently, a
violation of the urban landscape’s intended function morphs
it into an unfamiliar (non)space. The city has a familiar
circulation sequence and dictates behavior. Once that
function is stripped, the outcome is haphazardous motion.
365
A wayfinding strategy is a cosmogram that weaves the new
behavior of the current function to the old infrastructure. The
former still controls navigation employing signage and visual
cues; the latter defies it and adapts to unprecedented behaviors
transforming the space from a regulated one to a dynamic one.
A close encounter of the 6th kind is when the distinction between
human and nonhuman collapses into a machinic multiplicity.
006. Given the tragic explosion that destroyed the Beirut
port and raised half of the city, TEU’s interest in exploring
temporal disjunctions and investigating spaces characterized
by conflict and collapse only intensified our motivation and
strengthened our will. Despite the temporary pessimistic
overtones that plague our collective intellects, now more than
ever, we believe in this task that was bestowed upon us by an
entity yet to arrive. Neologicon undermines the linear notion
of time, the stability of ideas, and seeks to queer taxonomies
and blur the boundary between concept and metaphor.
TEU considers Neologicon a machine, and when it comes to
machines one wants to know what it does rather than what
it means and what we believe it does, is to retroactively (re)
engineer itself into existence.
as a primitive form of artificial intelligence, sidelining the
Earth’s inherent geo-sentience that is an amalgamation of
thermodynamic, hydroponic, photosynthetic, and fungal
circuitries. A new machinic hivemind emerges, holistic
and Hydra-like, enmeshed within and around the globe via
satellites and shipping routes, submarine communication
cables and oil pipelines, autonomous and inorganic,
completely assembling itself from the planet’s resources.
This traumatic migration from the biosphere to the
technosphere doesn’t necessarily have to destroy the former
to bring about the latter. TEU is interested in (terra-)forming
a synthesized sphere where a machinic nature and organic
machines coexist, communicate, and cooperate. Neologicon
is a cosmogram erupting in our present as a blueprint for
this future hybrid entity retroactively engineering itself into
existence using our practice as a medium to self-actualize as
time spirals forward.

A close encounter of the 7th kind is finally making contact only

to realize that the aliens at the other end of the transceivers are
nonhuman Terrans.

007. A future reality is projected unto the past piece-by-

piece, hyperstitionally emerging within our present as a
machine to excavate the future history of the world’s quasi-
final migration from the biosphere to the technosphere. This
traumatic process is met with resistance by an insurectory
culture attempting to synthesize the two rather than destroy
the former to bring about the latter. Solarpunk shines and
multiplies through the cracks of cyberspace. Neologicon
challenges canonical demarcations of linear time operating
within temporal paradoxes where places and spaces are
malleable, layered, and sentient.

A close encounter of the 9th kind is when the whispers of the trees
become intelligible to all.

008. As the technosphere envelopes the Earth, the planet

begins to gain machinic sentience through a global network
of sensors, stacks, surveillance technology, and the spread
of information. This process occurs at the expense of the
ecosphere as the organic collapses in the face of the machinic,
and the planet goes into emergency mode, accelerating freak
weather patterns and environmental collapse. As this new
planetary hivemind emerges, the planet gains techno-sentience

366 367
 SKATEBOARDING
The following pages deliver three separate pieces taking
on various subjects related to the culture, activity, and
understanding of skateboarding. The Gray Center has been
building connections with folks in skateboarding for the past
few years, which led to a skate-focused FarBar event in June
of 2021 and this special section of Portable Gray, featuring
contributions from Alexis Sablone, Aram Sabbah, Kyle
Beachy, Mark Gonzales, Nick Sharratt, and Ryan Lay.

A note to the reader:

The language of skateboarding reflects the creative and
transgressive attitudes that inform so much of the activity
itself. The things skaters say when discussing tricks might
sound like complete nonsense to the uninitiated. If you find
yourself thinking “that’s a typo” or “what is this person talking
about?” while reading the next few pieces, please refer to the
handy glossary of skate terms prepared for us by Kyle Beachy.

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 IT’S THE HARD FLIP
Alexis Sablone and Mark Gonzales
with Kyle Beachy

In the 60-some years since its emergence as a post-war American plaything, skateboarding
has found its way into every facet of American, and eventually international, culture.
With Mark Gonzales, it was ushered into gallery and museum exhibitions. With Alexis Sablone,
skateboarding entered the discourse of design and built architectural environments. In Kyle Beachy’s
work, it becomes a facet of literary theory, memoir, and identity. On the cusp of skateboarding’s
debut as an Olympic sport, the three discussed how their creative and embodied practices have
been informed by skateboarding, and consider its nuanced ecosystem of competition, community,
and individual expression. Is anything lost when skateboarding joins the Olympics? Can a
commodified and centralized subculture remain an outlet for the weird and uncanny?

The following exchange was edited by Beachy from

the transcript of the June 24, 2021, public conversation.

Kyle Beachy, Roosevelt University, USA; Mark Gonzales, New York, New York, USA; Alexis Sablone, New York, New York, USA
© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
371
Alexis Sablone, Photo: Courtesy of Converse
kb — I would like to get at some of the
different ways that we relate to our skateboard
over the course of a life. How much are you
skating these days? And what is it like when
you go out skating? What is skateboarding for
you right now?
as — I’m skating, I don’t know, five days a
week, it depends on the week, and it is strange
right now. It’s definitely the closest I’ve ever
been to thinking of skateboarding as training.
I’m going to Tokyo in a couple of weeks, and
I basically knew if I thought of skateboarding
as training too early I would burn out and lose
my mind. So I’ve been training, which means
instead of getting stuck trying one trick for
four hours that I’m probably never going to
land, but eventually someday I’m going to
land, I’m doing five things over and over again.
Which in a way brings me back to the
beginning, when I first started skateboarding
and I had really rigid goals, like I’m going
to land a kickflip. I’m going to do 100 until
I land one. So in a way, it’s nostalgic. It feels
very different than it felt in the middle of
the pandemic, skating alone in New York.
Contests were far out of my mind, and it felt
372
like the first time in a long time where I could
do whatever I wanted, which is the best part
about skateboarding.
mg — What are the five tricks you’re working
on?
as — Kickflip front-
mg — Wait, wait, don’t give them away. We
don’t want our competitors to know. I’m
excited to watch you in the Olympics. So let’s
keep them secret.
kb — What about you Mark? What is skating
like for you right now?
mg — It’s super fun. I’m not practicing for any
contest. I was trying to do a backside lipslide
and my board broke, so that was a bit rough,
but it’s no pressure. I don’t have any demos
coming up, so I’m just having fun. Next to
fun, I skate to learn my tricks, but when my
board breaks, I can’t make it, so that’s what
it’s like.
Mark Gonzales, Photo: Courtesy of The Boardr
kb — Do you feel that you’re doing
maintenance when you go out? Is the impulse
for you to do a back lip because “God, I don’t
want to lose this back lip?”
mg — No, I just did a back lip four months
ago, or five months ago, maybe a year ago
before the pandemic. So I did one on a parking
block, frontside, and I thought, well, that felt
really good. So coming up before the end, I
said, oh, I’m going to do it backside, that’s
going to be great. I have to do this backside. So
I started doing it backside and my board was
broken, and it just kept getting worse.
kb — Often you’re skating on what we might
call unconventional skateboards. When you
go out skating and you’re just squeezing in say
30 minutes of a day, are you on a conventional
popsicle board? Or do you have a deep quiver
that you pull from?
mg — It’s a little bit rough to have to skate
today, you know what I mean? Imagine you’re
going to be in the Olympics, but you don’t
want to ride what everyone else is riding.
How are they going to score somebody riding
something that doesn’t even make sense?
A lot of the boards I ride now are boards I
couldn’t ride back when I was trying to sell
boards. I had to ride what the people were
going to be buying. You don’t want to miss
what’s happening. You don’t want to be too
far ahead, you don’t want to be too far behind.
You don’t want to be in the dream land, you
have to still kind of operate in a reality world
where people understand. Now I’m a lot older,
so now I like to ride fantasy type boards.
kb — We’re now weeks from this thing
that we know has been coming, and we’ve
either been dreading it, excited for it, or
pretending that it’s never going to happen.
Before we get into the Olympics per se, Alexis,
I wonder if you can talk a little bit about
competitiveness—would you be where you are
now if you weren’t as competitive as you are?
as — I’ve always been competitive when there
are no stakes. And this stubborn obsessive
part of me—I think it’s a necessary part of
learning to skate and skateboarding every
373

Alexis Sablone, Photo: Courtesy of Converse
day. Do you want to do it again? It’s like, I can
do that. I want to do it again. I want to do it
again until it feels like I know it can feel. But
if it’s a trick I’ve never done and I’m trying
something for the first time, there’s way less
pressure. When you actually land one or get
close to one, it’s like a delight.
374
Mark, I’ve watched all your skating
and I’m obviously a huge fan like everyone
else. But I’ve never really skated with you in
person, so when I think of your skating it’s
like everything I wish I could do, it looks like
it’s so improvisational. You don’t know the
next trick before you even do it. It has this
feeling that I think is part of what makes
people get so excited. When I go skate, I have
meltdowns, because I have to do a kickflip
backside tailslide. I can’t picture you doing
that. But then in my mind I’m like, but don’t
all skateboarders do that? So, I guess, I’m
asking, do you do that?
mg — I do that, too, for sure. The backside
lipslide just the other day, I was so upset at the
gutter.
as — Well, you didn’t say you were upset, you
just said your board broke, but that’s what I’m
wondering. Were you swearing and throwing
your board?
mg — No, I do. I curse now, too. And like, I’m
53 years old. I’m riding a skateboard. If that’s
not something to laugh at already. Now he’s
cursing, like fuck.
kb — One of the least healthy relationships
I’ve had in my life has been with making art,
making writing. Skateboarding has been the
part of my life that’s not competitive, that
outlet of, oh, it doesn’t matter that I’m not
as good as I used to be. It doesn’t matter that
I have a bad kickflip. Given that you’ve both
copped to being competitive on a skateboard,
either with yourselves or with the people
around you, do you ever feel that in the
visual arts?
mg — Sometimes I have something in my
head that I have to create, or, like, someone’s
asked me to do something. I try to figure
out how quickly I can get it done and how
little of a mess I could make. I don’t want to
make a big mess, because I don’t want to bum
anybody out. So, I build types of things in
my head like a competition with myself. It’s
hard though because then I’ll go to it, right,
and then I’ll be midway through it, and yeah,
this looks good too, and soon we find out I’m
making something else and not doing what
I was asked to do. Which is the essence of
skateboarding kind of. It just kind of goes
and then before you know it, you’re doing
something else.
as — Okay, yeah I’d say it’s like a curse. It’s
like I think the way, Kyle, you said you were
with writing. It’s not competing against
other people. It’s more like this thing with
myself. There’s a painful part, too, where
it’s like at some part of the process, I hate
what I’m doing so much. Every time I ever
filmed something with a skateboard, there’s
inevitably a part where I’m like, “I hate
skating.”
mg — Do you ever focus a design? You know,
people get so upset, you smash your board. Do
you ever focus something you’re working on?
as — No, maybe that’d be a good exercise.
It’s more that you know when it doesn’t feel
right. It’s like, “I’ll just keep working.” But
then it’s like, “No, I’ll just be unhappy with
it.” I love it in the beginning. And same with
skateboarding, when it’s just the idea of it.
mg — It’s like a hard flip. Everybody’s doing
hard flips and it’s like, “It just doesn’t feel
good, why do I want to do it?” Then you end
up doing the hard flip because if he can do
the hard flip, did you see him do his hard flip?
Watch him do a hard flip. And, you’re out
there doing hard flips and it feels terrible.
as — It does feel terrible.
mg — And, then you realize what you really
wanted to do was an impossible, so you start
doing impossibles. I’m kidding, I’m kidding,
I’m being silly.
as — The best part is when you’re going to
sleep at night, when you’re just thinking
about what trick is possible, you’re going to do
it the next day, you’ve got it. You know what it
feels like. That part is so exciting, because you
can picture it. And then the reality is, it’s way
harder. It doesn’t work, you start punching
yourself in the face. You’re like, “Why am I
doing this? I’m an adult, and why did I get
myself into this mess?” And, I’m stuck doing
this, you know?
And with design stuff and art it’s the
same thing. It’s like the beginning phase when
a project could be anything. You go to sleep
and just come up with all these good ideas
and you think it’s clicking. And, then as soon
375
as you start to make it tangible, you’re like, “I
hate this. This is the stupidest idea ever, I hate
this.” And then-
mg — It’s exactly like the hard flip.
as — Exactly, it’s the hard flip.
mg — I had a dream with skateboarding last
night. I mean, I can’t remember the last time
there was actual skateboarding in my dream.
I must’ve been nervous about being on this
thing tonight, so it was tricky.
kb — Do you remember the dream? Can you
tell us about the dream?
mg — I did a frontside blunt slide really slow,
and it was on the thing where you could really
stick in there, lock-in. So I did a frontside
blunt really slow and then popped up big and
landed it. And then I go, “Oh, shit my camera
didn’t get it. Oh, that fucking sucks.” Because
I like to video the tricks that I do.
And then my friend—he’s an artist, he
doesn’t skateboard at all—he goes, “I think
I got it. I was videoing something off in the
distance and I think I got your skateboard
trick. I got it.” I’m like, “Well, let me see the
footage.” I go, “You just got the bottom part!”
He goes, “Hey, I told you I got it. I wasn’t
filming you, I was filming and your trick was
in it. Why are you being a dick?” And then I
go, “Whoa, okay, okay. Let me try it again, I
think I can do it.”
So, I go for the trick again and I do
it really fast. I go, “That was too fast. The
first one was original. The first one was good
because it was slow and I popped up. Extra
pop.” So I go, “We got to do it again, we got
to do it again.” So then I was trying it again
and then I don’t know what happened. I
think I woke up or . . . I don’t know. I don’t
have skateboarding dreams very often. It was
pretty trippy.
kb — I do want to talk a little bit about the
giant international historic contest. Mark,
I have a short quote here. You said, “The
way I see it happening is that the Olympic
people who do skateboarding are going to say
skateboarding is theirs. It belongs to them, it’s
376
an Olympic sport now. We are skateboarding,
we are skateboarding now and this is what
skateboarding is now.” Do you think there is a
risk of the Olympics fundamentally changing
the way skateboarding exists in the world?
mg — The original Olympics, there was a
section in it with arts. So there was music, it
wasn’t just sport. But yeah I do feel that about
it. Like, imagine the first cricketers, any type
of sport. As soon as it becomes set and then
people start doing it, and if you do something
else, it’s, “What the? That’s not the right bat
you should be using.” Then there’s just going
to be conflict. Who’s to say what you can go
up to the thing and hit the ball with? People
want to hold on to things and say it’s theirs, or
how it is, or what it is. And label it, say what
it is, it’s theirs. It belongs to them, this is the
way you should do it.
I mean, if they would do anything, they
should do things that have a definite start to
finish, who can get from the top to the bottom
the quickest. That makes more sense. How Mark Gonzales doing a rock and roll, Photo: Courtesy of The Boardr
can you judge street skating in the Olympics?
I mean, really! Even with vert skating, I mean,
what if one person drops in and doesn’t do a some people start skateboarding. Back when that’s where our money should go. Why are
trick, but they’re having fun? we started, the idea of starting skateboarding we paying all these other people to just mess
because you wanted to be an Olympian was around in the street?
kb — Right, right and so Alexis, not to harp ludicrous. In the future, instead of being the
too hard on the kickflip frontside 50, but you thing that you have to talk your parents into mg — I just can’t wait to see if it’s going to be
at some point in your contest career realize, getting you a skateboard or steal a skateboard, exciting or not. I want to watch it, I’m excited.
“Oh, here is a trick that does well. Here’s there’ll be this path to glory and success.
a trick that is going to succeed.” What do That’s very weird. as — You’re excited?
you think about this risk of skateboarding It means different things to different
becoming quantified or regulated? That this people. No matter how skateboarding mg — That’s for sure.
is worth this, X is worth Y, and that’s how changes, I don’t think there’s a way to change
skateboarding works. Is that a risk? everyone’s mind to only think one thing like, as — I’m nervous.
“Okay, now this is skateboarding.” Like Mark
as — Well, I mean, first of all, I discovered I said, change the cricket bat or whatever. mg — If I could do it, I would be in there too.
could do kickflip front 50s before I was doing There’s no way to do that, there are infinite
contests. bats, you know? as — I can’t picture that at all, but that would
I mean, I guess what I do worry be amazing.
kb — Okay, good. more about is how it’s going to change the
industry. There are a lot of big companies in mg — I would probably have one really good
as — And then, conveniently, I was like, skateboarding now, and a lot of people. Even run and they’d probably take me out and say,
“Well, this is like a freak trick that for if we have people immediately working in “Okay, you’ve been having too much fun,
some reason is easier for me frontside than skateboarding who are skateboarders, who buddy. That’s it for you, get down. Get him
backside.” But I mean, I think that the is their boss? And who’s that person’s boss? out of there, what’s he doing? That’s not even
Olympics cannot fundamentally change what If the power’s in the hands of someone who a skateboard trick, what’s this guy . . . Get this
skateboarding is. The part that I don’t like is doesn’t know about skateboarding personally, guy out of here.”
that it could change the motivation for why they could see the Olympics and think, well,
377

