*reads one paper on artists as shamans
A Qin emperor obsessed with immortality has 7,000 terracotta soldiers to stand sentry over his tomb. I can’t help but think of Jeff Bezos and an Amazon fulfillment center.
Fred Moten from All That Beauty
Thoughts on Kiarostami
Last year, with the twenty-something retrospectives of Kiarostami’s work, I gave myself over to nearly all of his available film work and much of the critical dialogue surrounding it. The Koker Trilogy, Close-up, Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us define his most satisfying middle period. The early works made under the Shah through Kanoon demonstrate a remarkable capacity for poetry and politics in the face of censorship. Of this period First Case, Second Case and Fellow Traveller stand out as conceptually driven, politically oriented films that provoke critically. His late period of experimental works feel overdetermined in their postmodern constructions. The middle period is his most fertile for the issues closest to me; those of form, knowledge, truth, class, otherness and the ethnographic gaze. These slow-burning meditative pieces open up into moments of startlingly beauty, with small acts of kindness serving as the main events. The films have a delicate balance of self-reflexivity, caprice, beauty and philosophy. For anyone who has seriously considered suicide, Taste of Cherry is a generous, unresolved offering. Kiarostami called his films half-made for their openness to interpretation and I found viewing them at screenings with conversation following, they shimmer like prisms, reflecting differently to each. In Iran, Kiarostami has been criticized for many things, including a kind of exoticizing, orientalist, obscurant approach inflected towards international audiences. From my occidental, artistically-biased position I find myself justifying his move towards a philosophical realm that inevitably forfeits a degree of context and particularity in service of opening a space hospitable to more disparate and alienated subjectivities. Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa in a conversation with an often tedious Jonathan Rosenbaum- and interrupted by September 11th- provides an excellent companion reader. Another interesting piece of scholarship by Matthew Abbott maps onto Kiarostami, focusing on his late period, the advanced uncertainty of postmodern philosophical problems giving a corresponding vocabulary to Kiarostami’s ambiguity.
For Abbott, an epistemically unassured skeptic, cool to enlightenments rage to know, relaxes into an unresolved present. What are the conditions that allow for this position of mobility and inquiry, and how are those distributed across society?
In Godfrey Cheshire’s Conversations with Kiarostami, we find the later director aloof, condescending, manipulative, arrogant and generally thankless to his collaborators over the years.
The question of how to how to situate his films in relation to social and political justice in Iran and the representation of women in Kiarostami casts into sharp relief, my cultural naiveté. This marks the beginning of an exploration…
new project - https://www.charnel.space/
For second I was going to write RIP to all the D’s.
A kinda winking throwaway.
I woke up a night or two later with a shivering about burying my cynicism or something like.
I bought the photos from my Laotian friend in a lot from a dying collector.
Our conversations lead to jokes about sex. $200 and you can do whatever you want to me hunny.
She sends money to her granddaughter and hasn’t been back to visit in 13 years.
We show our kin on phones.
She gives away things for less than they’re worth and less than people offer.
The lot is big and sitting in a red plastic tub in my little cabin.
I steady myself to take on these lives in speculative absentia.
Gives it away to whoever’s nearest towards the and
Forensic Architecture significantly expands the field with new concepts for understanding the technologically transformed mediascape from which evidentiary assemblages are compiled in service of assessing the common and globally connected concerns of our built environment. This expanded form situates architecture as a media form inscribed with and disseminating information produced by global politics and capital flows. It shares a broad horizon with thinkers like Keller Easterling and challenges us to reconsider the discipline in it’s common usage.
The book moves through different levels of granularity, offering an overview and some brief case studies in Poland, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Serbia, Palestine, Syria and Guatemala before moving into the painstaking detail that demonstrates the scope of their interpretive labor with two in-depth case studies in Palestine.
In the case of the Saydnaya Syrian detention camp, architectural renderings are co-constructed with a group of survivors in an iterative feedback loop stimulating collective memory with testimonies as ‘memory objects’ scripted over videos in virtually reconstructed environments. There is a psychotherapeutic element, adding more dimension to this multidisciplinary practice, with the potential to resurface memory and heal traumatized victims while amending the historical register and seeking retribution and reparations.
It’s concerning that to ‘dismantle the masters house with the masters tools’ reinforces practices of positivist, aestheticized, expert-down, detail-oriented forensic analysis easily embroiled in post-truth attention economies and byzantine financially-biased legal processes.
Forensic Architecture performs new notions of cyborg witness-investigator articulating interstitial trans- and emerging disciplines to parse this rapidly evolving mediascape. It asks for architecture and images to be understood as emergent of technological, social, political and economic conditions- an expanded ecological thinking interrogating ‘The slow violence of the split second.’
tyler in paris 2012
the way pictures reveal
in different ways throughout
our relationships to one another
