0:00
0:00
00:00
Parergon?Walking as if it was an ornament.
6:15
Hermeneutics of Ornament.
15:25
Ornamentation and the Erotic:
the difficulty in reconciliation of Rational and Sensual.
23:50
Cyclical pain. Attempt at movement towards the past.
24:54
The Intersection of Ornamentation and Labour: Navigating the Tensions of Privilege & Exploitation.
26:25
Medieval gesture and why it matters.
31:29
**Silent Mantras and hectic Movements. Delicate depression. Post hope. How to get out?**
42:42
The possibility of micro-resistance in homo ornans.
59:22
So please don’t cancel the future, not yet.
footnotes
A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [1e fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside. Neither simply outside nor simply inside. Like an accessory that one is obliged to welcome on the border, on board [au bard, a bard]. It is first of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er) [Ii est d' abord l' a-bard]
(Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London, 1987) Debord, Guy. Definitions. Internationale Situationniste, vol. 1, 1958 Jonny Nash and Teguh Permana. Air. Track 6 on Poe, Air, Melody As Truth, 2020 Flâneuse derives from the Old Norse Verb flana which means to "to wander with no purpose"; The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed there .... The simple flâneur is always in full possession of their individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world...which intoxicates them to the point where they forget themselves. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to them, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; they are no longer a human being, they are a part of the public, of the crowd.
(Fournel, Victor. Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris. Forgotten Books, 2017 (originally published in 1867)) Massumi, Brian, Candeloro, Constanza, editor. Vagabondi efficaci. Ness Books, 2019 Rietlanden Women’s Office. MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/ornament, 2019 Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004 Heidegger, Martin, Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Lieven Martens. Madrigal: a Conversation in the Dark. Track 3 on Short stories – pleasant and/or rather sad, 2022 Ben Bondy. A place I know (digital bonus). Track 3 on Ben Bondy, 2022 Indeed, all elements of body adornment are so important in Naga society for displaying personal and social identities that they are conceived as part of the definition of being truly human. Therefore, they have to be removed from the body at death, since they cannot follow the corpse of the wearer in the grave. (Micheli, Roberto. Personal Ornaments, Neolithic Groups, and Social Identities: Some Insights into Northern Italy. Documenta Praehistorica 39, 2012 (227-256). Hall, Stuart. The work of Representation. London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997 Coomaraswamy, Amanda, Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Coomaraswamy, Amanda. Figures of Speech Or Figures of Thought? The Traditional View of Art. World Wisdom, 2007, (originally published in 1946) Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Harper Perennial, 1998 Ectoplasm Girls. Falkoga. Track 6 on New Feeling Come, iDEAL Recordings, 2018 Rietlanden Women’s Office. MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 noctilucents. walk away. Track 1 on [GNM010] noctilucents - noctilucents, Genome 6.66Mbp, 2018 Ono, Yoko. A painting to see the sky III. Grapefruit. Wunternaum Press, 1964 aya, tailwind. Track 9 on im hole, 2021 Dr. V.A. Gijsbers. History of Modern Philosophy. Universtiy of Leiden. 2020 Twemlow, Alice. The decriminalization of ornament. EyeMagazine. 2005 Jones, Owen. The Grammar of Ornament. London: Day & Son. 1856 Even though Adolf Loos has already received way too much attention, I am also choosing to engage with him. This decision to give a platform to a man with questionable beliefs and actions is a complex one, however, as a feminist, it is important to examine and critique these figures as part of living in proximity to a nerve, as discussed by Sara Ahmed in her book Living a Feminist Life. It is noteworthy to mention Beatriz Colomina's text Battle Lines, in which she tells us a story of Le Corbusier employing the technique of mural-painting as a means of ornamenting and yet defacing the surface, specifically the house made by Eileen Gray. Through this act, he asserts his ownership of the space, marking it with a bold and destructive gesture. Alice Twemlow mentions in her text The decriminalization of Ornament that even today, despite its proliferation and the slow emergence of discourse surrounding it, the use of decoration is still regarded by mainstream graphic design as a taboo—a testimony, perhaps, to modernism’s enduring hegemony. Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime. Penguin Classics. 2019 (originally published in 1913) The critique of Loos has been ongoing for several decades. Among the theorists that tried to deal with his harassment were women like: Norma Broude, Naomi Schor, Penny Sparke. Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2019 When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
(Lorde, Audre. The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984.) How can we bear the present?asks Lisa Robertson in her book Anemones—A Simone Weil Project, thinking near Weil herself. At one point, she focuses on how reinhabiting the words that were misused or co–opted by the terrorizing powers can be an experience deeply valuable for resisting the flattening narratives. Simone Weil lived amid horror. In the 1940s she wrote: The sole strength in the world is purity. (Petrement, Simone Weil, p.16) Robertson chooses to give space for contemplation of Weil’s usage of the term. Weil, herself was Jewish and antifascist, and her choice to give great importance and value in her writings to the term purity (a theft enacted by Nazi propaganda of the time) can seem misplaced or troubling. But Robertson convinces us that it is a difficult relationship that unfolds multitudes that we should aim at. It underlines the relationship to language as contextual, including the histories of abuse, and heresy of resistance. It is a purity that is considered as opposition to force, purity is the opposite of force. Here the word purity pertains not to an essence or a putative origin, nor a coalitional focus or exclusivity, but to a quality of social relationship—social mutual consent. It is a heresy because not many will take the time to understand the purpose of this employment. But this approach faces us with something exciting for me. It stands in opposition to neglect or erasure, it claims the reality in its fullness, offering this linguistic reinhabitation as a difficult fight against singularity and binaries. It opens our ways of coexisting, and so our mentalities, if not always to hope, at least to a discernment that evades the market-driven flattening and squandering and of our intellectual and spiritual beings. Such discernment must underpin any lovingly committed living in the world, where the world is the inconceivable, irritating, stimulating many-ness that will persist nonetheless to the end, whether personal or global. When we recover a potential from materials, when we refuse to use things properly, we are often understood not only as causing damage but as intending what we cause. Queer use could thus also be interpreted as vandalism: “the wilful destruction of the venerable and beautiful.” Sara Ahmed for feminstkilljoys blog Consider how feminist artists have made use of complaint, or how feminist art can be complaint. The Guerrilla Girls, for instance, had an exhibition called Complaints Department, in which individuals and organizations were invited to post “about art, culture, politics, the environment, or any other issue they care about.” They also ran office hours where you could share your complaints “face to face.” You can turn what might be assumed to be a mundane administrative practice into an art project. The direction of travel goes both ways. Those who make complaints, who enter that department, the Complaint Department (though of course making formal complaints often means entering many departments), can turn what they do—it might seem tedious, it might seem dull, all those papers—into art. Or perhaps there is no turning involved; perhaps there is an art in the mundane, to the mundane.