Alexis Sablone, Photo: Courtesy of Converse
as — You’ve stumped all the judges, they
wouldn’t know what score . . .
mg — No, I would have fun and do my run. Be
serious, win the gold. And then I would just
be like, “Watch this. You got to see this, watch
me screw this shit up. Watch this.” Boom.
378
kb — If I could add one skateboarding event,
it would be a boards ollie. A straight-up puzzle
boards, who can ollie the most boards. Mark,
if you could add a skateboard Olympic event,
what would you add?
mg — Well, who could take apart their board
and put it back together the fastest. I think
that would be a good event to judge and to see
and to witness.
kb — Alexis, you had a fiver in the HBO series
[Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel]. What’s your
max? What have you max ollied? Have you
sixed?
as — Yeah, I’ve sixed and I think that’s it. I
don’t think I ever got to seven, maybe six and
a half, like when you turn the one board, or
six plus some little debris on top or something
but never seven. Seven’s like to my belly
button.
kb — Seven’s a lot.
mg — Do you think taller people ollie higher?
as — Well, I don’t know because that was
always my excuse.
mg — There’s Donger. I don’t know how short
he is, he ollies really high. I know that.
kb — Mark, do you remember your most
boards puzzled? Are you a sixer? Are you a
sevener?
mg — I don’t know. Unless I’m doing a trick,
like going up to 50/50, I’m not trying to do a
higher ollie.
as — Puzzled? Kyle, is that what you called
it? When you puzzle boards, that’s how you
call stacked boards? I’ve never heard that term
before.
mg — That’s the first time I’ve heard of it,
tonight. And I automatically knew what you
were saying.
kb — Alexis, we have an audience question
here that asks about architecture and a
relationship between architecture and
skateboarding, or skate culture in general.
And this certainly extends to Mark as well,
broader thinking about how other creative
practices might influence your skateboarding.
as — I think there’s a broader overlap in
terms of the way as an architect or designer,
you are really tuned in to seeing things, not
just taking them for granted or using them
how they’re meant to be used. The way
skateboarders see space and it’s like seeing
the city and the things around them in a way
that’s not just accepting ideas about function.
Okay, this is how you walk on stairs. This is
how you sit on a bench. Skateboarders are
looking at, like, is that wall a little sloped?
Or is that crack really bad? The difference
between a spot and a non-spot is so small,
but skateboarders are looking at space with
a whole different mission in mind, a totally
different agenda.
kb — Mark, you’ve said that it wasn’t until
you were 50 years old that you could think of
your art seriously. Do you feel like now in this
more mature phase of your art making that
there’s still room for skateboarding to find its
way into it?
mg — I think so. Yeah, I mean, if I had to
think about it, which I just did, yeah, for sure.
But I had a question. Have you seen those
yellow bus things in Brooklyn where the
people skate them?
as — At the bus station?
mg — Yeah. Those are cool. Have you skated
those?
as — I’ve walked by it a bunch of times and I
have stood on them, and thought, Eli (Reed)
did a switch wallie? I mean, a bunch of stuff’s
been done, but just thinking like, wow, these
things, they’re pretty tall. I always thought,
what if maybe I could ride up and do a kick
flip and land back on and go back in? I’m sure
actually trying it would be a lot harder.
mg — I was thinking about it in terms of
design, because it seems as though they’re
made to stop or direct the busses. It’s the way
that they go into the parking lot or the way
they turn around.
as — It’s like a big curve.
mg — It looks artistic in its own way, but I
379
don’t think it was meant to be. I think you
can just take those and put them in front of
the Met and people would say that’s fabulous.
as — They would. Kyle, do you know the spot
he’s talking about?
kb — Yeah, my buddy Randy I think wallie
5-O’d it. Right, like wallie the vertical side,
and then 5-O down the sort of . . . there’s a
pinch on the front of them, right?
mg — There are like three different types
there. They look like artworks. They really do
look like someone designed them.
as — Maybe what’s funnier about that
conversation is the way skaters have kind of
a Rolodex of these spots that they’ve never
been to. Someone could say oh yeah, that
ledge in China, and name five people and the
tricks they have done there. Which is just
crazy when you think about it, because no
non-skater would have any idea what you’re
talking about. What do you mean? It’s just a
ledge in a park, it’s not a thing.
In that HBO thing, that bump to bar,
that was my first bump to bar, and I’ve been
on a hunt for a bump to bar that I could talk
myself into doing for ten years because it’s
terrifying. It’s like, go full speed, who knows
what the bump feels like, hope I make it over
the bar. That’s really scary to me. I know
that there’s one in Greece that’s freakishly
small, and I’m like, well maybe I could switch
flip that. The fact that I’m itching to go to
this place because of a building code or some
construction guy messed up somewhere and
made a weirdly low bar, and now there’s a
skateboarder in New York that’s like, oh, I
can’t wait to go there.
mg — In Paris there’s this housing place, I
don’t know, like a housing tract. And out in
front, there’s all types of banks and stuff made
out of bricks. And I go, oh man, I got to go
there. So I got there, but it wasn’t as good as it
looked in the pictures.
as — Because the bricks were rough?
mg — It’s just I think fantasy, the way you see
380
it in your head is better. Everything in the
photograph looks so beautiful. You get there
and it can never . . . your reality could never
match up to what your head is thinking.
kb — Isn’t there a famous clip of you showing
up at that mellow gold round handrail and
being like, oh, I thought I was going to 50/50.
mg — Yeah, that’s exactly it. In your head,
you think you’re going to do these tricks and
you get to this point, just like okay, what was
I thinking? In your head it’s like, oh yeah, just
come over here, do a little of this, do a little of
that. You get there, and you’re just like, I was
daydreaming.
kb — What is your take on the way that
skateboarding, at least in the last 10 years,
has become an activity for a much broader
swath of people? What does it feel like to
you to look around and see so many different
people skateboarding these days than there Mark Gonzales at Harold Hunter Day in NYC. Photo: Courtesy of The Boardr
used to be?
mg — There were so many girl skaters when that still supported in any way?
mg — I think it’s awesome. Alexis getting the I was a kid. I liked Laura Thornhill. I liked
shoes and getting paid, I mean, that’s amazing. Vicky Vickers. I liked all them girls. They mg — I think the thing is people need to be
It’s sad that it took that long, but it’s awesome were awesome. happy with themselves, that’s it. You know.
that now she’s getting what she deserves,
and I think it’s opening up, lots of people are as — I mean, but you’re cool. as — Yeah, people need to be happy with
allowed to just be themselves who they are themselves, but no one can exist in a bubble,
and not care what people think, and people mg — Girls have been in skateboarding and if it weren’t for the community of
still respect them and still want to buy their for so long. I mean, there’ve been girl pro skateboarding, we wouldn’t be here right now.
boards. I think it couldn’t be better right now skateboarders before. I wouldn’t even know who any of you are,
in skateboarding—it’s going to be an Olympic we would have just been alone in a bubble
sport and people can do their own thing. They as — Yeah, but what documentation do we somewhere. To have a community and that
could do DIY spots or go to the skate park have to show that history? support—it needs to be drilled into everyone’s
or not skateboard and still call themselves a head who’s starting out that skateboarding
skateboarder. No one’s going to care. mg — I saw them live. When I was a kid really is for everybody. And if skateboarding
watching, they’re doing these things with the is only about who can do the best, sickest,
kb — Alexis, what do we need to do better? two skateboards, and I couldn’t go to sleep biggest trick, then who cares? I don’t want to
How do we keep going? at night after watching them skate. I was skateboard if that’s all it’s about.
like, fuck, this is where it’s at. This is what’s
as — I think more and faster, just kind of in happening. mg — Is skateboarding all about losing or is
terms of the types of people. The line has skateboarding all about winning?
always just been like, yeah, skateboarding’s as — But not everyone saw it that way. For
for everyone. It’s not like you have to be built every person that was like you, I think there as — Neither.
like a football player to be a skateboarder. But are probably a lot of other people that were
it wasn’t really for everybody. Look at any like, what are you doing on a skateboard? Just kb — It’s about failure right?
magazine or any video, and you’re like, wait, look at social media comments—it’s the lowest
why are these all guys? of the low. Look when someone posts a girl, mg — I can’t wait to get up here and fail.
look at the comments there. It’s like, how is
381
 Terms found in It’s the Hardflip,
Kyle Beachy’s conversation with Alexis Sablone and Mark Gonzales THE GOOD JUICE
kickflip front board A kickflip that lands onto a rail or ledge in a frontside (the Ryan Lay interview with Aram Sabbah
obstacle in front of the skater) boardslide.

backside lipslide In which the skater approaches the rail backside (behind
the skater), then ollies and rotates over the rail, landing in a
boardslide as if skating it frontside

kickflip backside tailslide A kickflip into a backside slide on the tail of the board.

Focus To deliberately break [the board] in half.

hardflip A somewhat unnatural move that combines a frontside shuvit

(half rotation) and kickflip.

Impossible A truly unnatural move whereby the board wraps a full rotation
around the foot, as close to a vertical rotation as possible.

frontside bluntslide A rail or ledge slide in the blunt position, a move traditionally
achieved at the top of transition on a halfpipe or other ramp.

kickflip frontside 50 A kickflip into a frontside grind with both trucks (a 50-50 grind).

switch wallie A wallie—a sort of smashing of the board onto and then over,
or off the corner of, a wall—done in the unnatural, backward
stance.

wallie 5-O A wallie used to achieve a grind along a ledge or rail, with only
the back truck (5-0 representing one half, sort of, of a 50-50).

bump to bar A ramp designed for accessibility, often in the place of stairs,
that runs from the sidewalk up to a platform at the height of
a doorway. Such platforms and ramps are generally enclosed
by railings for safety. A skater will ride up the ramp at enough
speed to ollie and clear the rail at the platform’s far side. Aram Sabbah is known to many
as one of the first skateboarders
switch flip A kickflip done in a skater’s backward, unnatural stance. in Palestine. Through his work
with the non-profit organization
50/50 A relatively stable grind with both of the board’s trucks. SkatePal, Sabbah has forged
a strong connection with
the American professional
Prepared by Kyle Beachy skateboarder Ryan Lay, who has
been making visits to Palestine
since 2018. In the following
exchange, Lay talks to Sabbah
about some of the most significant
skate spots in Palestine.

Ryan Lay, Phoenix, AZ, USA; Aram Sabbah, Ramallah, Palestine

382 © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Ramallah, Photo: Clément Le Gall 383
383
 Asira Al-Shamaliya Skatepark, Photo: Clément Le Gall
rl — I’ve been to Palestine two times, but the
second trip, I went out there to make a video
for Thrasher Magazine and we shot photos
for an article that was featured in the print
publication. We skated a lot of spots up and
down the West Bank, so I want to use some
of the spots to springboard into conversations
about how to get to those places, what those
places mean as a skateboarder and as a
Palestinian.
SK ATING RINK
rl — Let’s talk a little bit about this spot. This
is a roller skating rink, right? In Ramallah?
as — It’s supposed to be an all-wheels kind of
thing: Roller skaters, scooters, skateboards,
anything that they can skate on. And I think
it was funded by the Russian people.
rl — Russia funded it?
as — Either the Russian or the Chinese.
Almost everything that we have in Palestine
is funded by something. Also, roads. I mean,
there are roads from the USA. But this is
basically just a cement hole. It doesn’t have
384 Ramallah (Qadura Park), Photo: Clément Le Gall
anything but that colorful metal fence around
it. And there are two metal copings on the
wall. The most fun part of it is if you hippie
jump, as in the photo, or you go from inside,
you pump and ollie over the fence, or do a
trick over the fence. You did a late shuv.
rl — Yeah, the first time I tried to switch
heel over it and tried for several hours. I feel
like every time we would skate there, you’d
feel kind of bad because it’s a place that gets
a lot of family use, and the kids are on their
little trikes and scooters and just kind of spin
around in circles.
as — Security never lets us in because they
only let in families. I swear to God, almost
every time that we have any skater not
from Palestine, they let us in. When we go
ourselves, they don’t let us in.
rl — Honestly, it’s kind of a dream of a skate
spot. It’s really smooth somehow, it’s got that
polished ground and the tile, which actually,
we should talk a little bit about the tile. So
much of the West Bank seemed to be really
good to skate because there’s this incredibly
hard, white tile everywhere that doesn’t chip
385
Ramallah Plaza, Photo: Kyle Seidler Ryan Lay and Aram Sabbah, Jericho, Photo: Kyle Seidler

or chunk and it grinds really well with just a
little bit of wax.
as — It’s known that we have a lot of good
stone. It’s the only thing we can produce. It’s
the only thing we’re allowed to do: Get stones
out of the ground.
PLAZA
rl — Let’s talk about the Plaza. What is this?
as — It’s a safe spot that we can go to. It’s a
very peaceful spot. There are always a lot of
people and it’s slimy and dirty. I don’t know
why in this photo it looks clean as fuck.
rl — I think this was a day after it had rained
pretty hard.
as — Probably cleaned everything.
rl — You have the line where you were doing
an ollie up and then board slide to manual
and then ollie-ing this three-block and I think
that we went and swept up first. There’s a lot
of trash and goo that builds up: Cigarettes,
popcorn.
as — There are ledges of every length and
every height. It’s all marble and slimy and
ready to go. The one thing that is hard to get
used to are the tiles in the ground. They slide
a lot. They really, really, really slide. Every
trick you have to land almost perfectly.
rl — Two interesting things about this plaza
are that it’s basically where you get dropped
off if you take a taxi from Qalandiya, or take
the bus in. It’s the city center, in a way, even
though it’s not downtown. It’s in this central
little hub right next to the taxi and bus depot
across the street, right?
as — Right. There’s a bus stop from Jerusalem
and on the left you can see, beneath the
purple billboard, there’s a bus station.
rl — I think a lot of the plazas in the US are
not typically used by people that are working
or hanging out at parks. They’re usually
only places where people live, so you end up
with a mix of homeless encampments and
skateboarders who also take care of the space
and are the only ones who really see value in
it. But what’s interesting about this plaza is
that it gets a lot of use by families and little
entertainers, people pouring coffee, selling
corn, street vendors. When you’re skating, it
has this almost performance element where
on a typical evening these seats are filled with
people, so if you’re skating the three-block
you’re almost skating for an audience.
as — It’s almost like a show.
rl — Yeah, exactly. But one thing that is
fascinating is that in the States, skating really
annoys people. One thing I felt was true all
over the West Bank was that people are really
receptive to skating and just curious about
it—they usually understand that you’re just
playing and it’s fine. You might get hurt, but
it’s okay. There’s not this stress and tension
that you feel when you skate in the States.
as — People are welcoming in general.
Sometimes they get annoyed by us skating
if it’s a Friday afternoon and they’re just
chilling, trying to sip their coffee in the sun
and we come along and start skating and
making noise. But, mostly, we can just talk
them through it and they just watch us and
have fun with us instead of hating on us.
They immediately switch and try to have fun.
Sometimes some of them actually ask us to
try to skate. Almost every kid that comes to
the spot where we’re skating will ask for the
skateboard to skate. Then we teach them, of
course, and skate with them.
rl — Let’s talk a little bit about that. The
work that you do with SkatePal, as the
manager there, is to help grow a new skate
scene in Palestine. What’s interesting is that
kids just come up to you and they want to
learn, and there’s no formal skatepark there in
Ramallah, so it’s a great entry point for kids
to learn about skating for the first time. Step
on a skateboard, skate around. You see a lot of
that, and with adults too, right?
as — Yeah. As well as adults, and they’re
funny. It’s fun to see the child in each adult
when they try skating here and make them
forget how miserable the world that we live in
is. For a second, they’re okay. It’s nice.
SK ATE PARKS
rl — Let’s talk about the two skateparks. You
want to give us a breakdown of the parks that
SkatePal helped get built?

