Michelle!

I can't stop thinking about that Yemeni coffee, how they recreated a photo at the cafe, and also our conversations about the specific in the general.

Here's a more accurate representation of that Mallarme poem.

Hi Andrew, 

I feel like a major theme of what we're discussing has been orbiting around image making. What is an image, the indexical power of images that is reinforced by representational/identity politics, the (in)accuracy of said representation, knowability and vision etc etc. 

When I was doing research on mammoths I learned that the founding father of zoology as a discipline was Georges Cuvier, who established extinction as a scientific fact. He proved this discovery by comparing mammoth fossils and the anatomy of living elephants to illustrate that they are fundamentally different species, hence inferring that mammoths as a species were at some point wiped out completely and catastrophically. While this scientific discovery relied on fossils as some sort of image evidence, prehistoric fossils, which are considered first images, didn't intend for an audience originally. This made me think about how images can be used for unintended purposes, and opposingly, whether some truths or evidence-making can be unhinged from images and its metaphors--enlightenment, illumination, etc. Artist Pallavi Paul had mentioned LIGO (The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), which is designed to directly detect gravitational waves, as an example of scientific phenomena that doesn't rely on vision. 

(Side note: Cuvier would perpetuate colonial and racist practices of exhibiting slaves and indigenous people in freak shows in the name of science and pedagogy.) 

Which brings me to another thing that we talked about which is music and sound, which, unlike light, requires a material medium in order to travel. You also explained to me once how feedback works, which is an articulation of the distance between two things, rather than the sound that the microphone makes itself. So there's something fundamentally material and contingent about sound, perhaps fitting with both of our penchant toward collaboration. 

I think we are both interested in what constitutes or challenges authenticity. The story about the missing axehead is a folklore about honesty that is itself dubious by way of circulation. I too think about the re-staging of the photograph in the Yemeni cafe repeatedly. What's at stake is definitely not the accuracy of the re-presentation but more like activating the medium, i.e. time passed in between the two images. I'm excited to think about incorporating that experience into our project somehow. 

Happy holidays! 

Michelle,

Something about your email had me recalling this quote from Joan Didion:

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Something I think that is happening with our conversations as you described is exactly that - an image is being produced. We both understand that image production, in all its forms, does not always correlate intention and reception. That is part of the struggle of what you also mentioned - which is - the power of images to both (mis)represent and how that can produce (mis)recognition.

Your research of mammoth fossils, Georges Cuvier, Pallavi Paul and LIGO has me thinking about origins and how our understanding of the present, how it is entangled/embodied, and how all of it is also contingent on our past. The idea of origins has significantly different registers when speaking on scientific, biological or even etymological terms. But if we are talking about origins as it relates to some notion of the authentic (as it relates to identity formation); I think this idea becomes troubled for those living in a diasporic situation, the exiled and the displaced. And I think another way of articulating this condition is another thing we are speaking about which is - the distance between two things.  

So I think there are really one of two ways to go with this disadvantaged distance between yourself and that location of the authentic: you can look/listen toward the lost elements of your story, history, language, culture or you can move away and look/listen elsewhere. Both are unknowns in my opinion. There is a bootlegged talk by Trinh T Min Ha that was forwarded to me by artist/writer/educator Sreshta Rit Premnath where she speaks about the relationship of being "politically marked" artist/writer and what this means for both the individual and the work. I've transcribed it here for you:

“It is often said that writers of color, including anglophone and franco-phone third world writers of the diaspora, are condemned to write only autobiographical works living in a double exile far from their native land and far from their mother tongue. They are thought to write by memory and to depend to a large extent on hearsay. Directing their look toward a long bygone reality. They supposedly excel in reanimating the ashes of childhood and of the country of origin. The autobiography can here be said to be an abode. In which the writers mention necessarily take refuge. But to preserve this abode they would have to open it up and pass it on. For not every detail of their individual lives bears recounting in such an autobiography. And what they choose to recount no longer belongs to them as individuals. Writing from a representative space that is always politically marked as coloured or as third world they do not so much remember for themselves as they remember in order to tell. And when they open the doors of the abode and step out of it they have in a sense freed themselves again from home. They become a passage.”

-Trinh T Minh Ha

I think this articulates the space in which some of us exist within - which is indeed a real space - the space between two things. At least for me, this is a generative space for thinking about myself and my work.