(Ahmed, Sara. Complaint Activism. Feministkilljoys, 2021) Kieślowski, Krzysztof. Gadające Głowy. Warsaw Documentary Film Studio, 1980 Sciamma, Céline. Portrait of a Lady on Fire. 2019 Spalarnia, 2022. Ziemia. On USTA claire rousay. everything perfect is already here. Track 2 on everything perfect is already here, 2022 Important factor in the devaluation of women’s labour was the campaign that craft workers mounted, starting in the late 15th century, to exclude female workers from their workshops, presumably to protect themselves from the assault of the capitalist merchants who were employing women at cheaper rates. The craftsmen’s efforts have left an abundant trail of evidence… the discrimination that women have suffered in the waged work-force has been directly rooted in their function as unpaid laborers in the home.
(Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004) Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004 Alongside these movements, new forms of surveillance were adopted in Europe to ensure that pregnant women did not terminate their pregnancies. Women were required to register every pregnancy and were sentenced to death if their infants died after a concealed delivery. Statutes were passed to surveil unwed mothers, and even unmarried pregnant women “became” illegal. A new medical practice prevailed that prioritized the life of the foetus over that of the mother which led to women being prosecuted in large numbers and later executed for infanticide. Midwives were marginalized, and male doctors came to be seen as the true "givers of life.".
(Based on: Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004) Rietlanden Women’s Office.MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 The increasing industrialization shed new light on (wasted) labour, where on the one hand, the body of the labourer is used up or wasted at accelerated rates to secure the most profit. On the other hand, the exigencies of capitalist profit-making may lead to this factor of production being excreted (as a form of waste) into unemployment or underemployment, creating surplus populations that are separated partially or fully from domains of capitalist exchange and social life. (Yates, Michelle. The Human-As-Waste. The Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in Contemporary Capitalism. Radical Journal of Geography, 2011) Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime. Penguin Classics, 2019, (originally published in 1913) Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones. ?, 2021 Degrowth directs itself at reaching a society that enables global ecological justice, strengthens social justice and self-determination and strives for a good life for all under the conditions of this changed metabolism. It redesigns its institutions and infrastructure so that they are not dependent on growth and continuous expansion for their functioning. Multiple viewpoints exist on reaching this state, with no one perspective dominating the discourse. It is a pluriverse, containing many possible futures. This is reflected in number of degrowth-oriented imaginaries including currents that are institution-focused, sufficiency-focused, communing-focused (alternative economy), feminist, and post-capitalist/critical of globalization.
(this fragment is based on Schmelzer, Matthias, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter. The Future is Degrowth. VersoBooks, 2022) Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones. ?, 2021 Popol Vuh. Kyrie. Track 2 Hosianna Mantra, Pilz, 1972 Exhibition curated by Daniel van Straalen. Medieval Minded. 2019 Eco, Umberto. Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Middle Ages as a pretext, as the site of an ironical revisitation, as a barbaric age, a land of elementary and outlaw feelings, of Romanticism, of the philosophia perennis or of neo-Thomism, of national identity, of decadentism, of philological reconstruction, of so-called Tradition, as an expectation of the Millenium... Eco, Umberto.Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Neomedievalisms are various postmodern tropes directed towards the medieval past. Ursula LeGuin paints a similar story in a conversation she had with Jonathan White (Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity) In it, she said: The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out. Heith. Enter Lemuria. Track 7 on X, wheel, 2022 Silent Mantras and hectic Movements. Delicate depression. Post hope. How to get out? is a description of the album Hilf Dir Selbst! by Christoph de Babalon Yalcinkaya, Günseli.When Medieval Mysticism Conquers the Dance Floor. RA Electronic Music Online, 2021, https://ra.co/features/3921 tumy. Ruins to hide. Track 6 on St pool, 2023 skins. இலைகள் எப்போதும் என் ஐன்னலில் பச்சை நிறமாக மாறும். Track 6 on ஒ ர ு ப ோ த ு ம ் ச ப ி க ் க ப ் ப ட ் ட த ி ல ் ல ை, 2022 Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/imagination, 2017 Yalcinkaya, Günseli. When Medieval Mysticism Conquers the Dance Floor. RA Electronic Music Online, 2021, https://ra.co/features/3921 Sonja Tofik. Graveyard. Track 6 on Anomi, Moloton, 2020 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. London: Zero Books, 2014 Fisher, Mark. Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation of The Future. Youtube, Uploaded by pmilat, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ Eco, Umberto. Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Exhibition curated by Daniel van Straalen.Medieval Minded. 2019 The ornament can be equated with expression also because it acts as a particular type of sign, whose original content fades almost completely in the favour of the meaning it has to embody or to enhance in a particular context. Its content being reduced or inessential, the ornamental sign acts as pure expression, although its form cannot be devoid of its primal sense and is chosen precisely for its signifying potential.
(Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004) a shadow, impression, and abstraction of conventional writing (Jacobson, Michael, Schwenger, Peter. Asemic: The Art of Writing. 2019) These shapes have been designed and crafted to be used as a computer font with the specific purpose of enabling the practice of data divination, meditation, and investigations of the unconscious. This is a tool for detaching our cognitive system from the relationship between language and object, and from the relationship that connects a sound to a specific meaning. A tool for detaching us from our anthropocentric vision of realities. It’s also an attempt to sabotage our common language and—along with it—the structures of power that constitute our civilisation.
(Heith for musicmap in 2022) I learned this technique while working in sound design — you can just like deep-fake words. You just take syllables and move them around and if you do it correctly, it sounds like that's how they were spoken. So between the chords and my voice being deep-faked constantly, there isn't actually literal meaning in the music. Especially in Chinese, which is a monosyllabic language. It's actually just gibberish. You cannot understand anything. With that, even when I play these songs out as gibberish, people still have visceral emotional reactions to it. That indicates to me that the music has effectively imprinted whatever moment of emotion I had when I made it.