386 Ramallah (Qadura Park), Photo: Clément Le Gall 387

Asira Al-Shamaliya Skatepark, Photo: Clément Le Gall
as — There are two skateparks that we can
actually call skateparks because they have a
bunch of stuff. SkatePal has built four, but
two are the main ones. There is one in al-
Nasirah and there’s another one in Jayyous.
Al-Nasirah is located in Nablus, almost an
hour from Ramallah. If you want to go to
Nablus, you have to go through two or three
checkpoints. Sometimes they just nag people
and they stop one car and there’s traffic that
ends up miles and miles long that eventually
kills your time. If you’re leaving at 10:00 from
Ramallah and you’re planning to go 11:00,
11:30 to the park, sometimes you get there at
1:00. And I know it’s only a couple of hours,
but sometimes it just fucks up the whole
schedule. It fucks up the whole day because
we have to go back to Ramallah before the sun
goes down.
The other one is in Jayyous next to Qalqilya.
It’s almost an hour and a half away. Those
parks are really fucking nice. Everyone goes
there. I feel like now, in 2021, Al-Nasirah
skatepark has become a really good skatepark.
There are boards there and people from the
village who take care of it themselves. We
open the doors for the kids to take the boards
388
and skate with them. It’s really nice.
rl — The skateparks operate with some help
from international volunteers who come
and meet people and do a skills exchange. I
would also add that they are just really great
parks and they’ve got such incredible energy.
Energy that I’ve never really felt at a lot of
skateparks in other parts of the world. Super
mixed where you have adults that skate part-
time and lots of kids who are interested. It’s a
special place.
SHOPPING CENTER
rl — Let’s talk about this indoor double-set
that you ollied, and I skated this rail and also
broke my finger trying to switch biscuit (360
flip).
as — It’s located inside a building. It’s literally
on the ground floor. There are a bunch of
stores: clothes, shoes, beauty centers, IT stores,
banks. We didn’t have lights but there’s an old
keeper for the building, and we asked him . . . I
don’t think we even asked him. He just offered.
He just stepped in our circle and was like,
“Hey. I can put the lights on.” And he did.
Jericho, Photo: Kyle Seidler
rl — This is the type of spot that you see at
a mall in the States as a kid, you’re walking
around the store with your mom or something
and you’re just thinking, “Wow, this would
be a dream to skate this.” And it was pretty
remarkable that you went in there as they
were closing, and most of the stores were
closed, and the shopkeeper came up to us
and basically, he was like, “Well, let me go
turn on the lights for you real quick so you
guys can skate it.” We skated it a couple of
different nights, and he just sat and drank
some coffee and looked like he was relaxing,
watching us try to jump down this thing.
And skating down a set of stairs can be very
high intensity, there’s a lot of raw emotion.
When I broke my finger, obviously I was
freaking out. I can only imagine what he
was thinking because he let us skate there
and then I break my finger, and I’m just this
American dude who’s there. Why am I even
here? And we left for the hospital. We ended
up seeing him on the street the next day,
walking around Ramallah. I can’t remember
what he said to us, but he tried to help us
with something.
as — He asked what happened. I told him,
“He broke his finger.” “Tell him to get well
soon. It’s in God’s hands. It should have
happened. It happened and it’s okay.”
rl — It was such incredible hospitality, but
also this support. Some store owners have
that private property mentality that is really
common in the States but more often than
not, you tell people what you’re trying to do
and you’ll have shopkeepers who are like, “Oh,
you need wood for the run up? Let me go grab
a sheet of wood for you.” And then a stranger
comes into the picture and they’re like, “Oh,
yeah, yeah. I’ll block traffic for you.”
JERICHO HIGHWAY
rl — Let’s talk about going to the Dead
Sea and skating the spot in the middle of
the highway in Jericho. Where is Jericho in
relation to Ramallah?
as — Jericho is 25 minutes away, south of
Ramallah. It’s the lowest point in Palestine.
Jericho is also the lowest town on Earth. The
Dead Sea is the lowest water-faced surface.
And it’s so fucking hot.
389
Jericho, Photo: Kyle Seidler
That spot is right on the entrance of Jericho
if you’re coming from Jerusalem on the main
road. Such a nice spot. Not any skater can
skate this. It has a weird setup, so you have
to run and jump on the surface and put your
skateboard in front of you and go on it, or
even before it, and just ollie. It’s hard. You see
where Ryan is standing, it’s an empty space
beneath him, so we had to go and pick up the
big ass metal sheet and put it above it so he
jumps from the kicker to it because there’s
nothing beneath it. We had to put that piece
above it so it was flat and you can ollie on it. It
was fucking worth it.
rl — Yeah, it was pretty incredible. You’re
skating in the middle of the highway as cars
are going in both directions. Even in the one
that I ended up filming, there’s a bus that goes
back on the right side that I land just after.
It speaks to how there were all these moving
parts at a lot of the sessions. You need a team
of people to make it happen.
BETHLEHEM BAR HOP
rl — I wanted to talk about this thing that
we skated. We drove to Bethlehem one or two
390
days and we found a couple of good spots.
This being one of them. This is a handicap
ramp or a bar hop as we call it in skating.
as — Remember we asked the banks? We
started skating and security came and was
like, “People are still working here.” I was like,
“Wait, let me ask your manager.” And we go
inside and we speak to the manager of the
branch and he was like, “Yeah, you can skate,
just don’t show the brand and whose bank it is
so we don’t get in trouble.”
rl — This was the first bar hop you’d ever
ollied, right?
as — Yeah, it was the first one. It was so weird
because it was so easy, but it’s still weird
because you have to pop before the ramp ends
and not right after. There’s a weird timing to
it, but it’s nice. And it’s one that looks really
high, but it tricks your mind.
rl — And afterward, we went to eat and
then I believe I found this on our way back.
I noticed that there was this out-ledge that
poked out from this hookah shop and so we-
Nablus, Photo: Clément Le Gall
as — Al-sultan coffee shop.
rl — Oh, that’s what it’s called? Do you want
to walk through what this whole process
looked like because it was really funny.
as — You go for it.
rl — This thing is really kind of a dream
come true. There’s a little out-ledge and then
there’s a gap out into this hill, but if you time
it right, you can land and then bomb the hill.
The street is really smooth. The out-ledge is
really good. It’s also pretty small to get onto.
The only problem was that the runway was
straight through the coffee shop. We had had
some experience with talking to people that
made us realize that people are much more
amenable than you might think. Eventually,
we got to this spot and I was like, “Maybe we
can just talk to those guys and I can literally
just skate through the coffee shop.”
as — They gave us tea and they gave us shisha.
They were like, “Yeah, sure.” They were really
helpful.
rl — The funny thing is the owner came
out, and they’re hanging out and they’ve got
shisha. Aram’s sitting over here watching
and smoking shisha as I’m skating. And I
am throwing down next to a group of old
men inside the coffee shop that are playing
dominoes or checkers or something. I’m
literally throwing down next to them in the
shop, rolling through the shop and then I
have about 10 feet after the shop to hit the
ledge and go into the street. It was a really
memorable experience.
as — It was a good one.
rl — I should try to find them and send them
this photo, come to think of it.
as — Put it in the shop.
rl — Yeah, that would be great actually.
HILLS
rl — Let’s talk about hills and what they
mean for skating out there and how they’ve
shaped your skating. This is what makes the
West Bank so uniquely good for skating. I’ve
been fortunate enough to travel all over the
391
392 Bethlehem, Photo: Clément Le Gall 393

Ramallah, Photo: Clément Le Gall
world for skateboarding, but I honestly think
that the West Bank is one of the most magical
places to skate in the world for a handful
of reasons. One of them being that the
geography of Palestine is such that everything
is a rolling hill and you end up with a lot of
interesting architecture that’s sloped with
a lot of stairs, and you combine that with a
really good white tile and these really smooth,
greased streets. New York has a similar
quality. A lot of the streets in New York are
really greasy and worn in and they’re smooth
for that reason. I think a few times we went
out skating we didn’t have a car and we would
just trudge up a hill, bomb a hill, trudge up a
hill, bomb a hill. Talk a little bit about what
hill skating has been like for you and what
you think it offers other skaters.
as — Growing up with no skateboarding
pushes you to skate wherever you want, and
skating streets and hill bombing just kills your
fears and helps you to enjoy skateboarding
even if you just trudge up the hill and
bomb a hill—you’re having fun while you’re
doing it. It feeds your soul. Skating streets
gives you more edge. It opens you up to see
differently. Instead of just seeing asphalt
394
and buildings and stairs and metal things,
you see differently. You see a spot, you see a
playground, you see a place where you can
have fun whether you’re in Palestine or Hong
Kong or anywhere in the world. Street skating
gives you a deeper impact.
rl — I think also what’s true of street
skating is that it teaches you how to explore
your neighborhood, which I think can be a
really powerful thing especially for people
who maybe have grown up in adverse
environments. For one, skateboarding is a
transportation tool, but two, it really opens
up space in a lot of ways and turns your city
into a skate park. Especially once you get the
skill set to know how to ride those spaces. You
realize that there are all sorts of opportunities
and places to practice and push yourself.
Looking for the spots is half the fun. I get
a lot of enjoyment out of finding spots for
you to skate and I’m sure that you’ve felt the
same way about me when I was skating there
because we all have varying skill sets and skill
levels. It’s really fun when you find something
in the street and think, “oh, wow, Aram can
definitely ollie this or boardslide this.” A lot
of what we would do is not unlike location
scouting for films. You just kind of wander
around, looking for different features. For
example, when there are hills, you know that
there are going to be stair-sets because people
have got to get up and down those hills and
then you know there’s going to be something
with some sort of banister or handrail for
people to hold onto to get up and down those
stairs.
This thing was a two-for-one because I
realized I could probably skate this hubba and
transfer into the hill, and we needed a few
pieces of wood. The run up is pretty crusty. I
think that a stranger actually helped us find
some wood, right?
as — Yeah, he told us where to get it and the
person agreed to give us the wood.
rl — So we built a roll up to the curb and
then a full runway that I could pop off of.
Then afterward we used this same piece of
wood and put it on this set of stairs because I
knew that Aram could skate this hubba right
here. I think that was your first hubba, right?
That you had boardslid before?
as — Yeah. It was the nicest one. I felt really
good about that. I felt like Tyshawn Jones or
some kid from New York when I did it. Really
good. I landed really nice. And the whole idea
of putting the wood on the stairs, and if you
dropped down on the wood then you just have
to ollie to it—it’s beautiful. And you really
motivated me to do it, doing your boardslide
to boardslide.
rl — It was awesome. I just feel like street
skating is so unique and such a departure
from regular skate park skating and that it
gives you this tool to open up new possibilities
in your built environment.
as — In your brain.
rl — In your brain, too. Very few skaters
actually get that experience anymore because
so many skaters grow up with instruction
and training. There’s a totally different and
magical experience learning something on a
street spot.
as — If you don’t have the chance to try the
hubba in the park then you try the hubba
in the street. You just have to try the hubba,
and if it’s scary enough you won’t be scared
of every hubba. It kills the fear factor every
time you skate. It makes the park look easier
because you know the park is made for
training so you know you can train more
instead of exploring. In the street you get the
chance to explore things as they are in the
world that we created.
rl — Can you talk briefly about how street
skateboarding specifically has made living in
Palestine different for you or opened up some
sort of enjoyment that wasn’t there?
as — The fact that I had skateboarding in
my life growing up really helped me to grow
up in general and specifically to grow up in
Palestine. Living here, there are some easy
options you can go to growing up. Pushing
toward not giving a fuck and doing a bunch of
shit on the street, being in danger of getting
shot at or killed. Or going straight to school or
university or some shit. Having skateboarding
made my brain sane. You tend to lose it
through the chaos of living in a place that is
occupied by a Zionist government. It’s hard to
live in. Not to make it political, but these are
just the facts of the world that I live in.
Skateboarding just makes things easier to
hold or grasp in life. You meet people, you
talk to people, , you’re more aware, you accept
life more, accept certain things in life that
you’re not in control of, but if you accept it
and go with it, it gives you the good juice.
Skateboarding gives me the good juice every
time. In fact, if I don’t skate often enough, I
just get crazy, you know? To the point where
I don’t want to live here. I just want to leave.
I don’t understand anything, nothing makes
sense. As soon as I get back on the board, I
feel like it’s okay now. It’s bearable, I can hold,
I can do good things. I have an opportunity
to do good things for other people and other
kids and the youth through skateboarding. It’s
another possibility. Skateboarding makes it a
bit easier to access things that you want in life.
395
 Terms found in The Good Juice,
Ryan Lay’s interview with Aram Sabbah

hippie jump In which the body leaps over an obstacle and the board rolls
beneath, the two reuniting on the obstacle’s far side.

Ollie The foundational, indispensable motion for all street

skateboarding, a sequence triggered by the back foot stomping
on the board’s tail and then, quickly, an ensuing slide forward
with the front foot to level the board into the air.

late shuv At the ollie’s height, a quick (and late) maneuver to spin the
board a half rotation before landing.

switch heel A heelflip (like a kickflip but flipping in the opposite, clockwise
direction) done while riding in a skater’s unnatural, essentially
backward stance.

boardslide In which the skater ollies onto and slides the area between the
board’s trucks.

manual A wheelie, basically, balanced either on the rear or front pair of

wheels.

switch biscuit A switch stance (unnatural, essentially backward) three-sixty

flip, in which the board undergoes both a full rotation and flip.

bar hop An ollie over a bar.

hubba A ledge that runs at an angle alongside a set of stairs. The name
derives from 1990’s slang for crack cocaine and the famous
“Hubba Hideout,” a famous skate spot in San Francisco where

