sirilaf:

“Exiles look at non-exiles in resentment. They belong in their surroundings, you feel, whereas an exile is always out of place. What is it like to be born in a place, to stay and live there, to know that you are of it, more or less forever?”

— Edward Saïd, Reflections on Exile

purrinormal:

“It could be that capitalism is violent just because people are violent, but most people are not violent at heart: think of the feats of community we perform daily, embodied in the gossip’s willingness, part love and part labour, to make herself the conduit of other people’s business. In the end, our opinion of the social conditions that prevailed before capitalism depends on our world-view. Some believe in something like Rousseau’s imaginary “state of nature”, a wild and bloody war of all against all, out of which the benevolent capitalist state emerged, but there is evidence to suggest that, in many places, people tried hard to live together more or less cooperatively and peacefully, just as most of us continue to do more or less today. The reduction of communal life to the nuclear family (as in unit, as in war), combined with, as Federici argues, the drastic deterioration of women’s social standing, produced a situation in which the conventional basic unit of social life outside the wage was idealised as a stressed out and authoritarian provider living with a stressed out and speechless carer. This form masquerades in many places as a Flintstones-esque natural order, back-projected thousands of years into the distant past, where, we are sincerely supposed to believe, the gender demarcations of capitalist Europe were upheld with perfect genetic consistency. This is the order in which the gossip, who has never been marginal, is made marginal, or considered trivial or evil.”

— WITCH-HUNT -Hannah Black (via dreamnews)

Ketty La Rocca, Craniologia I & V, 1973 (x-ray and handwriting on plexiglass, 70×50 cm)

In Craniologia, La Rocca has superimposed her finger over the image of her cranium. The position of the finger looks almost as if it is poised to ‘shh’. Around the edges of the form, she has written ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘you’, again and again, like mantra. When La Rocca writes ‘you’, does she mean ‘me’? And, in viewing her work, is it ‘I’ that imposes this distance between us, between the artist and the viewer?