(bod. Get lost in bod [包家巷]’s sprawling Music for Self-Esteem. 2020, https://www.thefader.com/2020/04/30/bod-nich-zhu-music-for-self-esteem-interview) Schwenger, Peter. Asemic: The Art of Writing. University of Minessota Press, 2019 Micro-resistance refers to subtle forms of resistance to authority or dominant systems, such as ignoring rules or norms, expressing dissent through tone or body language, and using irony, humour, or other forms of small subversion. While not as visible as more overt forms of resistance, it can still be effective in challenging oppressive systems. Ornans meaning adorning, decorating, praising. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004 Embaci. Flute Boy + Child's Play, 2022 Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones.?, 2021 (Standing apart) also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one(…) To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails. (Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2019) Lucy Liyou. lV. For Piano and Three Voices. Track 4 on Cadaver Opening If You Just, 2022 Orr, Gregory. To Be Alive. From Concerning the Book That Is the Body Of the Beloved, Copper Canyon Press, 2005 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Courier Corporation, 2012, (originally published in 1882) Perila and Ulla. Every Something is an Echo of Nothing. Track 1 on Memories of Log, Vaagner, 2021 Decaster, Laïs. I’m not unhappy. Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, 2018 The insight of James Hillman, a student of Carl Jung aids me. A glimmer of hope. There is this one interview that I kept compulsively sending to my friends two years ago while struggling with mental exhaustion, reaching the limits of my sanity. In it, he identifies the root issue plaguing contemporary (so-called) Western societies as a chronic, numbing detachment from the world and its captivating beauty. The “cosmos” which was the world for the universe, was at the same time signifying an adornment. The cosmos was an adornment. Hillman suggests that we can heal ourselves by reigniting our sense of aesthetics. If we approach the world with a sense of its beauty, we will want to preserve it, just as we would do with anything that captivates our hearts. (Hillman, James. James Hillman on Changing the Object of our Desire. Youtube, Uploaded by TreeTV, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFa0X06hLOU) Bridle, James. New Dark Age. Versobooks, 2018 Embaci - KNOCK U DOWN (improv draft), 2023 Ectoplasm Girls. Dvorek. Track 1 on TxN, iDEAL, 2011
(Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London, 1987) Debord, Guy. Definitions. Internationale Situationniste, vol. 1, 1958 Jonny Nash and Teguh Permana. Air. Track 6 on Poe, Air, Melody As Truth, 2020 Flâneuse derives from the Old Norse Verb flana which means to "to wander with no purpose"; The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed there .... The simple flâneur is always in full possession of their individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world...which intoxicates them to the point where they forget themselves. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to them, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; they are no longer a human being, they are a part of the public, of the crowd.
(Fournel, Victor. Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris. Forgotten Books, 2017 (originally published in 1867)) Massumi, Brian, Candeloro, Constanza, editor. Vagabondi efficaci. Ness Books, 2019 Rietlanden Women’s Office. MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/ornament, 2019 Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004 Heidegger, Martin, Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Lieven Martens. Madrigal: a Conversation in the Dark. Track 3 on Short stories – pleasant and/or rather sad, 2022 Ben Bondy. A place I know (digital bonus). Track 3 on Ben Bondy, 2022 Indeed, all elements of body adornment are so important in Naga society for displaying personal and social identities that they are conceived as part of the definition of being truly human. Therefore, they have to be removed from the body at death, since they cannot follow the corpse of the wearer in the grave. (Micheli, Roberto. Personal Ornaments, Neolithic Groups, and Social Identities: Some Insights into Northern Italy. Documenta Praehistorica 39, 2012 (227-256). Hall, Stuart. The work of Representation. London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997 Coomaraswamy, Amanda, Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Coomaraswamy, Amanda. Figures of Speech Or Figures of Thought? The Traditional View of Art. World Wisdom, 2007, (originally published in 1946) Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Harper Perennial, 1998 Ectoplasm Girls. Falkoga. Track 6 on New Feeling Come, iDEAL Recordings, 2018 Rietlanden Women’s Office. MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 noctilucents. walk away. Track 1 on [GNM010] noctilucents - noctilucents, Genome 6.66Mbp, 2018 Ono, Yoko. A painting to see the sky III. Grapefruit. Wunternaum Press, 1964 aya, tailwind. Track 9 on im hole, 2021 Dr. V.A. Gijsbers. History of Modern Philosophy. Universtiy of Leiden. 2020 Twemlow, Alice. The decriminalization of ornament. EyeMagazine. 2005 Jones, Owen. The Grammar of Ornament. London: Day & Son. 1856 Even though Adolf Loos has already received way too much attention, I am also choosing to engage with him. This decision to give a platform to a man with questionable beliefs and actions is a complex one, however, as a feminist, it is important to examine and critique these figures as part of living in proximity to a nerve, as discussed by Sara Ahmed in her book Living a Feminist Life. It is noteworthy to mention Beatriz Colomina's text Battle Lines, in which she tells us a story of Le Corbusier employing the technique of mural-painting as a means of ornamenting and yet defacing the surface, specifically the house made by Eileen Gray. Through this act, he asserts his ownership of the space, marking it with a bold and destructive gesture. Alice Twemlow mentions in her text The decriminalization of Ornament that even today, despite its proliferation and the slow emergence of discourse surrounding it, the use of decoration is still regarded by mainstream graphic design as a taboo—a testimony, perhaps, to modernism’s enduring hegemony. Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime. Penguin Classics. 2019 (originally published in 1913) The critique of Loos has been ongoing for several decades. Among the theorists that tried to deal with his harassment were women like: Norma Broude, Naomi Schor, Penny Sparke. Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2019 When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
(Lorde, Audre. The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984.) How can we bear the present?asks Lisa Robertson in her book Anemones—A Simone Weil Project, thinking near Weil herself. At one point, she focuses on how reinhabiting the words that were misused or co–opted by the terrorizing powers can be an experience deeply valuable for resisting the flattening narratives. Simone Weil lived amid horror. In the 1940s she wrote: The sole strength in the world is purity. (Petrement, Simone Weil, p.16) Robertson chooses to give space for contemplation of Weil’s usage of the term. Weil, herself was Jewish and antifascist, and her choice to give great importance and value in her writings to the term purity (a theft enacted by Nazi propaganda of the time) can seem misplaced or troubling. But Robertson convinces us that it is a difficult relationship that unfolds multitudes that we should aim at. It underlines the relationship to language as contextual, including the histories of abuse, and heresy of resistance. It is a purity that is considered as opposition to force, purity is the opposite of force. Here the word purity pertains not to an essence or a putative origin, nor a coalitional focus or exclusivity, but to a quality of social relationship—social mutual consent. It is a heresy because not many will take the time to understand the purpose of this employment. But this approach faces us with something exciting for me. It stands in opposition to neglect or erasure, it claims the reality in its fullness, offering this linguistic reinhabitation as a difficult fight against singularity and binaries. It opens our ways of coexisting, and so our mentalities, if not always to hope, at least to a discernment that evades the market-driven flattening and squandering and of our intellectual and spiritual beings. Such discernment must underpin any lovingly committed living in the world, where the world is the inconceivable, irritating, stimulating many-ness that will persist nonetheless to the end, whether personal or global. When we recover a potential from materials, when we refuse to use things properly, we are often understood not only as causing damage but as intending what we cause. Queer use could thus also be interpreted as vandalism: “the wilful destruction of the venerable and beautiful.” Sara Ahmed for feminstkilljoys blog Consider how feminist artists have made use of complaint, or how feminist art can be complaint. The Guerrilla Girls, for instance, had an exhibition called Complaints Department, in which individuals and organizations were invited to post “about art, culture, politics, the environment, or any other issue they care about.” They also ran office hours where you could share your complaints “face to face.” You can turn what might be assumed to be a mundane administrative practice into an art project. The direction of travel goes both ways. Those who make complaints, who enter that department, the Complaint Department (though of course making formal complaints often means entering many departments), can turn what they do—it might seem tedious, it might seem dull, all those papers—into art. Or perhaps there is no turning involved; perhaps there is an art in the mundane, to the mundane.