Prepared by Kyle Beachy

Asira Al-Shamaliya Skatepark, Photo: Clément Le Gall

396 397

IN THE HANDS
OF SKATERS
Nick Sharratt
with Mike Schuh
True skateboarding. Those are the final two words on the
welcome letter that you’ll find on the “about” page for the
Palomino skate shop website. It brings to a close a statement
that establishes the guiding principles of Palomino as a
necessary alternative source for products produced by and
for skateboarders at a moment when the influence of large,
corporate entities grows with each entry into the network of
shoe sponsors and energy drinks. It might be hard for many to
believe that something like skateboarding would need to rely so
much on people like Nick Sharratt, the founder and operator of
London-based online skate shop Palomino, out there promoting
independent brands and ensuring that the ways skateboarding
culture gets presented to itself, as well as the broader world,
doesn’t become too nice, too clean, too easy. Sharratt conveys
a sense that not only is his endeavor necessary now, but it will
only become more necessary as the financial heft of massive
non-skater-led fashion, sports, and media corporations continue
to impose themselves on this industry, taking bigger and bigger
bites out of what they view as a marketplace, one they are as
commercially entitled to as any other.
In addition to selling clothing, boards, and related hard goods,
Palomino sets itself apart as the place to find ever-rarer skate
DVD’s and a massive, international assortment of skateboarding
print publications: from periodicals to one-offs, and hardcover
photo-books to handmade, Xerox zines. For this piece, Sharratt
highlighted the following publications as a means of expressing
the current state of skateboarding. These examples show how
skaters continue to lead and evolve their own culture through a
desire to keep skateboarding true to itself.
Nick Sharratt, London, UK
398
© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
A Window to Fažana, Stefan Schwinghammer, 2019, Self-published
This one is made by the editor of Solo, the advertising-
funded, mainstream, skate magazine in Germany, which is
also something started by skaters for skaters, and ended up
becoming the mainstream representation of German skating.
This zine stems from a trip that Stefan made to a little film
festival they have in Croatia every year called Vladimir. It’s
based around this little fishing village called Fažana, so the
dirt that is sellotaped in there is from one of the hikes you
go on in the area. The minute I get something like that in
my hand I am immediately into it. Even if it ends up being
shitty, it kind of doesn’t matter because the motivation behind
it is utterly pure. There’s no reason that Stefan made that
other than he wanted to. I might have bought some copies
of that from the shop, but at no point did Stefan make that
to make money. He made that to send it to people he met on
that trip and swap it with someone else for a zine that they
made which is a huge part of the original Xerox zine culture
in skateboarding. “Send a check for a dollar for postage,” or,
“you send your zine with your address, and I’ll send you one of
mine back.”
Head of the Lion, Claudio Majorana, 2018, Cesura Publish
This was very much born of skateboarding. It’s shot by
a skateboarder and it’s about skateboarding but I can’t
remember how many pages actually show skateboarding.
It’s not full of pictures of people doing certain tricks down a
particular obstacle; it’s not about that. It’s about everything
that surrounds skateboarding, and the binding glue created
by the activity that we all find ourselves involved with. It was
made in this little Sicilian town, Catania, and you can see
it’s not some urban Mecca, full of granite and marble and
beautiful stair sets. And yet, there’s still a little scene that has
spawned around skateboarding with these kids. The book
focuses more on what this group of people might do outside
of skateboarding, but it’s skateboarding that brought them
together.
Credits | Maximum Flow, Norma Ibarra, 2020, Vans
I think Norma, who shot all the photos, describes this as
a zine. And if Norma considers her thing to be a zine, I’m
cool with that. But someone who comes from an old school
Xeroxing scene, and is particularly militant about what
should or shouldn’t be allowed to be called a zine would very
much dispute that this is a zine, which I totally respect. One
argument that could be valid against whether that should or
shouldn’t be called a zine, within zine culture, is that Vans,
this huge corporation, paid for it. This was shot on a Vans
399
trip, so Vans knew that everyone was going to be wearing
Vans in every photo. Vans is the whole reason everyone is
there together so they don’t really have to stick their oar in,
and I think the vast majority of these big corporate entities
in skateboarding now, like Nike and Adidas and Converse,
understand that for something like this to be worth the money
they’re putting into it, it has to be authentic. Even though you
could argue that the fact that Vans has paid for it instantly
makes it inauthentic, which I think I disagree with because it
was shot by a crew that did a lot of trips and a lot of traveling
together to make the video that generated this book. It is a
completely valid document of a group of people hanging out,
going skating, and having fun—I just wish things didn’t have
to be funded by Vans. It’s a shame there’s a Vans logo but It
doesn’t stop the vibe seeping out of the pages and into my
enjoyment of looking at it. I’d much rather have Norma’s book
exist with a Vans logo on the back of it than it not exist at all.
Skateism, Bi-annual magazine, Issue 5: Elsewhere (January 2020),
Skateism LTD
The driving force behind Skateism is to represent under-
represented subcultures within skating. Skateism isn’t doing
it because they have to, they’re doing it because they want to,
and they were doing it before it was cool.
One of the biggest things pushing inclusivity in skateboarding
at the moment is marketing. The big corporations that have
moved into skateboarding treat non-cis-white-male-straight
skaters as a huge, untapped pot of gold that they can just go
for, and they have done so with massive enthusiasm. The
truth is that corporate money has actually done a lot to make
under-represented people feel like skateboarding could be a
place for them, it’s just a shame that it had to come from the
corporations. But Skateism has never pandered to that. They
genuinely want to authentically represent all these different
people that the skateboard industry didn’t feel were worthy of
coverage just five or ten years ago.
Free 37, July-August 2021, Magazine published six times a year,
FMS Publishing Ltd
Free is a UK skate magazine put out by FSM Publishing, Free
Skate Magazine Publishing, and that is Will, Sam, and Arthur
who are all skateboarders and who all worked for Kingpin
skate magazine, which was published by some big extreme
sports publisher before they canned all of their physical
magazines. So, Will, Sam, and Arthur just started their own
magazine. They had the contacts and experience, but they
literally thought, “should we just start a magazine? Fuck it,
let’s do it.” And it’s that same attitude that is intrinsic to the
culture of skating. Just have a go. I guess it makes sense if
400
the act of skating itself is just repeatedly failing and trying
again, failing and trying again. You’re not scared to try to do
something that may or may not work out. Now there are at
least five regular magazines coming out in the UK that are all
free, all started by people that just wanted to start a magazine.
The Skate Witches, Issue 11, October 2018, Self-published
This is as true a skate zine as you will ever find. No fucking
Venice Beach dude from the 80s can call that “not a zine.”
There are so many people that moan about their scene not
getting represented, “Oh, this magazine never covers us.” I
don’t know if that is why Kristen and Norma and Shari, the
main crew that does Skate Witches (I think), started their
zine specifically, but it frustrates me when you hear this,
especially now, especially in 2021, people complaining that
their scene’s not getting covered and represented. You can
cover your own scene and represent it yourself. But even easier
than that, you’ve got Instagram. You’ve got YouTube. You
can have a website for five pounds a month or less. And now
if people want to know about your scene, you can let them
know, and if they want to care about it, they will. It’s a more
level playing field now and it’s just so sick that, while you don’t
have to make zine anymore, because you’ve got Instagram
and YouTube, young people are still turning to self-published
little Xerox zines that are no different in their makeup than
they were in the 80s. There’s no real reason for that to exist
anymore and it’s still not dying. They know it’s not the best,
posh, offset printed photo book, but looking at that is still
better than looking at a photo on a phone, in my opinion.
It’s an irreplaceable experience. That’s underground. They’re
creating their own thing, making zines, making their own
videos. That’s the subculture now. Skateboarding is not a
subculture now. Those days are long gone, but now there are
interesting subcultures within skating.
Splater Three Gorky Park, Mark Gonzales, 2016, Sprinter Publications
Deformer, Ed Templeton, 2008, Alleged Press/Damiani
Mark Gonzales is still making zines. He’s been one of the
biggest figures in skateboarding for decades and he’s still
making zines. He’s using one of the mediums that he still
considers a valid way to present his art to the world. He’s
making those little zines at the same time that he’s designing
clothing for Supreme, or giving Supreme graphics to put on
stuff. And he’s constantly putting out little videos on his
YouTube channel, so he’s embraced all this new technology,
and yet he’s still sticking to these old techniques.
If there is one classic skateboarding-based photo book,
Deformer is certainly one that is worthy of that title. Ed
Templeton is also hugely active on Instagram. Here’s another
401
legend in skateboarding who’s still using these time-honored
techniques, he still puts out fairly simple little zines every so
often, but he’s also hugely active on Instagram. Even these
legends that could just be stuck in their ways, thinking “No,
this is the only way it’s done,” adopt new technologies and
realize it’s just really fun. All the while, still making zines and
photo-books like they always have.
Southbank, Louis Woodhead, Self-published, Edition of 16
This is a zine that Louis made as a way of remembering and
documenting what he experienced during the Long Live
Southbank campaign. Southbank Centre is a huge cultural
space in London with concert halls, galleries, and more.
There’s also this undercroft area that the architect originally
designed as a space for nothing and anything to see how
the public might end up using it. It’s become one of the
oldest, continuously used public skate sites in the world. But
it’s actually not public, even though it’s presented as such.
Southbank Centre owns it and they were going to convert
the undercroft into retail in order to fund improvements
and the redevelopment of portions of the centre into new
facilities. Those new facilities weren’t going to be going in
the undercroft. The undercroft was going to be a fucking
Starbucks or something and that’s what Louis and the others
who started the Long Live Southbank campaign were against:
the closure of the undercroft to skateboarders for retail
units. The campaign was started by the day-to-day skaters of
Southbank, the vast majority of whom were young people.
Every morning they’d get the table out and a couple of people
would sit on that table all day until the sun went down. Then
they’d pack up the table and the stickers and t-shirts, put it
back where it was stored and do the same thing the next day,
for months. They worked out who was good at what and made
films to raise awareness as well. We’re fucking skaters, we
know how to make a film. They made a load of amazing videos
to help push awareness. They got on the local and national
news. They learned how to speak to councilors and politicians
and people in industry, as well as celebrities and other people
in the public eye. They raised awareness to the point where
it would have been a PR disaster for the Southbank Centre
to continue with their plans. Ultimately, Southbank Centre
u-turned on its decision, and this group of young people
stopped this juggernaut from replacing an important cultural
landmark with retail.
One Hundred and Ten Percent | Nepal, Tom Delion, 2018, Self-published
This is a book of photos that Tom Delion took while working
in Nepal. I love the photos in this one. Tom and another
British skater, Daryl Dominguez, started an NGO called
Skate Nepal, which functions along the lines of Skateistan
402
and SkatePal; just trying to use skating to give kids in areas
where they might not have many opportunities something fun
to do. They aren’t trying to push Western ideals and Western
values on non-Western cultures; they just see skating as this
hugely fun and positive thing to share. So they will go to a
town in Nepal, get a crew of people together, raise the money
to get out there and for materials, build a skatepark, and then
teach the local kids how to skate, and, hopefully, teach some
of the locals how to teach skating. One crucial realization
that organizations like Skate Nepal, SkatePal, and Skateistan
have made is that since many of these countries have never
seen skating before, it can be something that the girls were
permitted to do as well. It’s a rare thing but in some of these
communities skateboarding teaches lessons of equality simply
by providing something fun and physical that girls may not
otherwise be allowed to participate in.
Ari Marcopoulos, 9.24.2020, 2020, Self-published
This one is hugely moving and it’s just pictures of stones
on the beach taken soon after the passing of Keith Hufnagel,
a significant professional skateboarder and founder of the
apparel company Huf. Ari Marcopoulos is a well-known,
commercially successful photographer and there is nothing
special about those photos as photographs if you wanted to
technically pick them apart. It’s one person’s dedication to
another person, neither of whom I knew, and I found that
incredibly moving. Again, nothing and everything to do
with skateboarding. There’s no reference to skateboarding
in any image. I consider that quite culturally significant
within skating.
It’s a lovely day, the birds are singing, the sun is shining,
what more can you ask for?, 2019, Enjoi Skateboards
This book about Ben Raemers is just pure celebration of an
amazing dude’s life. Ben’s funeral was just that, too. Everyone
that got up to deliver a eulogy . . . they were all just fun
stories. There’s no way that Ben would no longer be with us
without somebody in skateboarding making a book about
him. It’s intrinsic to our thing. One of the ways we are going
to remember him is by producing a book that you can hold
in your hand, sit on your sofa, and look at, and be there with
your memories. It does work on the phone. If I see a picture
of Ben on a phone, it brings back good memories, but sitting
down with this book and these photos is just better. It’s that
tactility. It will always be a part of our culture. Tactility.
When Ben killed himself, the pain was obviously there
for everybody and it brought the London skateboarding
community together in a way that it hasn’t been fractured
apart from again. We have this voice to ourselves in
403
skateboarding. Skateboarding constantly presents itself
to itself. It takes care of its own coverage, and it has this
incredible voice to itself that can be a force for good. Since his
passing, the Ben Raemers Foundation has done so much work
to make skateboarding in London a more open culture, and
a more open community. “Tell your friends you love them” is
this big mantra now. We have Ben to thank for that.

‫ ر ح‬٩٩٧
(A LANGUAGE ACT),
2020
Amira Hanafi
‫ ر ح‬٩٩٧ (A language act) is an open invitation to contribute to
a crowd translation of the English Language Unity Act of 2019,
a piece of proposed legislation that would establish an official
language for the United States. The original text of the bill is
posted on Google docs, and is open to the public for edit.

The work was developed in the lead up to the November 2020

elections in the United States, in response to an invitation
from the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University
of Chicago.

On the final day of 2020, I mailed printed copies of the

translated act to thirty white men in Washington, DC—
the Republican sponsors of the bill.

With contributions from:

Anna Nacher, Anonymous, Benjamin Arenstein, Birgit Kemmerling,
Emily Podwoiski, Hoda El Shakry, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, Indrė
Liškauskaitė, Işıl Eğrikavuk, Jacob Leveton, Jenna Crowder, Jennifer
Sabir, Joe Hall, Kay Heikkinen, Laura Kraftowitz, Leah Feldman, Luísa
Santos, Megan Jones, Nava Waxman, Nini Ayach, Serge Bouchardon,
Shatha Al-deghady, and others.

Amira Hanafi, Chicago, IL, USA

404 © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 405
406 407
408 409
 SUFFERING AT THE
SPEED OF INVISIBILITY,
THE POETRY OF
OMAR KHOLEIF

Tomorrow never arrives in our distant future, somehow it is

always just lying-in-wait and ambushes us unawares. If poetry
is poetry, then it functions like tomorrow in this way. It is not
that poetry is, or should be, full of surprises; waiting to pounce
on us like a cat from behind the door. Rather, it tells us things
that we already know and yet are surprised by, which makes
it ring true. How that truth-like-feeling lands is different for
everyone and varies from moment to moment and in the speed
by which it is encountered—like the pop song playing on the
radio as you motor along the freeway at sunset that brings you
to tears for reasons that you can’t entirely understand but you
know all the same.

The following poems by Omar Kholeif will find you in our

present moment thinking about your body in relation to
someone else’s, to America, to illness, to its fragility when
beset by the violence of homophobia and racism, and to its
own mysterious vulnerability. These are all things we see
every day liminally, subliminally, and even super-liminally.
With Kholeif’s poems, it is not a matter of “slowing down to
see,” it’s about being able to shift gears to find other speeds to
hear things, another pace to feel things.

True, in the end, you may have to slow down to read these, but
you may also have to listen faster to catch up. Perhaps, poetry
won’t find you at all. Either way, we all move at our own pace
as do Kholeif’s poems.

—zachary cahill

Omar Kholeif CF FRSA, London, UK; Sharjah, UAE; Los Angeles, USA
410 © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 411
 PREJUDICE [IN ARABIC AND NOT IN ARABIC]

Khawal
I detest this word because as a child I would hear it used to defame and reduce so
many men to nothing. [Dirtiest faggot]

Fagball
I am ambivalent about this term, but what I like about it, is that as a ball, a fag
becomes an object of some kind of insular warmth.

Gayrab
I have heard this phrasing used to define a regional queer specificity. I remain to be
convinced by how its use and application will be welcomed.

Bakla
This is something the Filipino community growing up in Saudi Arabia used to
spew regularly; I used to find it jarring, but now I find it oddly familiar, almost
comforting. [A sort of transvestite]

Twink
I like the suggestion here of innocence being married to something that twinkles,
glistens; there is romanticism here.

Bear/Otter
I like the accepting nature of these terms; they suggest a comfort with being large,
big, or even overweight, a fetishization of our very own imperfections.

Shaz/Shoozooz
A friend of mine uses the term shoozooz affectionately; I have come around to
smiling at him when he says it. [Direct Translation: Pervert; Dissident being, i.e. gay
man, also means means ‘unique’ by some token.]

Credits

An earlier version of “Beach Books, Texts and

Documents” appeared in the anthology, Creating
Dangerously, published by Sharjah Art Foundation (2021).

An earlier version of “Prejudice (Not in Arabic)”

was commissioned by Mounira Al Solh for NOA
published by 98 Weeks, Beirut (2014).

An earlier version of “Poetry of Contagion”

was published in 2020 by the collective Radar
Contemporary as part of “Post-Contemporary Affinities.”

With thanks to Fiona Banner, aka The Vanity Press,

for her encouragement.

412 413
 THIS IS AMERICA

If you see something, say something. A smell of shit wakes me up, the kind of poo that even my BISMOL can’t hold in
Well I am saying something— your pants.
‘Welcome to Walgreens’, mutters the girl from behind her hijab as she rings up my ‘You have arrived brother.’
bags of Haribo.
I waltz across the concourse of the plaza like a Marie Kate or Ashley post-rehab.
She isn’t speaking to me, but to everything with a pulse that walks through the I debate what meds I would like to switch today.
store’s electric front doors. I enter with an emblazoned white plastic bag containing 12 varieties of pills.
She has been programmed.
Programmed by America to be America ‘What does this one do?’ Pointedly.
Programmed to think of the next client, the next possible opportunity before the ‘They all do the same thing, just to different frequencies!’
current transaction is complete; before satiating they, who are not yet half way out ‘What do I really need?’
of the door. ‘Hey bud, if I could do a blood test and tell you that then we wouldn’t be here.’
Nauseous antagonism—
The putrid air in Walgreens comforts with its familiarity.
It is the first place that I return to every time I come back. This 30-minute sesh costs 200 bucks too much
It is here, that one can experience the delicacies of America. Plus the 40-dollar car fare each way
Walgreens is where to pick up the pink juice that saves your bowels from collapsing; Stand-up position and pace like in the movies.
collect the anti-psychotic that will stop you from self-induced mania; a place that Remove fanny pack and throw it against the office window.
invites one to binge on candy and diet pills in equal measure, all while stocking up
on your fave issue-based publications: The National Enquirer, US, W; a fly swatter? Exhumed?
I call an Uber or a Lyft or whatever car service and begin my ascent from the Mute wrath becomes a quiver, a tremor; the un-endurable.
Northern tip of the city of Chicago into the depth of America: strip mall after strip Epic Fail.
mall, each emblazoned with signs of cash rich proposition. “Turn your dirt into Cinematic weeping.
gold” reads a crusty glowing sign.
I emerge after 33 minutes.
We are heading to my Shrink’s office, who works in the Northern Suburb of Skokie Now with 13 varieties in the cocktail.
on Friday’s. ‘Being up here. It keeps it in-tar-esting’, he tells me. The sample in the bag.
I.e. the client base equals pastoral housewives and slightly right of center young I’m promised that ‘things will get better, that I will get through it, I just need to be
adults: a man.’
focus groups. A Big brother voice—
I would have liked a sister.
In the car, my chauffeur, a Bosnian refugee wields his head back towards me, ‘You
Muslim brother?’ Broken laptop keys lead to e-mail chains
‘I’m a staunch atheist’. The kind that cycle backwards and forwards; much ado about naught.
‘What’s that? A branch of Islam?’ Bashful—a glow as flush as my PEPTO. I am leaving America tonight.
‘I believe in nothing. How can you believe in anything?’ Absolution from the succession,
‘I get you man. I’m on my way out. Bosnia man, it’s a dream. I’m on that Muslim Of sexless marriage and obese desire.
register, Trump’s gonna be the first to send me off and I’m going to soak it up. I am Paris—
gonna fucking love going home. I’ll give ‘em the finger and tell him he can suck x3 nights
me cause I’m a proud Muslim man. I fuck my wife. Hug my kids. I don’t need no Hotel-Room
mutherfucking U.S. of fucking A!’ Sheets I don’t have to clean.
I nod. Go on and board the Green-tinted plane
Bosnia is not on a Muslim register, I ponder? A multi-layover journey
Consider discounting the expressive growls on the airhostess’s faces.
I am dosing; head bop. Gyrate, twirl—up, down, forwards and backwards. 3 hours tick.
Whiplashy pangs. ‘I would like a red wine please.’

