“Isn’t it remarkable to be quieted by something as routine as the sun rising? That was Kiarostami’s — not gift — but eloquence. How the prosaic, when given time to breathe instead of rushed into action — like chatter between two characters, for instance — can disclose life’s most electric pursuit: connection.
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“At the center of the Anthropocene lies what the PNAS scientists refer to as the “present dominant socioeconomic system.” Capitalism as we know it has not simply steered the global human ecological niche off course; it has driven us completely into a ditch. “High-carbon economic growth” and “exploitative resource use” are constitutive of this system, not incidental to it. And this resource exploitation is not limited to fossil fuels and rare-earth metals. Everything from the augmented mental health regimes of white-collar workers in the Global North to increasingly destabilized and dispossessed farmers and fishermen in the Global South are part of its extractive circuit. Its causal tendrils snake back through the history of colonization, of coal and oil, of geopolitics, and, of course, profit.”
ugh, this piece so eloquently describes why akerman is one of the goat’s. so glad i discovered her when i did. timing is of the essence sometimes.
“Akerman was Jewish. Akerman was queer. Akerman was Belgian. These were not incidental facts to a body of work about isolation, dislocation, and social marginalization: she was an artist for whom identity was key, although also inchoate and complex and abstract. Akerman made her own persona and inner life central to her work without making her work all about herself.“
countervisuality 