(Ahmed, Sara. Complaint Activism. Feministkilljoys, 2021) Kieślowski, Krzysztof. Gadające Głowy. Warsaw Documentary Film Studio, 1980 Sciamma, Céline. Portrait of a Lady on Fire. 2019 Spalarnia, 2022. Ziemia. On USTA claire rousay. everything perfect is already here. Track 2 on everything perfect is already here, 2022 Important factor in the devaluation of women’s labour was the campaign that craft workers mounted, starting in the late 15th century, to exclude female workers from their workshops, presumably to protect themselves from the assault of the capitalist merchants who were employing women at cheaper rates. The craftsmen’s efforts have left an abundant trail of evidence… the discrimination that women have suffered in the waged work-force has been directly rooted in their function as unpaid laborers in the home.
(Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004) Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004 Alongside these movements, new forms of surveillance were adopted in Europe to ensure that pregnant women did not terminate their pregnancies. Women were required to register every pregnancy and were sentenced to death if their infants died after a concealed delivery. Statutes were passed to surveil unwed mothers, and even unmarried pregnant women “became” illegal. A new medical practice prevailed that prioritized the life of the foetus over that of the mother which led to women being prosecuted in large numbers and later executed for infanticide. Midwives were marginalized, and male doctors came to be seen as the true "givers of life.".
(Based on: Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004) Rietlanden Women’s Office.MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 The increasing industrialization shed new light on (wasted) labour, where on the one hand, the body of the labourer is used up or wasted at accelerated rates to secure the most profit. On the other hand, the exigencies of capitalist profit-making may lead to this factor of production being excreted (as a form of waste) into unemployment or underemployment, creating surplus populations that are separated partially or fully from domains of capitalist exchange and social life. (Yates, Michelle. The Human-As-Waste. The Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in Contemporary Capitalism. Radical Journal of Geography, 2011) Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime. Penguin Classics, 2019, (originally published in 1913) Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones. ?, 2021 Degrowth directs itself at reaching a society that enables global ecological justice, strengthens social justice and self-determination and strives for a good life for all under the conditions of this changed metabolism. It redesigns its institutions and infrastructure so that they are not dependent on growth and continuous expansion for their functioning. Multiple viewpoints exist on reaching this state, with no one perspective dominating the discourse. It is a pluriverse, containing many possible futures. This is reflected in number of degrowth-oriented imaginaries including currents that are institution-focused, sufficiency-focused, communing-focused (alternative economy), feminist, and post-capitalist/critical of globalization.
(this fragment is based on Schmelzer, Matthias, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter. The Future is Degrowth. VersoBooks, 2022) Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones. ?, 2021 Popol Vuh. Kyrie. Track 2 Hosianna Mantra, Pilz, 1972 Exhibition curated by Daniel van Straalen. Medieval Minded. 2019 Eco, Umberto. Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Middle Ages as a pretext, as the site of an ironical revisitation, as a barbaric age, a land of elementary and outlaw feelings, of Romanticism, of the philosophia perennis or of neo-Thomism, of national identity, of decadentism, of philological reconstruction, of so-called Tradition, as an expectation of the Millenium... Eco, Umberto.Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Neomedievalisms are various postmodern tropes directed towards the medieval past. Ursula LeGuin paints a similar story in a conversation she had with Jonathan White (Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity) In it, she said: The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out. Heith. Enter Lemuria. Track 7 on X, wheel, 2022 Silent Mantras and hectic Movements. Delicate depression. Post hope. How to get out? is a description of the album Hilf Dir Selbst! by Christoph de Babalon Yalcinkaya, Günseli.When Medieval Mysticism Conquers the Dance Floor. RA Electronic Music Online, 2021, https://ra.co/features/3921 tumy. Ruins to hide. Track 6 on St pool, 2023 skins. இலைகள் எப்போதும் என் ஐன்னலில் பச்சை நிறமாக மாறும். Track 6 on ஒ ர ு ப ோ த ு ம ் ச ப ி க ் க ப ் ப ட ் ட த ி ல ் ல ை, 2022 Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/imagination, 2017 Yalcinkaya, Günseli. When Medieval Mysticism Conquers the Dance Floor. RA Electronic Music Online, 2021, https://ra.co/features/3921 Sonja Tofik. Graveyard. Track 6 on Anomi, Moloton, 2020 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. London: Zero Books, 2014 Fisher, Mark. Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation of The Future. Youtube, Uploaded by pmilat, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ Eco, Umberto. Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Exhibition curated by Daniel van Straalen.Medieval Minded. 2019 The ornament can be equated with expression also because it acts as a particular type of sign, whose original content fades almost completely in the favour of the meaning it has to embody or to enhance in a particular context. Its content being reduced or inessential, the ornamental sign acts as pure expression, although its form cannot be devoid of its primal sense and is chosen precisely for its signifying potential.
(Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004) a shadow, impression, and abstraction of conventional writing (Jacobson, Michael, Schwenger, Peter. Asemic: The Art of Writing. 2019) These shapes have been designed and crafted to be used as a computer font with the specific purpose of enabling the practice of data divination, meditation, and investigations of the unconscious. This is a tool for detaching our cognitive system from the relationship between language and object, and from the relationship that connects a sound to a specific meaning. A tool for detaching us from our anthropocentric vision of realities. It’s also an attempt to sabotage our common language and—along with it—the structures of power that constitute our civilisation.
(Heith for musicmap in 2022) I learned this technique while working in sound design — you can just like deep-fake words. You just take syllables and move them around and if you do it correctly, it sounds like that's how they were spoken. So between the chords and my voice being deep-faked constantly, there isn't actually literal meaning in the music. Especially in Chinese, which is a monosyllabic language. It's actually just gibberish. You cannot understand anything. With that, even when I play these songs out as gibberish, people still have visceral emotional reactions to it. That indicates to me that the music has effectively imprinted whatever moment of emotion I had when I made it.