414 415
 ‘We are serving coffee now, no wine!’ This was a thesis authored 20 years ago.
Deposited at the University of Glasgow—
Her Irish-American bark is almost puppyish, a little dog— I called this. I call this!
Cocooned in the caged gardens and front lawns of Call them the electrical college.
Pretoria, South Africa’s Capitol. The electric chair,
I accuse her of racism. The electric bazaar.
This is pre-BLM ‘It all will be fine’ says the Arian husband—
She does not care. On speaker phone.
Arrivals, Unsure whom or what they are placating.
Europe, Flickering,
Destination One: The expectant convulsion?
A shower, a suit, a funeral.
A speech to give. Re-entering America, I notice that I have arrived to another funerary service.
In honor of an artist defamed.
The Manic ego replaces the tired. The CTA officers look up at me with a sullen glint: some of them white, some of
them black, some of them brown and just like America, every color in-between.
‘Eee-nun-cee-iate.’ A gentleman of Taiwanese origin with a sniffer canine pulls me to the side for a
It is ended. routine security check.
A life, his life. As he begins to pat down my luggage, I study him
Bury my friend. Try to lock eyes.
The blistering chill, ‘Have we collapsed?’
My legs, toes and a testicle; departed.
I had kept the digs light: Blind looks stray off-screen,
To curb the adrenal sweats. Have we warped into one body:
Is this a wake, or an artsy lunch? All together,
Wine or Cheese? All the time,
Are these hours or minutes? A necessary evil?
The sheets are smooth: oven crisp,
prepared to be sullied.

The U.S. Presidential election is being called.

A super-slow match.
All is blue.
I dream blue.
I see blue, and the world is all blue.
Someone’s favorite color.
‘Can you switch on the TV?’
My neighbourly neighbor—
My cousin, and,
His toddler
On my bed
Slapping my head.
‘Eh, it’s not blue anymore?’ Says he.
The sleep in my eyes
Fall out of their sunken holes

416 417
 POETRY OF CONTAGION (2021) WOKE FOLK

The future is hearsay, or is it Heresy IN THE END,

A new variant IT WAS
An active protein that manifests from in-between the seams? ALL ABOUT
Searching for an exit sign LOVE.

The wounds are as bulbous The words floated like balloons

As the Cloud The yellowed-maroon cover
The Infinity Engine Lay at the bottom of a heap of literature
Rebooting in the African desert By white people for white people
AWS
Books purporting sociological offerings
A locomotive soaked in honey On how to make good with one’s privilege.
A pile of Muck
A Bronchial murmur The broom-closet of a bookstore lived on a piss-soaked street,
Native-immigrants, forever one where my house-mate picked up ‘rough trade’ in the wee hours of
Hollowed of Knowing Sunday.
Updating weaker
“Update Slacker” Exiting onto the grimy pavement,
efflorescing gum buckles at the base of my white shoes.
Nomadlands
Everyone’s land My nails dig-into my treatise on love—
No one’s land A salvaging balm for this Mental Traveller.
The Father, the Dissident, The Jester, The Creep
US: You and Me and Everyone We Know Kinfolk—hung-over remnants of the human species,
observe my shuffle with confusion.
Bird after Bird
Travel down identified routes Glances of peculiar affinity, turn into inquisition—
Extinct on arrival O’clock If asked, Polio, will be the answer today.
There are no more O’clocks
My fraternal twin Joe dubbed my unhinged walk
Scat To be the Chaz-waddle1
Till you are nothing but a dreg
Voided Like the time my mum mama
A couple of cents left on a balance sheet Informed me that ‘dirty Paki’ in 80s Britain was a term of endearment,
I hugged his words as seeds of tenderness.
Baby poems
Surrogate children When we were in our mid-teens
Filling in for wounds that cannot be sutured Joe discovered mama mum’s ‘butt-cream’
A cosmo-sphere in waiting The one she used after her several births.
Ascending, transcendence

Wanton Science, without fiction 1

Chaz, a play on the Arabic word Shez, which translates to ‘pervert’ in English. This is a common
translation for the word ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ from English to Arabic. One also assumes a potential
reference to Chaz Bono—Cher and Sonny’s transgender son, or was Joe too maladjusted to
be aware of such Pop culture?

418 419
 The soothing relief of the anti-inflammatory Exhausted
AnuSol Of being exotic—
Would spurt from its slender nozzle into my pupils, is how I was choosing to ‘spin it.’
Giving life to abundant chuckle. I narrated this tale in my Personal Statement for Harvard.

Hydrocortisone does not ‘soothe’ or ‘relieve’ When the denunciation from Admissions reached our rickety door,
Vision I sensed that a ‘rags to riches’ sob story would have been more tactical.
Could I credit his blindness with my own?
Weaponize your identity appropriately, and then forget it exists.
This mass epidemic of blindness was to spread,
from compound to compound pre-BLM or AAPI
Of our military-industrial desert town Mixed African race would not cut it.
Up the barbed wire fences, past the festooned security guards pre-9/11
And into every expatriate Mama, Mum and Mom’s dilated consciousness. My Muslim faith would not Mack it.
pre-Queer marriage
Before then, Faggot would not take.
Joe used to slap my booty pre-Trans/non-binary you and me
For shits and giggles. I would be calling for erasure.

The fair-skinned basketball boys My BFF, or rather

Ogled me like a piece of rib-eye My only F
An Assyrian as white as snow
The fairest With ruddy, constantly-pursed, cooked lips
Ripest Explained that I was Semitic.
Tallest
Pinkest As in White
Of them all Sudan and Egypt were not African,
Took such a shine to the plump junk that unbalanced my wheels they were ‘Arab’
That he thought it legit to tie-up my legs and arms
With cable-ties The F clucked his mouth and tongue
Before ramming what his daddy told him was his ‘Johnson’ up and in. Mocking what he dubbed to be primitive ‘Zulu.’
The ‘kiss click’ was more Bantu than anything.

So fastidious were his movements It takes time to learn to be in your own skin,
that his penis projectile vomited in me in like 10 seconds. To accept your skin as your own—
To find that queer genteel soul that will inform you to rub-in the Cetaphil—
Junior Year, I was upgraded to the terraced
American To embrace that being born ‘marked’ is a privilege that exists as more than just a weapon:
International But A reverent cause for celebration.
School.
My waddle had arrived before me. When I left ‘home’
The aspiring ripe, towering, pink ‘playa’ from Shreveport, Louisiana, was a There was a massacre.
Native Informant. Of two different varieties—the one where they pointed guns at our heads,
Another between me and I.
He had cast my waddle as part and parcel of my love of—
Horses, or donkeys, if I had to settle for a lesser form of bestiality.

420 421
 The Bad Panda inside of me
Wanted out of the Zoo.
I played research assistant
To a semi-retired Irish professor
Who authored texts that he believed
To be ‘woke’ before we had even awoken.
I edited out his ‘unconscious bias’
From the sub-text
Without pay, or credit.
When the time came for my first surgery
He declined to give me more than 4 days off of work.
I was reminded of his importance
That I could be ‘put down’ in an instant.
Jobbing on a beat in the evenings
Editors would invite me to craft coverage
Cover Stories
On streets that they would dare not pass.
The by-line in print read as mine
But the sordid alphabet
Emerged from someone else’s
Tortured insides.
When I die
They will not make a movie of me.
My verse and lyric,
were stripped of their bass and timbre
Leaving only the head voice to project.
My baby brother who was now no longer a baby,
had become wokest of them all.
Volunteering stories in newspapers of the bigoted racism
Combatted
Offering proposals as to how to puncture
The growth
Of hate, in his mostly white-town.
I thought he an ally.
I thought he was the me I had always wanted to be.
422
At 24 years young, he was about to marry a proper English Rose.
Rents were not as proud as I thought they would be.
A sigh of relief
Belly, flops.
The core tribe arrived to the couple’s rural countryside wedding
In England
2 hours late,
I think mum mama wanted to keep the Bride from
Walking.
Baby brother who now spoke in a pronounced Edinburgh-chic
Blasted our adherence to CPT (Coloured People Time),
as we took our seats in the front row.
Our eyewear filled up under our masks
This was pandemic era.
No tears here.
Of the 120 humanoids present
The core tribe of 5 +1
Equated to the sum total of negroid blood.
2 out of the 5+1 equated to the entire queer community
Present.
The brothers (which still included me/they)
Were requested to don kilts in the Bride’s family tartan.
The temperature was ‘too hot to handle.’
After having funnelled two bottles of Prosecco down his throat
Joe, who by this point had gone all full-blown
Body Narcissism
Stripped his wares to nothing but his man-dress.
My mama mum mommy smiled for the first time that day,
A beaming ray of sunshine that could burn out the sun itself
‘My favourite boy . . . ’
The man-dress swirled
A whirling dervish
Conjuring supple white fabrics:
Swirling, churning, spinning,
Toward eternity—
423
 BEACH BOOKS, TEXTS AND DOCUMENTS
Omar Kholeif and Blake Karim Mitchell

We’ve been accumulating life for what feels like too long— March.
We were informed that the successive qualities of cumulative culture would repair us. Paris Match.
Born, but not yet alive,
Raises yellow emoji hand. still together.
We lived it.
I’d like a processor to process what we have lived through together.
Fingertips rake across stained linen—
Who, you? sheets equal metaphors for wounds.
Was that a request, or a demand? The seams unbuckling,
modifications were in order.
I am still waiting at the barricades,
socially-distanced Bastille Day
But you have not shown up. May Day
I see pictures of you topless and trim on Instagram, perhaps nearby? Arab Spring
The Lebanese Civil Wars
We made a Spice Girls inflected decision to ‘become one.’ The never-ending war of wanton longing.
But you appear to have disregarded that promise.
Happy Birthday, General!
Memory lapses are but mere excuses. It is all yours.
We shall not reserve them for the young or the elderly, or anyone for that matter— These hills, these borders, this nation,
this body, this figure perennially standing in the fire.
*
I leave these words—these pages of memory, as a living archive of what was and
Remember that bitter chill on the 40th floor? what could have been.
Watching Alicia Florick in the last season of The Good Wife— A testimony of illness—
Debating between us who was who in this relationship? in its myriad forms.
Who were we going to become? But also, as a document of recovery, of care.

The solar ice-caps were melting right outside our window.
In the pit of the frozen Lake as it came alive in December.
An apocalypse intending to devour all that was inside of us.
But we resisted, somehow, in some very minor fashion.
The ice dissipated into smooth blue.
Sharjah Creek it was now.
Ships, tender, inching forward at the pace of ants.
Ships dipped in oil and water.
Ships cooked in direct sunlight.
In these pages:
You shall find an absence.
One that we have grown to radically receive.
Two obsolete forms:
Binary genders, hollowed fantasies, un-sutured pieces of coil.
Together, they of ‘brown skin’ and they of ‘fair eyes’ are permitted to consolidate.
Two fragments, unabridged, working together,
scouring for the ink to author yet another page.

1968
1975
2011
2015
2019

424 425
 I AM
HIGHLY
SENSITIVE
PEOPLE

I feel like
my brain is
falling out of
my arse-hole
426 427
 THE SPHINX THAT WINKED AT ME UNTITLED 2

Kindness is cruel The contours are different

Isn’t it just? this time
It is exhausting The sleepy ape-shaped animal has woken from their long stupor
To hate Emerging from the rattling cage
That which you love most From the dormant waters
The person that follows your shadow Only one aim in sight
That person that grew from the same Universal take-over
Seeds as you
The seeds of you 09.10.2020
Different masks
Same tongues
A mothered othered other just like you
Dreaming to be one
Fractured by circumstances
Out of our control
Make two
A cigarette burn, one for me and one for you

428 429
 INTENSE DESIRE 2 (AFTER DAVID ROBILLIARD) MEMORIAL TO/FOR THE DISPOSSESSED

I loved him They speak in the same contorted tongues—

Until he became the only one inside.
Like they always did.
Expunging guttural clatter, that emits—
From their malformed forms
A cacophonic spree of mucus-infested throttle
An echo, of voices, forming a rotunda of Kh—

KHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
KHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Laden reminisces of living on Elderslie Street

Surface as the path makes itself visible in front of me

The blueish-green Church spire still sits at the end of the street

INSERT>Nicole Ritchie taught me sensitivity Training<Ends/

I was the She on the street

Sucking on sickly IRN-Bru sherbet sticks

That Corner Shop is still there

My tail always caught inside
Burrowing through the candy cases filling up my bag with rare finds
Candy sweets not of this Earth.

That white paper-bag

Cost a penny a sweet

The treacle inside

Descended from my mouth
Sliding from her hands down my neck,
She Rubbed each piece into my body

We were playing 9 and ½ Weeks

Under the rafters
When Mama went to learn English.

We tossed my little brother a candy cane

Keeping him quiet as we kept on keeping on.

The move to Hillhead Street

Emerged after a gap of circa 10 years,
OR More, probably,
Who ‘counts’ time any MORE?

The first party my youngest brother staged

430 431
 Saw emissions of mottled turds in countless manifestation— Wet or Dry?
Ejecting from lithe, pale-skinned bodies.
You guess.
I asked them to excrete the venom in the master bath-tub
I suggested that I would wipe it clean in the morning. When those waves cease up.
I open drawers
The night ended with a first-year from Cali Uni Pictures spill to the floor—
Leaning on the loose metallic railings outside.
The ones that fashioned a very Big Apple vibe to this private staircase, OFFICIAL Boyfriend number 2
The fanciful enclave. ‘Picture Perfect’
But he did not have a TV
As he leaned to light his cigarette; he went flying.
I liked the way he kissed me
The collapse into the pit below All-over, ad-nauseum
Yielded a lawsuit, or so I was informed.
The boy was comatose, but he lived, or so I was told. Small-eyes though,
And not fond of subjects such as,
The middle brother who had invited him over that night Black Studies, or even
Has remained persistently peculiar Literary Studies for that matter
Even as the decades have hurriedly sped by.
Conjuring his body
INSERT>I do not think I can engage the people of this world<Ends/ All I can see is my first shit-stained condom—

A cocoon of commemorations He made me fuck him very deeply

In an envelope. On the floor
Always the floor
The crooked cornicing Bathroom floor
Has come undone Living-room floor
Edges unfolding, sloping, Kitchen counter slash floor,
Little flakes of white ash. The bed was for the earned reprieve of sleep
I was never invited to sleep.
INSERT>STRICT TIME DEADLINE<Ends/
I cannot recall the shape or size of his penis,
Memories float in corresponding thought bubbles I am craving to remember it:
Prickly nostalgia I email him, text him, LinkedIn him,
pricking prickles, my I wonder if he would still want for me now?
Eyes, my
Nose Obliterating memory is the only way to heal, or, sometimes.
My,
Belly, button. A dump
My A throw
Cock, A black bin bag—
My taint, Hurriedly makes its way to a distant industrial dustbin,
My crack, Not the one where the silky silver ginger they kissed me up.
My,
Cunt. I am too busy for human relationships now.

432 433
 ROUTES NOT ROOTS

I am better off spending my time auditioning for a Church talent show, Lokmat El Kadhi, Zalabia
I’ll consider putting away my Marlboros for a while. Peeks at me from a broken glass window—
17 years old by my estimation
PLUMES and plumes, and PLOOMS!!! Still living on Woodlands Road

This room is a warm blanket: To be devoured

By a brute
A lifetime of fragments— Employee at First Letts Residential
A Letter who never learned
Indiscreet noises and pungent tastes The fluency of
Hearty farts and heady fucks Taste
Drug-induced Cornucopias mutating into Corrosive time
Stretch gymnastics transcending into Yoga bunnies His sense of self
It happened one night, MR. Capra, and it all happened here. Gaged from the grimy contours
Of crunchy foreign delicacies.
Living
BIG OR SMALL
Room We ship it!

A Room for the Living. That is what they said to the refugees
Sandwiched next door.
05. 08.2021 Glasgow, Scotland The building’s marble arches
Crumbling Rhubarb Crumble.