(bod. Get lost in bod [包家巷]’s sprawling Music for Self-Esteem. 2020, https://www.thefader.com/2020/04/30/bod-nich-zhu-music-for-self-esteem-interview) Schwenger, Peter. Asemic: The Art of Writing. University of Minessota Press, 2019 Micro-resistance refers to subtle forms of resistance to authority or dominant systems, such as ignoring rules or norms, expressing dissent through tone or body language, and using irony, humour, or other forms of small subversion. While not as visible as more overt forms of resistance, it can still be effective in challenging oppressive systems. Ornans meaning adorning, decorating, praising. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004 Embaci. Flute Boy + Child's Play, 2022 Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones.?, 2021 (Standing apart) also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one(…) To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails. (Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2019) Lucy Liyou. lV. For Piano and Three Voices. Track 4 on Cadaver Opening If You Just, 2022 Orr, Gregory. To Be Alive. From Concerning the Book That Is the Body Of the Beloved, Copper Canyon Press, 2005 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Courier Corporation, 2012, (originally published in 1882) Perila and Ulla. Every Something is an Echo of Nothing. Track 1 on Memories of Log, Vaagner, 2021 Decaster, Laïs. I’m not unhappy. Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, 2018 The insight of James Hillman, a student of Carl Jung aids me. A glimmer of hope. There is this one interview that I kept compulsively sending to my friends two years ago while struggling with mental exhaustion, reaching the limits of my sanity. In it, he identifies the root issue plaguing contemporary (so-called) Western societies as a chronic, numbing detachment from the world and its captivating beauty. The “cosmos” which was the world for the universe, was at the same time signifying an adornment. The cosmos was an adornment. Hillman suggests that we can heal ourselves by reigniting our sense of aesthetics. If we approach the world with a sense of its beauty, we will want to preserve it, just as we would do with anything that captivates our hearts. (Hillman, James. James Hillman on Changing the Object of our Desire. Youtube, Uploaded by TreeTV, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFa0X06hLOU) Bridle, James. New Dark Age. Versobooks, 2018 Embaci - KNOCK U DOWN (improv draft), 2023 Ectoplasm Girls. Dvorek. Track 1 on TxN, iDEAL, 2011
A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [1e fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside. Neither simply outside nor simply inside. Like an accessory that one is obliged to welcome on the border, on board [au bard, a bard]. It is first of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er) [Ii est d' abord l' a-bard]
(Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London, 1987) Debord, Guy. Definitions. Internationale Situationniste, vol. 1, 1958 Flâneuse derives from the Old Norse Verb flana which means to "to wander with no purpose"; The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed there .... The simple flâneur is always in full possession of their individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world...which intoxicates them to the point where they forget themselves. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to them, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; they are no longer a human being, they are a part of the public, of the crowd.
(Fournel, Victor. Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris. Forgotten Books, 2017 (originally published in 1867)) Massumi, Brian, Candeloro, Constanza, editor. Vagabondi efficaci. Ness Books, 2019 Rietlanden Women’s Office. MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/ornament, 2019 concerned with the purpose, goal of something rather than the cause of its existence Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004 Heidegger, Martin, Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Ibid. Ibid. Indeed, all elements of body adornment are so important in Naga society for displaying personal and social identities that they are conceived as part of the definition of being truly human. Therefore, they have to be removed from the body at death, since they cannot follow the corpse of the wearer in the grave. (Micheli, Roberto. Personal Ornaments, Neolithic Groups, and Social Identities: Some Insights into Northern Italy. Documenta Praehistorica 39, 2012 (227-256). Hall, Stuart. The work of Representation. London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997 Coomaraswamy, Amanda, Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Coomaraswamy, Amanda. Figures of Speech Or Figures of Thought? The Traditional View of Art. World Wisdom, 2007, (originally published in 1946) Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Harper Perennial, 1998 Rietlanden Women’s Office. MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 Ono, Yoko. A painting to see the sky III. Grapefruit. Wunternaum Press, 1964 Dr. V.A. Gijsbers. History of Modern Philosophy. Universtiy of Leiden. 2020 Twemlow, Alice. The decriminalization of ornament. EyeMagazine. 2005 Jones, Owen. The Grammar of Ornament. London: Day & Son. 1856 Even though Adolf Loos has already received way too much attention, I am also choosing to engage with him. This decision to give a platform to a man with questionable beliefs and actions is a complex one, however, as a feminist, it is important to examine and critique these figures as part of living in proximity to a nerve, as discussed by Sara Ahmed in her book Living a Feminist Life. It is noteworthy to mention Beatriz Colomina's text Battle Lines, in which she tells us a story of Le Corbusier employing the technique of mural-painting as a means of ornamenting and yet defacing the surface, specifically the house made by Eileen Gray. Through this act, he asserts his ownership of the space, marking it with a bold and destructive gesture. Alice Twemlow mentions in her text The decriminalization of Ornament that even today, despite its proliferation and the slow emergence of discourse surrounding it, the use of decoration is still regarded by mainstream graphic design as a taboo—a testimony, perhaps, to modernism’s enduring hegemony. Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime. Penguin Classics. 2019 (originally published in 1913) Ibid. The critique of Loos has been ongoing for several decades. Among the theorists that tried to deal with his harassment were women like: Norma Broude, Naomi Schor, Penny Sparke. Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2019 When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
(Lorde, Audre. The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984.) Ibid. How can we bear the present?asks Lisa Robertson in her book Anemones—A Simone Weil Project, thinking near Weil herself. At one point, she focuses on how reinhabiting the words that were misused or co–opted by the terrorizing powers can be an experience deeply valuable for resisting the flattening narratives. Simone Weil lived amid horror. In the 1940s she wrote: The sole strength in the world is purity. (Petrement, Simone Weil, p.16) Robertson chooses to give space for contemplation of Weil’s usage of the term. Weil, herself was Jewish and antifascist, and her choice to give great importance and value in her writings to the term purity (a theft enacted by Nazi propaganda of the time) can seem misplaced or troubling. But Robertson convinces us that it is a difficult relationship that unfolds multitudes that we should aim at. It underlines the relationship to language as contextual, including the histories of abuse, and heresy of resistance. It is a purity that is considered as opposition to force, purity is the opposite of force. Here the word purity pertains not to an essence or a putative origin, nor a coalitional focus or exclusivity, but to a quality of social relationship—social mutual consent. It is a heresy because not many will take the time to understand the purpose of this employment. But this approach faces us with something exciting for me. It stands in opposition to neglect or erasure, it claims the reality in its fullness, offering this linguistic reinhabitation as a difficult fight against singularity and binaries. It opens our ways of coexisting, and so our mentalities, if not always to hope, at least to a discernment that evades the market-driven flattening and squandering and of our intellectual and spiritual beings. Such discernment must underpin any lovingly committed living in the world, where the world is the inconceivable, irritating, stimulating many-ness that will persist nonetheless to the end, whether personal or global. When we recover a potential from materials, when we refuse to use things properly, we are often understood not only as causing damage but as intending what we cause. Queer use could thus also be interpreted as vandalism: “the wilful destruction of the venerable and beautiful.” Sara Ahmed for feminstkilljoys blog Consider how feminist artists have made use of complaint, or how feminist art can be complaint. The Guerrilla Girls, for instance, had an exhibition called Complaints Department, in which individuals and organizations were invited to post “about art, culture, politics, the environment, or any other issue they care about.” They also ran office hours where you could share your complaints “face to face.” You can turn what might be assumed to be a mundane administrative practice into an art project. The direction of travel goes both ways. Those who make complaints, who enter that department, the Complaint Department (though of course making formal complaints often means entering many departments), can turn what they do—it might seem tedious, it might seem dull, all those papers—into art. Or perhaps there is no turning involved; perhaps there is an art in the mundane, to the mundane.