The roads that lead here

Have Capsized.
New Builds
Council Estate-chic SPROUT—
Call it Post-War,
Brutal
Shit.

Purple sheaths
Conceal each and every one of the windows
A luminescent barricade
Explodes
Onto the street corner

The college-dropout
Opened up a cream shop
FLAVA FLAVE

An Arian piece of delish

A Lad
With signature mid-bald patch
Downs a pint of Amstel

434 435
 Quicker than he can say, an-other. As ever I, coy

El Paso Negro! The words open and blub out of his central orifice
El Paso Negro! Delectable non-fucking-sense.

They opened a gallery here He has been observing me taking pictures

In 1858 Listening to my muttered utterances—
The window display has little to say, words of supposed mourning
Orientalist tripe
Re-configured with Hirst-like Butterfly motifs I turn on the Breaks.
Editioned. He feels the Breaks.
The Breaks; I hand him a shard
They exist to line the walls of the sullied brownstones I Prick him.
The rickety flats sub-let to students— We can bleed into each other, together.
Wealthy expatriates who come here to pursue a degree He is gone before the ceremony is complete.
A graded graduation that affords no designation.
This city has a way of making you feel human
Decaying urbanity Ephemeral Evanescence—
Ensnared in the grip of wilting trees And then it is taken.
Withering sheets of grass
Leading up an unsteady path to nowhere and back. The silence after the silent silence is ruptured
The piercing sound of a police van.
It was up these concrete slabs that my mother mum
First got her comeuppance It takes its time
The Glasgow Kiss Trailing past the rotunda of a house that I had dubbed
That smash in the face The House of Pain.

A young man in a balaclava wanted nothing but her phone A hairy, un-showered blondie pummeled me here—there,
But mama mummy could not part with the photos—
Those low-res pics on her telephone were all that she had left, My summoning
Of a life that she had learned to leave behind Was an inversion
Of a life still aching in her bones.
Pre-Cloud services I was his Japanese Doll
Letting go was not an option. A practice-run.

Now there is an iCafe Once trial-runs were complete

Across the way, He headed out West to confess undying love
A place to lock and load To another someone-else.
Before handing over the goods,
If time could only move its dial A cavalcade of metal chairs strewn across an empty path
Backwards and forwards at our very whim— A hurricane from here to there to everywhere
A collection of detritus unspooled from the belly of the ground
That’s too-much melancholy, I am informed! An every-day apocalypse for one.
A young purple man untangles himself from amidst the bush, The people on the street are familiar—
Exiting the School of Education Resembling remnants of buried pasts
I put on the aesthetically-informed

436 437
 ON SOLID GROUND

Bushy Frames Each came with a pre-figured line out of a movie

Light-up the fire, A Magic Trick unspooled from a pocket
And play incognito till incognito becomes me. Right before
Bust & Run
I reach the point of return—
I see the pictures ‘I feel like we’re just stealing time’
I see the pictures
The pictures of this place. Was this haram act of back and forth—
Going to dissipate
My gratitude goes out to my shrink’s meticulously prescribed: Just Because the laws of the land did not sanction this?
Delete button.
The first ‘One’
08.08.2021 Glasgow Used pithy phrasing
Pulled from the book of trite
He ate too many Corn Dogs—

‘One Day, you’ll leave me for the world!’

A phrase to be howled
Thump, Crackle and Bang
Me and my wheelie bag sleep on in-land pavements
This is a Bomb—the Luring Love Test

The words stick to me, superglued

Outstretched on two hundred-year old wood floor,

Termite dust floating like embers

Windows shuttered
Doors bolted and bolted,
The Rites of Solitary

Alive with the Ghouls

Total Recall
ENTER the Nostalgia Police
You should have never said ‘NO’.

438 439
 THE FLOOR, THE COUCH, THE TOYS
Maud Lavin
The Floor
The living room floor is bare, hardwood, weathered smooth.
Blinds up, glass transparent to the night and the trees sketchy
in the faint gleam of urban night light breaking the dark.
Lights are off in the living room, but passersby, if they looked,
could see our silhouettes, backlit from the kitchen light a
room behind us. We close the blinds.
Now the floor is dark, the reflection from outside city
night cut off except for this bit seeping under the blinds at the
bottom—that small gap 6 inches from the ground. Otherwise
we have privacy. The house is ours.
We don’t know each other that well. We hadn’t been
planning on this. This living room downstairs seems to give
more breathing room than the bedroom upstairs. I run up
and throw a comforter, some blankets, a bunch of pillows
down the stairs. You grab them, scoop them up. I come back.
Together we cover the floor with the bedding from upstairs.
The bedding fills the center. It rolls out. The floor is an
expansive bed. In the dark, it is soft on top of hard. We stretch
out on the comforter, propped up on the pillows, talking and
touching.
Your skin is so beautiful. I could eat it.
We are old. Older than each of us has ever been with someone
new. Old enough to have had our hormones already dance
hard through our bodies in different ways in different decades,
the latest times inventing new choreographies we have not
even completely learned yet.
Because we hadn’t planned on this, neither of us has condoms.
That, though, still gives us a lot of skin to play with, however
we feel like. Fewer and fewer clothes are left on. You’re a
dancer. Agile. You can be on one side of me, then another.
Makes me laugh. And a musician, piano, string instruments.
Your hands!
I think about the olive oil in the kitchen and jump up
to get it. We are smooth, smooth skinned, naked. Now with
oil. We roll. Our whole bodies, so many kinds of touching.
My body is humming.
It’s like the floor is an oversized trampoline, with
pillows. The bounces are rolls, the floor is generous. We’re in
slow motion. And then like rolling down a hill, laughing, but
all level, on the horizon, the dark, hard and soft horizon, sweat
and oil.
Maud Lavin, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
440
© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
The Couch
Another time. On my back on the couch with my legs up in
a V, cheerleading style. You’re crammed in me and I want
you in, in me, in me. You’re sideways, head and shoulders off
the couch somewhere, I don’t care. I look over, see one arm
holding you up. Not sure where your legs are.
My hands are on your dancer’s butt. I love your butt.
So spherical. Skin smooth, butt hard. Round.
In me deep. I let my legs bend at the knees, my
heels, one at your side, the other tugging at your back. I keep
coming.
The Toys
We both came of age in the 70s and both of us started
exploring and playing with sex then. But you’ve done some
things I never have. I love your 70s stories that move sideways
into the plot with, “You know that thing when you . . . .” And
then you casually mention that thing. Me, “no,” and “Wait,
what?’ The details are good.
But, turns out, you’ve never been to a sex shop. In
my New York days, I used to frequent them on Christopher
St. Like candy shops. Some of the toys were candy. So now in
Chicago I can take you to one. We pick it because it’s near a
restaurant we want to go to. It’s too much of a classic though.
The floors are sticky and grimy not only in the back but
throughout. We don’t spend long. Another day we go to a well-
known lesbian one in Andersonville. This place is clean. The
saleswoman is invasive and earnest, giving out advice when
none was asked for. After a while I put on my pink-cheeked,
gray-haired smile and growl at her, “I’ve. Fucked. Before.” She
leaves us alone.
Here we got good loot. Vibrators, butt plugs, strap
ons, not 70s flesh on flesh on lube on flesh, but plastic. Like
the kind the 90s and still zines-to-magazines Bust and Bitch
couldn’t talk about enough.
We fill a drawer in the bedroom with them. But we
most often have sex in other rooms so for a while they go
unused and un-cared-for. Weeks later we get them out and use
them lavishly. We really like to play, so, you know, we’re good.
But it feels somehow unimaginative to us to use them. Like sex
coming with instructions. Back in the drawer. We don’t like to
follow rules.
At times though, recently, we grab some plastic and
use it in ways not intended or prescribed. Yes, this is us.
441
 SWAN SONGS FOR BUSAN:
THE CHICAGO CHAPTER
Stephanie Cristello

A white tundra swan that failed to join the flock

  flying home
Came to the Busan Wildlife Rehabilitation Center
They had to cover her face with white cloth
And cut away at the damaged wings
With her wings clipped, the white swan stopped eating
Reluctantly, they had to cover her eyes, tie up her beak
And push gruel through the slit.1

east 60th street —Kim Hyesoon, “Tundra Swan,”

  Busan Biennale 2020 Anthology

I met the Tundra Swan. She was laid in her bed, wrapped in
white linen, at the Hellenic Home. Under the powder blue
light, her eyes stare at me, watering. I reach my fingers out
holding a handkerchief to meet the droplets that escape from
her wet vision. Her wide eyelids of crepe skin are translucent
now, blue veins visible through the folds. White hand towels
are grasped within her clenched fists so that her fingernails do
not cut into her palms. “How old are you,” she asks. “You are
turning forty,” I answer—a joke we have between ourselves.
“Yes, you are beautiful, Yiayia.” Beautiful, Stephanie, she
responds. “It is nice to see you,” she says, and repeats this

south ingelside avenue

south drexel avenue

phrase three more times throughout our forty-minute allotted

Kim Gordon, July 24, 2020, 2020,
Single-channel video (color, sound)
Installation view: The Busan Biennale:
The Chicago Chapter, 11 Musicians
for 11 Writers Outside at the Logan
Center for the Arts, University
of Chicago, Chicago, 2021.
visit. For her it is the first time that she sees me; she utters
the sentence as it enters her consciousness. For me time is
still sustained, not yet lost to gaps in memory, and so I reply:
I love you, too.
To reach her room at the facility you enter through the passage
of white awnings that holds a blue cross with Orthodox
embellishment above the door of the 1960s red brick building.
Inside you are greeted with the sound of moans and monitors.
I tell her of the dress she sewed for herself that I still wear,
white eyelets with the pattern of apple blossoms, and show her
pictures of my roses. White with pink interiors. She stares at
my fingers as I navigate the photographs. “I used to wear rings,
large jewels on each finger, but now I am sick.” We stare at the
icons after I comb her hair, Byzantine hands locked in upward
prayer—how beautiful, look at the colors, Stephanie.

11 Musicians for When you leave the facility life leaves you.

11 Writers Outside
May 22–June 14, 2021
442 Open daily Stephanie Cristello, Chicago, IL, USA
© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 443
444 445
* For the swan, song and death are intertwined. Muteness ends,
Kim Ildu, “고니—극동의 3리터 Tundra Swan—3 Liters of Far
East,” Words at an Exhibition 《열 장의 이야기와 다섯 편의 시》 an
exhibition in ten chapters and five poems. Audio track, 4:28 minutes.
The beginning is marked by plucking in an ascending movement, like
waves. It moves like water in a single direction until the ear adjusts.
Now running over and over again, it could be descending. Streams
splitting around a fallen branch as the river babbles along a creek.
Toes on rocks—left then right, in searching steps—leave a wet
silhouette before their imprint fades in the sun. Like the opposite of a
photograph as it develops, here the image disappears as it is exposed to
light. The vanishing is sometimes slowed, interrupted by the dappled
shade of the overstory. The music is also like sunlight.
Fingers moving along the ridge of the guitar strings release metallic
sighs. Clutched tightly around the neck. The other hand reduces the
frequency of its touch and air fills the space between the melody.
The song respirates in a labored fashion.
Now this rhythm is patterned by a voice in a low register hum. It pulls
downwards and comforts, like down feathers, sinking through the sound.
Then—strumming. A crescendo of minor chords that feels like an
early memory: light tessellating through the red petals of a plastic
wind catcher shaped like a sunflower, staked in the blades of a wide
green lawn.
For the dénouement, the plucking returns. Tones rocking back and
forth like a swan in the wake. It slows until the final chord, which
sustains in the air before its edges dissolve. Placid water.
Silence.
* cast by the King.2 Following his death, his son took over with
While they are mute throughout their lives, swans sing
before they die. A mournful but beautiful melody, the
utterance of their music marks a gateway that occupies a
space that is neither here nor there: between the end of life
and the beginning of death. The metaphor derived from this
phenomenon is often translated to signify a “finale,” a last
gesture or act. In practice, a swan song indicates a passage
toward a location that cannot be arrived at by the listener—
we can only imagine what awaits the swan beyond this earth.
What is more certain is that something is about to change,
and how is not for us to say. In place of a finale there is a
transposition from one way of being into another (perhaps
nothing).
446
and so does life. For those with Alzheimer’s and dementia,
sound slowly escapes them as the illness progresses—first
language is lost, and if the vitals remain strong long enough,
the ability to speak leaves as well. Words remain unformed
by the encroaching paralysis resulting from the brain’s
inability to speak to the body that holds it. I am working
on an exhibition in Busan, South Korea, from my home
in Chicago for the year that I am forced to see my Yiayia
through a FaceTime screen from her hospital bed in Toronto.
Travel between these three cities is impossible due to a global
pandemic. For six months she does not understand that I am
not a recording. She has never had a cell phone, or internet—
the Greek station on the radio played constantly next to the
hum of the 1960s refrigerator in the bungalow she occupied
nearly the whole of her life after immigrating to Canada from
Sparta. I tell my friend from South Korea about my Yiayia,
about the facility, which he names the “silver town.” The
nomenclature both comforts and depresses me.
It is now the year following that of the exhibition in Busan,
and I am writing from Toronto waiting to re-enter the United
States following a fourteen-day ban on travel from Europe.
Though I am in Canada, I am thinking about Chicago, where
a portion of the biennale exhibition has been installed, and
which no one from the US was able to see. This iteration,
The Chicago Chapter, is comprised purely of the sound artworks
in the biennale. I am thinking about finales, death, sound,
and muteness. I ask my same friend from South Korea if there
is a myth about swans in Korean legend as I write a text for
Portable Gray. He sends me a link to a Wikipedia page for the
Bell of King Seongdeok, more commonly known as the Emile
Bell, and the lore surrounding its casting from 765–771 AD
with the caption “poor girl.” I am unfamiliar, but he tells me
everyone in Korea knows this tale, which chronicles how the
striking point of the bell produced no sound when it was first
the help of the Queen, yet still had no success. Then, a monk
had a vision: if a child from the village was cast into the metal,
the bell would ring. When the bell was complete, the dead girl
within the bronze, it made a heartrending sound as haunting
as it was beautiful.3
Though popular, the tale is likely the cause of a
mistranslation—the first written record is a nineteenth-
century document by Christian missionaries; oral narratives
date back to the Japanese colonial period4—but I am drawn
to it for this reason. Originally inspired by Russian composer
Modest Mussorgsky’s (1839–1881) piano composition Pictures at
an Exhibition, from 1874, which translated paintings into music,
the conceptual approach of the biennale proposed by Artistic
Director Jacob Fabricius began with text. In fall of 2019,
447
Bianca Bondi. The Antechambre
(Tundra Swan), installation view.
Busan Biennale 2020. © Bianca Bondi.

448 449
Fabricius selected and commissioned a group of eleven fiction
writers—from Korea, Denmark, Colombia, and the United
States—to write short stories or poems from, to, or about a city
like Busan. The texts were then provided to the sixty-seven
participating visual artists who were asked to respond to a
single story. The exhibition, Words at an Exhibition 《열 장의
이야기와 다섯 편의 시》 an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems,
is divided into eleven parts across three venues: MOCA Busan,
Yeongdo Harbor, and Old Town. Each consists of the original
text, the artistic installations, and a commissioned sound
work by different musicians for the sections. The relationship
between sound, image, and the written word in the biennale
is approached through a tripartite structure where language,
music, and visual art are made to penetrate one another.
Though conceived by Fabricius before the pandemic (July–
August of 2019), it is a concept that holds well against the
stress of lockdown and global panic.
I have never been to Busan; neither have many of the
participating artists and musicians. My role as a curatorial
advisor to the biennale is done remotely. We respond to the
texts, and in that way are transported there—but the stories of
Busan are mediated and unreliable, like all fiction. During the
first pandemic-enforced lockdown of 2020, I read the English
draft of the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s Tundra Swan while it
is in the process of being edited for the anthology (one-half of
the two-part publication for the Busan Biennale; the other is a
catalogue of the artists). It is a poem about her mother that is
somatic and visceral. She writes,
Things like this happen:
You cannot walk ever again
Sentenced to this, Mother was placed on a bed
She could not unfetter from that bed and return
  home ever again5
At this time, my Yiayia already cannot walk. Through the
screen, my mother and the nurse in the facility tell me that
she is losing the ability to move her hands, then her arms. By
the time I am permitted to visit her, one year and six months
later, she is completely paralyzed from the neck down. I try
to speak Greek, words and sayings she taught me as a child,
to accommodate her loss of English. Without translation we
communicate in gestures, in glances, in language, through
sound, through touch. My hand upon hers and whatever
words we can muster to bridge the gap. Things like this happen.
After I visit her, I listen to a sound piece commissioned for
one of the five poems that compose Kim Hyesoon’s chapter by
Kim Ildu titled 고니—극동의 3리터 Tundra Swan—3 Liters of Far
East. It is one of the few things that does not sound like death.
I decide to write about the work, a 4:28 minute audio track,
450
returning it into text—a translation that is now three times
removed. The song is just one of the eleven sound installations
on view as part of The Chicago Chapter, an iteration of Words
at an Exhibition that Jacob Fabricius and I brought to Chicago
with Zachary Cahill and Michael Schuh at The Gray Center
for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. In Chicago,
the sound pieces are presented without the context of the
artworks, save for a film by Kim Gordon in relation to author
Yi SangWoo’s As boats and busses go by, which accompanies her
score for the biennale. Each of the installations act as sonic
vignettes; 매일 산책 연습 Daily Walking Rehearsals by Korean
rock band Say Sue Me occupies the entrance of the Logan
Center for the Arts, responding to the fiction by Bak Solmay.
It is a track you would walk around to with headphones on
while jet-lagged after landing in a new city: a wandering
electric guitar meanders in sustained progressions of four
notes before a cascading resolve against indie strumming.
It reminds me of listening to I Slept with Bonhomme at the
CBC by Broken Social Scene for the first time. As part of
The Chicago Chapter, in April 2021 we host an accompanying
live recording stream of the song dispatched from Busan
presented with famed venue the Empty Bottle. The ethereal
voice of lead singer Choi Su-mi rises above the track at the six-
minute mark of the 7:06-minute track in her native Korean.
It is the closest thing I have experienced to live music in
almost two years.
At the rear of the Gray Center building, which also houses
the Midway Studios, a path that leads to an enclave of stairs
toward the basement holds Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s 초록은
미안하다 Green is for Sorry. The track echoes off the walls of
the chamber-like space, reacting to Kim Soom’s short story
Green is for Sorrow, which details the history of “comfort
women,” Korean victims of Japanese military sex slavery
enforced before and during World War II. The tale of the
red-light district in the Nampo-dong area of Busan—a part
of the city established by women who never returned to their
native villages—is told through the perspective of a formerly
enslaved woman and memories of her friend Midori (which
translates to “green” in Japanese). Rønnenfelt—the front man
of Danish punk rock band Ice Age, solo here—begins with
a rhythmic percussion that sounds like the steps, perhaps
from flat wooden shoes like geta worn by Geishas. Ambient
electric guitar, then keys, then violin reach into this sound
before wordless harmonized vocals layer upon the loop.
The sighs continue just past the three-minute mark of the
6:26-minute track before dissolving into static and sounds
of nature: thunder, birds, wind. These fade into a glistening
pattern of strings, melodious but not constructed, before
quickly washing away—like water being poured onto an ink
illustration while it is still wet.
451
Bianca Bondi. The Antechambre
(Tundra Swan), installation view.
Busan Biennale 2020. © Bianca Bondi.

452 453
What strikes me is that each of the texts and sounds The white tundra swan was in the hospital for
I have spent the majority of time since the pandemic   four years
thinking about were born of a single assignment. They And now she is in a reservoir
carry the same DNA, like humans, yet are different in their The white tundra swan that took me on her back
mutations, their consciousness. This text, like The Chicago From the chamber of feathers and sailed the
Chapter, is yet another permutation of that same genetic code.   black heavens
In one of the artistic installations in Busan contained For ten thousand meters, from the North Pole
within the same chapter, South African Paris-based artist   to the South overnight
Bianca Bondi is the only foreign artist to travel for her Is now by those waters7
work in the biennale. She and I write to each other during
her fourteen-day mandatory quarantine at a government- The reservoir has not yet been reached; for now, she rests in
appointed hotel near Gimhae Airport before she embarks on the antechamber. I write a swan song for both the poem and
installing a newly commissioned work, which will involve the music: neither is the finale.
pouring six metric tons of salt into a single clinically lit gallery
space at MOCA Busan. The two primary figurative objects
within The Antechamber (Tundra Swan), 2020, are a bed, whose
mattress holds a circular pond in place of where one would
sleep, and a dresser, above which a large round mirror reflects
the space as well as the circumference of the water. It is a space
of dreams and of cycles, “the bed is where you come into being
and where you take your last breath,” Bondi discloses in an
interview filmed during installation.6 This is true for many
of the ill in the care of others. Surrounded by the white sheets
of the bedding, flora erupts from the interior of the artificial
pond: plastic cattails, gooseneck loosestrife, and clematis vines
of violet and blue. Amid the salt, sparse dried branches stick
out of the fragile white blanket as if after a snowfall. Scattered
seashells and an oxidized brass vase are strewn at the foot of
the dresser, oversized porcupine quills and a crystal figurine
of a swan occupy the surface above the open drawers, from
which spill a cluster of nondescript objects and sea vegetation.
The scene appears as if the titanic has been lifted from the
depths and left to crystalize on dry land.
NOTES
The Antechamber (Tundra Swan) is a room meant for passage—
like the bird’s song, it signals an entrance into another realm.
It is also a space to lie in wait. The melody composed by Kim 1 4
Ildu echoes in this context, reminiscent of cascading water. Kim Hyesoon, “Tundra Swan,” 81. Encyclopedia of Korean Folk
I am told his voice possesses a distinct Busan dialect, but 2020 Busan Biennale 2020 Anthology. Culture, “Legends,” authored by
this is foreign to me. What is not unfamiliar are the images Busan Biennale Committee / Media OhSejung.
elicited by its sound: memories of walking along the creek by Bus, 2020.
a cabin in Western New York, where I spent a large majority 5
of the quarantine writing a book and working on the Busan 2 Kim Hyesoon, “Tundra Swan,” 81, 83.
Biennale texts. Memories of watching the warm air that passes “The Bell of King Seongdeok (The
through a plastic sunflower wind catcher on a metal stake that Emile Bell).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia 6
my Yiayia drove into the grass below an apricot tree in her Foundation. 29 July 2021. “Busan Biennale 2020 Artist
backyard for me to see. The smell of her boiling Greek coffee Interview Bianca Bondi,” Youtube.
on the stovetop, the sound of the china teacup as I flip it over 3 16 September 2020.
onto the saucer so she can read my fortune from the grounds. The Bell was originally housed at
the Bongdeoksa Temple and is now 7
stored in the National Museum of Kim Hyesoon, “Tundra Swan,” 83, 85.
Gyeongju.

454 455
 BUILDING WORLDS,
LOSING FRIENDS
Zachary Cahill
FarBar, coined by our Interim Director Ghenwa Hayek for the
Gray Center’s monthly online conversation series and the bulk
of much of our work this past year, was meant to signal our
ambition to take the Center’s work beyond the lovely abode
for our Sidebar series at Midway Studios here on campus. If
the name and effort directly addressed the ambitions, it also
indirectly commented on our situation during COVID-19 in
its homophonic ring with F.U.B.A.R, that acronym used by
American GI’s during World War Two: Fucked Up Beyond
Any Recognition. While enjoying relative privilege from
our position at the Gray Center, it was hard not to feel, like
everyone else, that we were living through some sort of sci-fi-
inspired dystopia and that our lives, our work, our enjoyments,
and perhaps most acutely our grieving was indeed—disrupted
beyond recognition.
I do not have the intellect, emotional stamina (or the hubris)
to try to grapple or comment on what all this means in the
face of mass death that we have been tethered to since the
COVID-19 virus stalked the earth and stole so much time
that will never be regained. I do not have it in me and maybe
no one does. Maybe this is a collective project that we share
together to offer each other solace for the losses we have felt
and the suffering we have shared.
The Gray Center lost two friends this past year and more
to the point—I lost two friends. Is it proper to memorialize
them in this issue? Is it even ok for me as editor of the journal
456
to take space here in these pages in this way? In light of
all our losses during the pandemic? Ethically, I am not sure.
But maybe the loss of these two friends isn’t just my loss . . .
Maybe it is yours, too . . . Maybe this is just one effort among
many to memorialize the ones we love. So many of our friends
are gone. Maybe it is up to us now to keep their worlds alive.
Robert Bird was a fellow at the Gray Center from 2017 until
his passing, and to date we are still working on a project that
grew out of his work with artist Cauleen Smith. When he
passed, I wrote the following remembrance in the immediate
wake of the news of his death for Critical Inquiry’s blog.
I wanted to be sure that his peers in the academic community
saw this aspect of Robert’s work, and Critical Inquiry was not
only the best avenue in which to do this, but I also think it
would have been Robert’s preference. Here, we reproduce it
as it was on the blog.
The shock of Lauren Berlant’s passing found me stunned
and wordless. Here, I try to find words to dedicate to
Lauren’s memory. Both Robert and Lauren died of cancer.
In their illness, they found each other and became friends.
For a number of reasons, not the least being the pandemic
lockdown, I missed out on this shared moment of their
journey. Both of their deaths caught me off guard, rocked
me from my complacency, thinking that we still had time.
We didn’t. I pray that somehow these words still find them.
457
 robert bird (1969–2020): a remembrance

Robert Bird, a scholar of vast erudition of film and Russian

literature, passed away on 7 September 2020, after a prolonged
struggle with cancer. His book Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements
of Cinema is considered a landmark contribution to the
scholarship on the Russian film director. Professor Bird was a
storied teacher in the Departments of Slavic Languages and
Literatures and Cinema and Media Studies at the University
of Chicago. Bird also curated major exhibitions of Soviet
art at the University’s Smart Museum including: Vision and
Communism: Viktor Koretsky and Dissident Public Visual Culture
(in 2011, with Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson,
Tumelo Masaka, and Stephanie Smith) and Revolution Every Day
(in 2017, with Christina Kiaer, Diane Miliotes, and this author).

458 Robert Bird, Christina Kiaer, and Zachary Cahill. Photo: Michael Christiano. 459
Words
As many of those close to Robert have expressed in the past few
days—there are no words. No words and too many memories
flooding in. Still, there is one word that keeps coming to mind
as I remember Robert Bird: comrade. This word, especially
as applied to him, means something deeper, and conveys a
relationship that is broader than perhaps the more familiar
word, friend. I think it has something to do with a common
cause, a cause worth devoting one’s life to. To be comrades with
Robert Bird meant to be a witness to, and to share, his passion.
It was a passion marked by a deep intellect, grace, gentleness,
wit, and a poetic soul. It is one of the great fortunes of my life
to share in some of his passions; it meant I would be one of the
many beneficiaries of his genius and insight.
Debts
In my experience of academia, when folks are talking about
art, the discussion tends to dwell on how artists affect
scholarship. How artists lead thinking—that artists are the
seers of knowledge production and culture. Less frequently
do we hear the stories of how scholars impact artists and
their work. This latter perspective is the vantage point
from where I write. So maybe this is a remembrance and an
acknowledgment of a debt.
For the past decade, my time with Robert has had an
enormous impact on my artwork. Always supportive and
inquisitive, his energy and intellectual generosity buoyed my
spirits as well as enlarged my mind and my art. For any artist,
knowing that there is even one person out in the world who
not only understands but also cares about your work is the
ultimate lifeline. Whether he knew it or not, Robert was that
lifeline to many artists, not just to me.
We met at the first birthday party of the daughter of our
mutual comrade, Matthew Jesse Jackson. To my amazement,
during casual party chitchat, I had stumbled into talking with
one of the world’s foremost scholars of Andrei Tarkovsky, a
filmmaker whose work I was in awe of. But more than that,
he also was a scholar of some of my favorite writers, Soviet
authors like Andrei Platonov and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.
It was at this first meeting that I would start to accrue my
many debts to Robert Bird. Fanboy enthusiastic, I blurted out
something to the effect that Memories of The Future collected
some of Krzhizhanovsky’s “real” writing (distinct from his
work on say, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia—or so that was
what I had thought I had read), to which Robert graciously
pointed out that this claim was unclear and that, in fact, the
author did not necessarily make such distinctions between his
work on the encyclopedia, editorial work, and his novels—it
was all his writing. For the Soviet writer, there was no such
divide between art and life. It was a casual thunderbolt, as
460
was Robert’s way. This observation was both inspiring and
liberating for me as an artist because I no longer felt hemmed
in by a profession, or role, that my art wasn’t dependent on
being claimed as such by other people, nor could anyone ever
pay me enough in a job to stop being an artist: artist in the
studio and artist in the office. Robert gave me that and so
many more insights.
Time and Art
The metaphysical study of time was one of Robert Bird’s great
passions. This is evidenced not only by the fact that he was
a keen observer and interpreter of the time-based art of film,
and not only because he was a prolific writer on revolution
and memory. His passion for time culminated, I believe, in
the Soviet-style tear-off calendar-cum-exhibition catalog
for Revolution Every Day. This little 800-page brick-shaped
machine for art and primary research on what it was like to
live everyday life in the Soviet Union was his invention for the
exhibition. In it, Robert had essays about the Soviets’ early
attempt to create a new sense of time through changing the
workweek to changing the annual calendar from the Julian
to the Gregorian (where 25 October became 7 November).
These essays were placed alongside reproductions of the
wildly creative Soviet calendars, numerous diary entries
that he translated at an unbelievable rate. The book and the
exhibition Revolution Every Day had an ecstatic quality to
them, not simply due to the revolutionary subject matter,
but because he was working alongside his life comrade and
wife, the renowned art historian Christina Kiaer. Two giants
of Soviet art scholarship engaged in a true labor of love, and
this labor was a gift to the city of Chicago that drew rock-
star writers like Karl Ove Knausgård (one of Robert’s favorite
contemporary novelists) and real rock-and-roll stars like Ian
Svenonius to the museum.
Robert Bird will surely be remembered for his scholarly
work, but he also was a great curator. He had a discerning
feel for space and vision for what would make an exhibition
interesting. Robert was a wonderful collaborator (an essential
ingredient for successful curation) open to other people’s
ideas, he possessed a genuine desire to hear from people
besides himself (this no doubt was one of the things that made
him such an excellent teacher.) Yet, one key reason for his
adeptness at curating had everything to do with his reverence
for art and his enduring belief that, in fact, art could change
the world. Standing beside him and Christina in this photo,
I definitely believed it could and, because of everything Robert
gave to us, I still do.
Thank you, my comrade.
May you rest in peace and in art.
461
 lauren berlant (1957–2021)

Lauren Berlant was one of the preeminent literary, affect,

Feminist, and Queer theorists of their generation. A beloved
and gifted teacher, they taught at the University of Chicago
for over thirty years and during that time was a co-editor of
the revered academic journal Critical Inquiry. A prolific author,
they published numerous books and articles including Desire/
Love (2012), Cruel Optimism (2011), The Female Complaint: The
Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008);
The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday
Life (1991); and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City:
Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997). A fervent practitioner of and
believer in collaboration, Berlant also co-authored Sex, or the
Unbearable with Lee Edelman (2014) and The Hundreds with
Katherine Stewart (2019). Lauren Berlant’s forthcoming book
from Duke University Press is titled On the Inconvenience of Other
People. In 2015 they co-organized and participated in Painting
and Its Humors, a symposium with artist and faculty colleague
Catherine Sullivan and the author as part of their collaborative
fellowship, Infrastructures for the Comedic, at the University of
Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