(Ahmed, Sara. Complaint Activism. Feministkilljoys, 2021) Kieślowski, Krzysztof. Gadające Głowy. Warsaw Documentary Film Studio, 1980 Sciamma, Céline. Portrait of a Lady on Fire. 2019 Spalarnia, 2022. Ziemia. On USTA Important factor in the devaluation of women’s labour was the campaign that craft workers mounted, starting in the late 15th century, to exclude female workers from their workshops, presumably to protect themselves from the assault of the capitalist merchants who were employing women at cheaper rates. The craftsmen’s efforts have left an abundant trail of evidence… the discrimination that women have suffered in the waged work-force has been directly rooted in their function as unpaid laborers in the home.
(Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004) Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004 Ibid. Alongside these movements, new forms of surveillance were adopted in Europe to ensure that pregnant women did not terminate their pregnancies. Women were required to register every pregnancy and were sentenced to death if their infants died after a concealed delivery. Statutes were passed to surveil unwed mothers, and even unmarried pregnant women “became” illegal. A new medical practice prevailed that prioritized the life of the foetus over that of the mother which led to women being prosecuted in large numbers and later executed for infanticide. Midwives were marginalized, and male doctors came to be seen as the true "givers of life.".
(Based on: Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004) Rietlanden Women’s Office.MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 The increasing industrialization shed new light on (wasted) labour, where on the one hand, the body of the labourer is used up or wasted at accelerated rates to secure the most profit. On the other hand, the exigencies of capitalist profit-making may lead to this factor of production being excreted (as a form of waste) into unemployment or underemployment, creating surplus populations that are separated partially or fully from domains of capitalist exchange and social life. (Yates, Michelle. The Human-As-Waste. The Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in Contemporary Capitalism. Radical Journal of Geography, 2011) Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime. Penguin Classics, 2019, (originally published in 1913) Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones,2021 Degrowth directs itself at reaching a society that enables global ecological justice, strengthens social justice and self-determination and strives for a good life for all under the conditions of this changed metabolism. It redesigns its institutions and infrastructure so that they are not dependent on growth and continuous expansion for their functioning. Multiple viewpoints exist on reaching this state, with no one perspective dominating the discourse. It is a pluriverse, containing many possible futures. This is reflected in number of degrowth-oriented imaginaries including currents that are institution-focused, sufficiency-focused, communing-focused (alternative economy), feminist, and post-capitalist/critical of globalization.
(this fragment is based on Schmelzer, Matthias, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter. The Future is Degrowth. VersoBooks, 2022) Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones,2021 Exhibition curated by Daniel van Straalen. Medieval Minded. 2019 Eco, Umberto. Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Middle Ages as a pretext, as the site of an ironical revisitation, as a barbaric age, a land of elementary and outlaw feelings, of Romanticism, of the philosophia perennis or of neo-Thomism, of national identity, of decadentism, of philological reconstruction, of so-called Tradition, as an expectation of the Millenium... Eco, Umberto.Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Ibid. various postmodern tropes directed towards the medieval past Ursula LeGuin paints a similar story in a conversation she had with Jonathan White (Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity) In it, she said: The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out. description of the album Hilf Dir Selbst! by Christoph de Babalon Yalcinkaya, Günseli.When Medieval Mysticism Conquers the Dance Floor. RA Electronic Music Online, 2021, https://ra.co/features/3921 Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/imagination, 2017 Yalcinkaya, Günseli. When Medieval Mysticism Conquers the Dance Floor. RA Electronic Music Online, 2021, https://ra.co/features/3921 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. London: Zero Books, 2014 Fisher, Mark. Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation of The Future. Youtube, Uploaded by pmilat, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ Eco, Umberto. Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Exhibition curated by Daniel van Straalen.Medieval Minded. 2019 The ornament can be equated with expression also because it acts as a particular type of sign, whose original content fades almost completely in the favour of the meaning it has to embody or to enhance in a particular context. Its content being reduced or inessential, the ornamental sign acts as pure expression, although its form cannot be devoid of its primal sense and is chosen precisely for its signifying potential.
(Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004) a shadow, impression, and abstraction of conventional writing (Jacobson, Michael, Schwenger, Peter. Asemic: The Art of Writing. 2019) These shapes have been designed and crafted to be used as a computer font with the specific purpose of enabling the practice of data divination, meditation, and investigations of the unconscious. This is a tool for detaching our cognitive system from the relationship between language and object, and from the relationship that connects a sound to a specific meaning. A tool for detaching us from our anthropocentric vision of realities. It’s also an attempt to sabotage our common language and—along with it—the structures of power that constitute our civilisation.
(Heith for musicmap in 2022) I learned this technique while working in sound design — you can just like deep-fake words. You just take syllables and move them around and if you do it correctly, it sounds like that's how they were spoken. So between the chords and my voice being deep-faked constantly, there isn't actually literal meaning in the music. Especially in Chinese, which is a monosyllabic language. It's actually just gibberish. You cannot understand anything. With that, even when I play these songs out as gibberish, people still have visceral emotional reactions to it. That indicates to me that the music has effectively imprinted whatever moment of emotion I had when I made it.