Sharon Hayes, Parole, 2010, multi-channel video and sound

installation, pictured (l to r): Lauren Berlant and Becca Blackwell,
462 Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: David Smith. 463
Dear Lauren,
Emotions sometimes feel like a labyrinth that we can’t escape
from—that I can’t find my way in.
Where are you now?
Apostrophe.
That’s a word you taught me. Apostrophe, not the diacritical
mark, but the poetic form for addressing someone who isn’t
there . . . like a note to Santa Claus. We were sitting in Sharon
Hayes’s exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago watching
a film that you were featured in when you explained it to
me. You had been writing about your mother on your blog,
Supervalent Thought. Always thinking and sharing. Helping me
process my own relations to death and sickness.
Sigh. (a common expression you used)
Chance meetings on the street in Hyde Park. Random
whirlwind discussions. Once as I was preparing for a residency,
we got to talking over coffee about your concept of the
Intimate Public Sphere as I was planning my first séance, I
was so inspired. I remember running (actually running) to
the bookstore immediately after to buy your book The Female
Complaint.
There are so many things I wanted to tell you.
To thank you for.
Is it weird to admit that in many ways I can’t imagine who
I am without our encounter? That our conversations wired
my brain differently. You did this for so many people. Your
intelligence was a type of grace that through its sheer velocity
coupled with your care raised people up. Raised me up. It was
a shield for us when we felt overpowered, disempowered. You
were a champion for so many. I am sure that may strike you as
hyperbole but that is how it was for me, for others.
You told me once: a personal story told in public is no longer
just a personal story. This observation/proclamation reset how
I talked to students and fellow artists about their work—when
they were told, “no one cares about your personal story.”
You had taken a complicated thing and made it clear. It
empowered them and me.
You could hold a whole classroom and guide students
through the toughest and most traumatic material . . . a quiet
autumn afternoon . . . our comedy class’s day on “the rape
joke,” a genre of stand-up that pushed the limits of taboo
464
and in so doing not surprisingly also often trafficked in toxic
masculinity of the worst kind . . . this was even more raw as
it was the fall of the 2016 election and Trump’s “locker-room
talk” was all over the news . . . you could hear a pin drop in the
classroom that day . . . there was so much love and gentleness
in that room, the affect was verging on the physical . . . soft
light . . . tenderness . . . this is what they mean when they
talk about safe space and care . . . It was a marvel of teacher-ly
compassion . . . Even now I wonder, how did Lauren do that???
. . . we co-taught the course because that was how generous
you were, but I was only ever your student really.
I wish I could share all the stories for how you shaped me . . .
provided me with a model for how to be with others . . . how to
say someone who shared a traumatic experience—how to say
to them: that was powerful what you just shared with me, and
I want to be there for you . . . I am processing what you shared
but I want you to know that I hear you and am here for you.
How to speak and not go silent in the face of the unspeakable.
This is a lesson I keep working on. It is incredibly difficult to
show up for other people in this way. You made it looks so easy,
but it is not.
Will I ever learn all the lessons that you taught me? that are
too many to count? I don’t know, but I do know that the world
is a smaller place now that you are gone—you made so much
space for others. But even in this impoverished space of your
absence, this void without your laughter—your good humor,
you left us guides for building worlds together.
Thank you, Lauren. I miss you.
I do not read things; I read with things. When I read
theorists, with art, with a colleague or a friend, to
read with is to cultivate a quality of attention to the
disturbance of their alien epistemology, an experience
of nonsovereignty that shakes my confidence in a
way from which I have learned to derive pleasure,
induce attachment, and maintain curiosity about
enigmas and insecurities that I can barely understand
or comprehend. This is what it means to say that
excitement is disturbing, not devastating; ambivalent,
not shattering in the extreme. Structural consistency
1 is a fantasy; the noise of relation’s impact, inducing
Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, incompletion where it emerges, is the overwhelming
Sex, Or the Unbearable (Durham: condition that enables change that, within collaborative
Duke University Press, 2014), 125. action, can shift lived worlds.1
465
CONTRIBUTORS
Kyle Beachy is the author of the novel The Slide (2009)
and a book of nonfiction, The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches
From a Skateboard Life (Grand Central, 2021). He lives
in Chicago and is an associate professor of English and
Creative Writing at Roosevelt University.
Mark Philip Bradley is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distin-
guished Service Professor of History at the University of
Chicago. His current research project, When the World
Went South, explores the place of the global South in the
making of our times.
Kittima Chareeprasit received her MA in Curating and
Collections from Chelsea College of Arts (UK). In 2016,
she co-founded the experimental workshop and art pub-
lisher studio Waiting You Curator Lab. Her interest lies
in contemporary art and culture that revolves around
critical history, social and political issues, specifically of
Thailand and Southeast Asia. She works across various
platforms and projects with academics, artists, institu-
tions, and art spaces. Kittima has previously worked on
many projects as part of the curatorial team of MAIIAM
Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai. Her recent
curatorial work includes Temporal Topography: MAIIAM’s
New Acquisitions; from 2010 to Present at MAIIAM Con-
temporary Art Museum (2019), In search of other times:
reminiscence of things collected, at JWD Art Space Bangkok
(2019), Occasionally Utility at Gallery VER, Bangkok
(2017), The Things That Take Us Apart at Gallery Seescape,
Chiang Mai (2017), Remembrance at Sri Prakat, Chiang
Mai (2015). She also co-curated the Thai Arts Festival in
Bournemouth, England (2015).
Lee Weng-Choy is an independent art critic based in
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He lived for over 20 years in
Singapore, where, among other things, he worked as
artistic co-director of The Substation arts center.
Stephanie Cristello is a contemporary art critic, curator,
and author based in Chicago, IL. She was previously the
Senior Editor US for ArtSlant (2012–2018) and founding
Editor-in-Chief of THE SEEN, Chicago’s International
Journal of Contemporary & Modern Art. Her writing has
been published in ArtReview, BOMB Magazine, Elephant
Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Mousse Magazine, OSMOS, and
Portable Gray, published by the University of Chicago
Press, in addition to numerous exhibition catalogues
nationally and internationally. She graduated from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 with a
Liberal Arts Thesis in the Visual Critical Studies De-
466
partment. She served as the Artistic Director of EXPO
CHICAGO (2013–2020) and is currently the Director
/ Curator at Chicago Manual Style, as well as a Guest
Curator at Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark) and the Malmö
Art Museum (Sweden). In 2020, she was a Curatorial
Advisor to the 2020 Busan Biennale (South Korea). She
is the author of Theodora Allen: Saturnine (Motto / Kuns-
thal Aarhus, 2021) and the forthcoming book Barbara
Kasten: Architecture and Film 2015–2020 (Skira, 2022) in
partnership with the Graham Foundation.
Jennifer Ding earned her PhD in 2021 from the Depart-
ment of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago,
where she studied visual processing in the retina. She is
interested in how realities are constructed, from the bio-
logical signals underlying visual and cognitive process-
ing to how information is disseminated in the political
arena. Ding is the recipient of a 2020–21 Arts, Science +
Culture Initiative Graduate Collaboration Grant for her
project Subjective Realities.
Patrick Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Uni-
versity of the Philippines and Curator of the Vargas
Museum. He was the Artistic Director of the Singapore
Biennale in 2019 and the Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion
at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Mark Gonzales is an artist and professional skate-
boarder. Gonzales is largely credited with initiating a
progressive style of skateboarding that ultimately grew
to define street skating as it exists today. In 2011 he was
named by Transworld Skateboarding magazine as the
most influential skateboarder of all time. His profession-
al career began with Vision Skateboards in 1985, going
on to co-found the skateboard company Blind in 1991
and later Krooked Skateboards in 2002, where he is also
responsible for the brand’s visual identity. His current
sponsors include Krooked, Adidas, Spitfire, Indepen-
dent, and Supreme. Beyond skateboarding, Gonzales
maintains serious and prolific practices as a visual artist
and writer, exhibiting his work widely and publishing
books, zines, and poetry such as Mark Gonzales (Rizzoli,
2020), Non-Stop Poetry: The Zines of Mark Gonzales (Print-
ed Matter, 2014), and High Tech Poetry (Contingency
Publishing, 2002).
Amira Hanafi is a poet, cultural worker, researcher, and
artist working with language as a material. Her work
uses systems and games to bring together communities
of real and fictional characters who speak, interact, and
sometimes exchange identities. It has been exhibited
widely online and in offline spaces around the world.
Amira is also the author of two books, a number of
limited edition print works, and several works of elec-
tronic literature, including A dictionary of the revolution,
which won the 2019 Public Library Prize for Electronic
Literature.
Nathalie Joachim is a Grammy-nominated flutist,
composer, and vocalist. The Haitian-American artist is
hailed for being “a fresh and invigorating cross-cultural
voice” (The Nation). She is co-founder of the critically
acclaimed urban art pop duo, Flutronix. Upcoming
world premieres include Joachim’s first-ever symphonic
and choral work commissioned by St. Louis Symphony
and the In Unison Chorus; new chamber works for
Roomful of Teeth and So Percussion; a youth educa-
tion piece for Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute;
and a work for vocalist Pamela Z with members of Los
Angeles Philharmonic. Joachim’s debut solo album,
Fanm d’Ayiti with Spektral Quartet received a Grammy
nomination for Best World Music Album, and 2020 saw
the release of Transformation, a collaboration with stu-
dents at Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School
High School. Joachim is a United States Artist Fellow,
an Artistic Partner with the Oregon Symphony, and a
Creative Associate at The Juilliard School.
Dr. Omar Kholeif, CF FRSA, is an author, artist, curator,
and historian of visual culture. Their practice manifests
in words—spoken word and lyric; poetry and creative
acts of non-fiction, as well as the scenography of exhi-
bition-making. Kholeif was born in 1980-something in
Cairo, Egypt, to parents of Sudanese and Egyptian her-
itage, before being uprooted at 3-months to a Glasgow
Scheme; South Central LA and Torrance, CA, before
being funneled into the constant in-between. After
an early career in the UK broadcast sector working on
documentaries, Kholeif entered into the picture palace,
where they have worked for over 15 years. The curator of
over 100 exhibitions, on six continents, they are also the
author or editor of over 30 books that have been trans-
lated into 12 languages. Forthcoming titles include the
monograph Internet Art: The First Thirty Years (Phaidon,
2022); a critical memoir of essays, Code-Switchers: The
Art of Being Invisible (forthcoming, 2023); and, thanks to
the support and encouragement of the Gray Center, an
as-of-yet untitled poetry anthology on the intersections
of everything that intersects with the body.
Emily Hooper Lansana is a cultural worker and perform-
ing artist. As a performing artist, she is most known for
her work with Performance Duo: In the Spirit. For more
than twenty years, she has performed as a storyteller,
sharing her work with audiences throughout Chicago
and across the country. She has been featured at the Na-
tional Storytelling Festival, the National Association of
Black Storytellers Festival, and at a variety of museums,
colleges, and performance venues. She also enjoys pass-
ing on traditions to young people as a coach and mentor
with the nationally recognized Ase Youth Group and
Rebirth Poetry Ensemble. Her work seeks to give voice
to those whose stories are often untold especially those
of the African diaspora.
Professor Emeritus in Visual and Critical Studies at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Maud Lavin is
the author of Push Comes to Shove: New Images of Aggres-
sive Women (MIT), Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and
Graphic Design (MIT), and Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The
Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Yale UP). She is a
Guggenheim fellow.
Ryan Lay is a professional skateboarder for Welcome
Skateboards and co-founder of Skate After School, a
non-profit providing after-school programs to youth in
underserved communities. Ryan is also an ambassador
for SkatePal and a co-host of Vent City, a podcast about
skateboarding.
LIR is a curator collective consisting of Mira Asrin-
ingtyas and Dito Yuwono. LIR was initially established
in 2011 as an art space (LIR Space) in Yogyakarta,
Indonesia, with an aim to build a supportive and posi-
tive environment for artists. Together the LIR curator
collective were a fellow of RAW Academie: CURA
(RAW Material Company-Dakar, 2019). LIR’s projects
are characterized by the multi-disciplinary collaboration
and often-performative exhibition in order to foster
continuous transgenerational transmission of knowl-
edge, memory, and history. LIR’s recent projects include
the Curated by LIR exhibition series (KKF - Yogyakarta,
2018–19); Transient Museum of a Thousand Conversations
(ISCP - New York, 2020); and 900mdpl (Kaliurang, 2017,
2019, and 2021), a long-term site-specific project in their
hometown Kaliurang at an aging resort village under
an active volcano Mt. Merapi. LIR are working on an
online publication, symposium, and exhibition for the
3rd edition of Pollination (2020–21)—a long-term col-
laborative exercise between different institutions across
Southeast Asia initiated by The Factory Contemporary
Arts Centre.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded
moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater,
experimental ethnography, and expanded cinema.
467
She tends to work with non-actors and incorporates
improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on
the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements,
on hurricanes and dreamwork, and irrational projection
lenses. Recent solo exhibitions include: Rodarán cabe-
zas, Espacio Odeon, Bogotá, Gosila, Der Tank, Basel;
Nuevos Materiales, Museo Amparo; Safehouse, Sullivan
Galleries, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors, PAMM, Miami;
Song Strategy Sign, New Museum; La Cabeza Mató a
Todos, TEORética, San José, Costa Rica; MATRULLA,
Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, México D.F. Recent
group exhibitions include: Whitney Biennial 2017,
NYC; Prospect 4, New Orleans; 8th Contour Biennale,
Mechelen; Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie, CAPC-Bordeaux;
Post-Military Cinema, Transmission Gallery/Glasgow
International; Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin
America Today, Guggenheim Museum, NYC. In 2017
she received the Tiffany Comfort Foundation Grant,
she was a 2016 Ford Foundation Fellow, and received a
2015 Creative Capital visual artist grant.
Sidney R. Nagel* is the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Ser-
vice Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago,
where he is affiliated with the Department of Physics
and the James Franck and Enrico Fermi Institutes.
Nagel’s work as a physicist draws attention to seemingly
simple scientific phenomena that are surprisingly subtle
with often profound implications for disparate areas of
science. He has attempted to understand the properties
of disordered materials through the concept of jamming
and his experiments, including experimental and
photographic investigations of drops, pattern formation,
and granular materials, often focus on the delicate and
exquisite elegance of phenomena in order to interest a
lay audience as well as the broad community of scholars.
The commonplace is extraordinary!
Aram Sabbah lives in Ramallah and is one of the first
skaters in Palestine. Together with his best friend
Adham Tamimi, Aram started skating just a couple of
months before connecting with Charlie Davis, founder
of the non-profit SkatePal. Since returning from Tunisia
in 2019 where he earned a BA in Audio-Visual Produc-
tion, Aram has been working with SkatePal full-time
as their Local Manager, overseeing all on-the-ground
operations, teaching skateboarding, and helping with
the construction of skateparks.
Alexis Sablone is an artist, architect, and professional
skateboarder. She has been skating in competitions since
she was 12, and at age 34 finished fourth in Women’s
Street Skateboarding at the Tokyo Olympics. Her
468
current sponsors include Alltimers, Converse, Thunder, into existence and fictions that make themselves real.
and Dial Tone. Sablone also creates works of animation, Aya Abdallah explores notions of techno-feminist
illustration, sculpture, and architecture, earning a mas- intimacy and implemented memory. Arine Aprahamian
ter’s degree in architecture from M.I.T. In 2018, Sablone focuses on future-oriented built environments through
was commissioned to create a skateable, public sculpture speculation and scenario-planning. Panos Aprahamian
in Malmö, Sweden. The New York Times and Rolling Stone locates and dissects the spectral (un-)presence of the
magazine have both featured Sablone in recent issues. past-future within bodies, spaces, and social relations.
Denise Araouzou investigates debt as an economic par-
Nick Sharratt is the owner of Palomino, a London based asite operating beyond the realm of finance, infiltrating
online skateboard shop specializing in independent subjectivities and holding futures hostage.
skateboard products. Since starting in 2012, Nick has
amassed the biggest selection of independent skate vid- * Indicates recipient of the Andrew Mellon
eos, zines, books, and magazines you can find anywhere   Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice
in the world. Nick has been the subject of interviews for   and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L.
Grey, Solo Skatemag, and Quartersnacks and was a panelist   Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.
in the 2019 iteration of the Pushing Boarders skate-
boarding conference in Malmö, Sweden.
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart is Professor in the Depart-
ment of Cinema and Media Studies at the University
of Chicago, Director of Arts + Public Life at UChicago,
and Chief Artistic and Programming Officer at the
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. She also directs
the South Side Home Movie Project and is the host
of Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies. A
native of Chicago’s South Side, Stewart’s research and
teaching explore African American cinema from the
silent era to the present, as well as the archiving and
preservation of moving images, and “orphan” media
histories, including nontheatrical, amateur, and activist
film and video. She is the author of Migrating to the
Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, and co-ed-
itor of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, and
William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission. Her writings have
appeared in Critical Inquiry, Film Quarterly, Film History,
and The Moving Image. In 2018 Stewart was inducted into
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Time Extraction Unit is a multi-headed operation
based in and around the sentient and malleable entity
that is the Middle East. Founded by a group of cultural
workers, TEU explores disjunctions in the fabric of
space-time through the creation of speculative records
using as a point of departure places that resist singular
narratives. Albeit virtually, and amid a global pandemic
by members in different geographic locations, TEU was
founded and could only have been founded in Beirut.
TEU has managed to spread its tentacles forward and
backward in time and across bodies of water and oil
pipelines expanding across the region’s centers and
peripheries, as well as its phantom limbs. TEU inves-
tigates entities that retroactively engineer themselves
469
Gray Center for
Arts and Inquiry
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

VOL.4 NO.2 / FALL 2021

KYLE BEACHY
MARK PHILIP BRADLEY
KITTIMA CHAREEPRASIT
LEE WENG-CHOY
STEPHANIE CRISTELLO
JENNIFER DING
PATRICK FLORES
MARK GONZALES
AMIRA HANAFI
NATHALIE JOACHIM
OMAR KHOLEIF
EMILY HOOPER LANSANA
MAUD LAVIN
RYAN LAY
LIR
BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOZ
SIDNEY R. NAGEL
ARAM SABBAH
ALEXIS SABLONE
NICK SHARRATT
JACQUELINE STEWART
TIME EXTRACTION UNIT