(bod. Get lost in bod [包家巷]’s sprawling Music for Self-Esteem. 2020, https://www.thefader.com/2020/04/30/bod-nich-zhu-music-for-self-esteem-interview) Schwenger, Peter. Asemic: The Art of Writing. University of Minessota Press, 2019 Micro-resistance refers to subtle forms of resistance to authority or dominant systems, such as ignoring rules or norms, expressing dissent through tone or body language, and using irony, humour, or other forms of small subversion. While not as visible as more overt forms of resistance, it can still be effective in challenging oppressive systems. ornans meaning adorning, decorating, praising Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004 Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones.?, 2021 forms that are able to perceive and feel (Standing apart) also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one(…) To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails. (Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2019) Orr, Gregory. To Be Alive. From Concerning the Book That Is the Body Of the Beloved, Copper Canyon Press, 2005 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Courier Corporation, 2012, (originally published in 1882) Decaster, Laïs. I’m not unhappy. Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, 2018 The insight of James Hillman, a student of Carl Jung aids me. A glimmer of hope. There is this one interview that I kept compulsively sending to my friends two years ago while struggling with mental exhaustion, reaching the limits of my sanity. In it, he identifies the root issue plaguing contemporary (so-called) Western societies as a chronic, numbing detachment from the world and its captivating beauty. The “cosmos” which was the world for the universe, was at the same time signifying an adornment. The cosmos was an adornment. Hillman suggests that we can heal ourselves by reigniting our sense of aesthetics. If we approach the world with a sense of its beauty, we will want to preserve it, just as we would do with anything that captivates our hearts. (Hillman, James. James Hillman on Changing the Object of our Desire. Youtube, Uploaded by TreeTV, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFa0X06hLOU) Bridle, James. New Dark Age. Versobooks, 2018
(Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London, 1987) Debord, Guy. Definitions. Internationale Situationniste, vol. 1, 1958 Flâneuse derives from the Old Norse Verb flana which means to "to wander with no purpose"; The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed there .... The simple flâneur is always in full possession of their individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world...which intoxicates them to the point where they forget themselves. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to them, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; they are no longer a human being, they are a part of the public, of the crowd.
(Fournel, Victor. Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris. Forgotten Books, 2017 (originally published in 1867)) Massumi, Brian, Candeloro, Constanza, editor. Vagabondi efficaci. Ness Books, 2019 Rietlanden Women’s Office. MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/ornament, 2019 concerned with the purpose, goal of something rather than the cause of its existence Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004 Heidegger, Martin, Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Ibid. Ibid. Indeed, all elements of body adornment are so important in Naga society for displaying personal and social identities that they are conceived as part of the definition of being truly human. Therefore, they have to be removed from the body at death, since they cannot follow the corpse of the wearer in the grave. (Micheli, Roberto. Personal Ornaments, Neolithic Groups, and Social Identities: Some Insights into Northern Italy. Documenta Praehistorica 39, 2012 (227-256). Hall, Stuart. The work of Representation. London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997 Coomaraswamy, Amanda, Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Coomaraswamy, Amanda. Figures of Speech Or Figures of Thought? The Traditional View of Art. World Wisdom, 2007, (originally published in 1946) Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004. Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Harper Perennial, 1998 Rietlanden Women’s Office. MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 Ono, Yoko. A painting to see the sky III. Grapefruit. Wunternaum Press, 1964 Dr. V.A. Gijsbers. History of Modern Philosophy. Universtiy of Leiden. 2020 Twemlow, Alice. The decriminalization of ornament. EyeMagazine. 2005 Jones, Owen. The Grammar of Ornament. London: Day & Son. 1856 Even though Adolf Loos has already received way too much attention, I am also choosing to engage with him. This decision to give a platform to a man with questionable beliefs and actions is a complex one, however, as a feminist, it is important to examine and critique these figures as part of living in proximity to a nerve, as discussed by Sara Ahmed in her book Living a Feminist Life. It is noteworthy to mention Beatriz Colomina's text Battle Lines, in which she tells us a story of Le Corbusier employing the technique of mural-painting as a means of ornamenting and yet defacing the surface, specifically the house made by Eileen Gray. Through this act, he asserts his ownership of the space, marking it with a bold and destructive gesture. Alice Twemlow mentions in her text The decriminalization of Ornament that even today, despite its proliferation and the slow emergence of discourse surrounding it, the use of decoration is still regarded by mainstream graphic design as a taboo—a testimony, perhaps, to modernism’s enduring hegemony. Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime. Penguin Classics. 2019 (originally published in 1913) Ibid. The critique of Loos has been ongoing for several decades. Among the theorists that tried to deal with his harassment were women like: Norma Broude, Naomi Schor, Penny Sparke. Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2019 When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
(Lorde, Audre. The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984.) Ibid. How can we bear the present?asks Lisa Robertson in her book Anemones—A Simone Weil Project, thinking near Weil herself. At one point, she focuses on how reinhabiting the words that were misused or co–opted by the terrorizing powers can be an experience deeply valuable for resisting the flattening narratives. Simone Weil lived amid horror. In the 1940s she wrote: The sole strength in the world is purity. (Petrement, Simone Weil, p.16) Robertson chooses to give space for contemplation of Weil’s usage of the term. Weil, herself was Jewish and antifascist, and her choice to give great importance and value in her writings to the term purity (a theft enacted by Nazi propaganda of the time) can seem misplaced or troubling. But Robertson convinces us that it is a difficult relationship that unfolds multitudes that we should aim at. It underlines the relationship to language as contextual, including the histories of abuse, and heresy of resistance. It is a purity that is considered as opposition to force, purity is the opposite of force. Here the word purity pertains not to an essence or a putative origin, nor a coalitional focus or exclusivity, but to a quality of social relationship—social mutual consent. It is a heresy because not many will take the time to understand the purpose of this employment. But this approach faces us with something exciting for me. It stands in opposition to neglect or erasure, it claims the reality in its fullness, offering this linguistic reinhabitation as a difficult fight against singularity and binaries. It opens our ways of coexisting, and so our mentalities, if not always to hope, at least to a discernment that evades the market-driven flattening and squandering and of our intellectual and spiritual beings. Such discernment must underpin any lovingly committed living in the world, where the world is the inconceivable, irritating, stimulating many-ness that will persist nonetheless to the end, whether personal or global. When we recover a potential from materials, when we refuse to use things properly, we are often understood not only as causing damage but as intending what we cause. Queer use could thus also be interpreted as vandalism: “the wilful destruction of the venerable and beautiful.” Sara Ahmed for feminstkilljoys blog Consider how feminist artists have made use of complaint, or how feminist art can be complaint. The Guerrilla Girls, for instance, had an exhibition called Complaints Department, in which individuals and organizations were invited to post “about art, culture, politics, the environment, or any other issue they care about.” They also ran office hours where you could share your complaints “face to face.” You can turn what might be assumed to be a mundane administrative practice into an art project. The direction of travel goes both ways. Those who make complaints, who enter that department, the Complaint Department (though of course making formal complaints often means entering many departments), can turn what they do—it might seem tedious, it might seem dull, all those papers—into art. Or perhaps there is no turning involved; perhaps there is an art in the mundane, to the mundane.
(Ahmed, Sara. Complaint Activism. Feministkilljoys, 2021) Kieślowski, Krzysztof. Gadające Głowy. Warsaw Documentary Film Studio, 1980 Sciamma, Céline. Portrait of a Lady on Fire. 2019 Spalarnia, 2022. Ziemia. On USTA Important factor in the devaluation of women’s labour was the campaign that craft workers mounted, starting in the late 15th century, to exclude female workers from their workshops, presumably to protect themselves from the assault of the capitalist merchants who were employing women at cheaper rates. The craftsmen’s efforts have left an abundant trail of evidence… the discrimination that women have suffered in the waged work-force has been directly rooted in their function as unpaid laborers in the home.
(Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004) Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004 Ibid. Alongside these movements, new forms of surveillance were adopted in Europe to ensure that pregnant women did not terminate their pregnancies. Women were required to register every pregnancy and were sentenced to death if their infants died after a concealed delivery. Statutes were passed to surveil unwed mothers, and even unmarried pregnant women “became” illegal. A new medical practice prevailed that prioritized the life of the foetus over that of the mother which led to women being prosecuted in large numbers and later executed for infanticide. Midwives were marginalized, and male doctors came to be seen as the true "givers of life.".
(Based on: Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004) Rietlanden Women’s Office.MsHeresies 2—Useful Work versus Useless Toil. Rietlanden Women’s Office, 2019 The increasing industrialization shed new light on (wasted) labour, where on the one hand, the body of the labourer is used up or wasted at accelerated rates to secure the most profit. On the other hand, the exigencies of capitalist profit-making may lead to this factor of production being excreted (as a form of waste) into unemployment or underemployment, creating surplus populations that are separated partially or fully from domains of capitalist exchange and social life. (Yates, Michelle. The Human-As-Waste. The Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in Contemporary Capitalism. Radical Journal of Geography, 2011) Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime. Penguin Classics, 2019, (originally published in 1913) Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones,2021 Degrowth directs itself at reaching a society that enables global ecological justice, strengthens social justice and self-determination and strives for a good life for all under the conditions of this changed metabolism. It redesigns its institutions and infrastructure so that they are not dependent on growth and continuous expansion for their functioning. Multiple viewpoints exist on reaching this state, with no one perspective dominating the discourse. It is a pluriverse, containing many possible futures. This is reflected in number of degrowth-oriented imaginaries including currents that are institution-focused, sufficiency-focused, communing-focused (alternative economy), feminist, and post-capitalist/critical of globalization.
(this fragment is based on Schmelzer, Matthias, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter. The Future is Degrowth. VersoBooks, 2022) Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones,2021 Exhibition curated by Daniel van Straalen. Medieval Minded. 2019 Eco, Umberto. Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Middle Ages as a pretext, as the site of an ironical revisitation, as a barbaric age, a land of elementary and outlaw feelings, of Romanticism, of the philosophia perennis or of neo-Thomism, of national identity, of decadentism, of philological reconstruction, of so-called Tradition, as an expectation of the Millenium... Eco, Umberto.Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Ibid. various postmodern tropes directed towards the medieval past Ursula LeGuin paints a similar story in a conversation she had with Jonathan White (Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity) In it, she said: The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out. description of the album Hilf Dir Selbst! by Christoph de Babalon Yalcinkaya, Günseli.When Medieval Mysticism Conquers the Dance Floor. RA Electronic Music Online, 2021, https://ra.co/features/3921 Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/imagination, 2017 Yalcinkaya, Günseli. When Medieval Mysticism Conquers the Dance Floor. RA Electronic Music Online, 2021, https://ra.co/features/3921 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. London: Zero Books, 2014 Fisher, Mark. Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation of The Future. Youtube, Uploaded by pmilat, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ Eco, Umberto. Dreaming of the Middle Ages. Travels Through Hyperreality, 1987 Exhibition curated by Daniel van Straalen.Medieval Minded. 2019 The ornament can be equated with expression also because it acts as a particular type of sign, whose original content fades almost completely in the favour of the meaning it has to embody or to enhance in a particular context. Its content being reduced or inessential, the ornamental sign acts as pure expression, although its form cannot be devoid of its primal sense and is chosen precisely for its signifying potential.
(Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook, 2004) a shadow, impression, and abstraction of conventional writing (Jacobson, Michael, Schwenger, Peter. Asemic: The Art of Writing. 2019) These shapes have been designed and crafted to be used as a computer font with the specific purpose of enabling the practice of data divination, meditation, and investigations of the unconscious. This is a tool for detaching our cognitive system from the relationship between language and object, and from the relationship that connects a sound to a specific meaning. A tool for detaching us from our anthropocentric vision of realities. It’s also an attempt to sabotage our common language and—along with it—the structures of power that constitute our civilisation.
(Heith for musicmap in 2022) I learned this technique while working in sound design — you can just like deep-fake words. You just take syllables and move them around and if you do it correctly, it sounds like that's how they were spoken. So between the chords and my voice being deep-faked constantly, there isn't actually literal meaning in the music. Especially in Chinese, which is a monosyllabic language. It's actually just gibberish. You cannot understand anything. With that, even when I play these songs out as gibberish, people still have visceral emotional reactions to it. That indicates to me that the music has effectively imprinted whatever moment of emotion I had when I made it.
(bod. Get lost in bod [包家巷]’s sprawling Music for Self-Esteem. 2020, https://www.thefader.com/2020/04/30/bod-nich-zhu-music-for-self-esteem-interview) Schwenger, Peter. Asemic: The Art of Writing. University of Minessota Press, 2019 Micro-resistance refers to subtle forms of resistance to authority or dominant systems, such as ignoring rules or norms, expressing dissent through tone or body language, and using irony, humour, or other forms of small subversion. While not as visible as more overt forms of resistance, it can still be effective in challenging oppressive systems. ornans meaning adorning, decorating, praising Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004 Robertson, Lisa. A Simone Weil project: Anemones.?, 2021 forms that are able to perceive and feel (Standing apart) also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one(…) To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails. (Odell, Jenny. How to do nothing. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2019) Orr, Gregory. To Be Alive. From Concerning the Book That Is the Body Of the Beloved, Copper Canyon Press, 2005 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Courier Corporation, 2012, (originally published in 1882) Decaster, Laïs. I’m not unhappy. Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, 2018 The insight of James Hillman, a student of Carl Jung aids me. A glimmer of hope. There is this one interview that I kept compulsively sending to my friends two years ago while struggling with mental exhaustion, reaching the limits of my sanity. In it, he identifies the root issue plaguing contemporary (so-called) Western societies as a chronic, numbing detachment from the world and its captivating beauty. The “cosmos” which was the world for the universe, was at the same time signifying an adornment. The cosmos was an adornment. Hillman suggests that we can heal ourselves by reigniting our sense of aesthetics. If we approach the world with a sense of its beauty, we will want to preserve it, just as we would do with anything that captivates our hearts. (Hillman, James. James Hillman on Changing the Object of our Desire. Youtube, Uploaded by TreeTV, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFa0X06hLOU) Bridle, James. New Dark Age. Versobooks, 2018