An outlet for nervous and creative energy in our isolated, uncertain, frightening, and infuriating present; a space for collaboration, connection, and sharing of texts, images, sounds and whatever else.
11. October 2020: David Frohnapfel shared a work by Getho J. Baptiste and Jessica Ruffin placed a couple items on the table.
Cloudscapes.
I realize now that over these months I’ve become an omelet. Between self and screen, the lack now too great. Or, is it that I can now clearly see I and you in the mirror – boxed in and clearly defined? In any case, this amoeba has pulled back its pseudopodia. Still an I but viscous, floating.
Now in the clouds, I test my projection on the mountains, on the valleys of suspended crystals, and the wisps above.
Do they look back?
Perhaps we can meet here if not on the ground.
// jr // comment
Unfortunately, the affective politics captured by the artwork "Etazini Tonbe“ (USA’s Downfall) by Port-au-Prince based artist Getho J. Baptiste from 2013 are terribly on point at this moment in time.
// df // comment
We went on summer hiatus. - S&J
12. July 2020: Amy Fung-yi Lee, Simone Stirner, and Jessica Ruffin have placed items on the table.
// ss // comment
I made this little world the other day. I’d spent months projecting myself into screen images of aquascapes and “jarrariums,” like you are now. Beautiful and distant, I imagined the delicate plants would melt in my hands or under my gaze, if I ever got too close. They still might. But as it now sits on the window sill, I’ve learned there is something in the passing glance - something different from capture and durational contemplation. I don’t know if I would call it pleasure; it’s some kind of release.
// jr // comment
14. June 2020: Items have been placed on the table by Sara Friedman, Kathleen Powers, Yujin Park, and Teresa Pittman-Chavez.
I’m not sure what it meant to see the philosophers’ faces on the wall. It was late afternoon, 20 steps behind a downtown Tunis train station. By that week, I’d begun to recognize the call of the heat in the morning. I stood in the shade. I’d been meaning to get to the site of this artwork for a long time. There was then, as there’s now, an anticipation, a sense of distance before the gravel, cement and metal where the interrelation between art and revolution, between philosophy and revolution, was so obvious it didn’t need to be understood.
The artwork at Bab Saadoun was erected by graffiti group Ahl El Kahf during the Tunisian Revolution December - January 2011. Photos were taken June 2011 and depict portraits of Edward Said, Antonio Negri, Mohmad Chokri and Gilles Deleuze.
// kp // comment
this apocalypse
so many road trips. anytime there was a break from school. up and down the western US. windows down and no cars ahead. the road is how commercials showed us freedom. i felt it like it was real, middle-class myth made well. is this how patriots are indoctrinated?
the automobile and the highways--giving rise to picket fences and uniform lawns--carved white supremacy into the land, entrenching stolen wealth, kettling color and poverty. amerika showed a false face to the third world, a pretty picture of peace and plenty, not the neighborhood that got raised to build the highway. we must accept my immigrant parents’ american dream is a lie so that King's might have a shot.
this city’s legacy, racist grand-architect, building highways in the name of white supremacy, obsessed with keeping Black and Brown folks away from the water. how did the street, the road, tool of spatial control, come to symbolize freedom? a slick of asphalt shrouds an aggregate of bone.
He died in the street.
whose streets? can all of these feet on the ground quake the earth and tear this veil?
// yp // comment
// tpc // comment
We don’t need the term “Nazi” to describe American racism
There’s a middle-aged White guy who stands in the center of UC Berkeley’s campus yelling things. He is indefatigable. One day, several years ago, this came booming over the plaza: THE FOUNDING FATHERS WERE NAZIS. NAZIS! THEY WERE NAZIS, THE FOUNDING FATHERS. NAZIS. While I appreciate the sentiment, I don’t agree. The Founding Fathers were Enlightenment era elites who knew it was wrong to enslave human beings but many of them did so anyways. They built a country on the back of slave labor, a country that has never stopped exploiting and erasing the very people that prop it up.
I’m an American PhD student studying German history. Right now, I’m in Berlin working on my dissertation, which is not about Nazis. Though my own research does not involve racial trauma and violence, such things are hard to ignore in Germany. I’m also perceived as Black or mixed in the USA and as Jewish in Germany (my mother is Black and my father is Ashkenazi Jewish). From my sample size of one, I can tell you which is less stressful.
In contexts ranging from the academic to the personal, I often hear expressed that being Jewish in Germany (regardless of when) and that of being Black in the USA are somehow comparable. I’d like to propose that these experiences are not analogous – not to mention that no one wins in the Oppression Olympics. Comparison should not be employed to “prove” the validity of human suffering. American racism, the centuries of hatred and devaluation of Black life so fundamental to our nation’s development, deserves to be addressed alone, in dialogue with nothing but its own depravity.
Stuttgart, Germany 6.6.2020
Comparing the two silences the uniqueness of their horrors. Outright extermination (built as it was on millennia of disenfranchisement and violence) is different from exploiting and erasing an entire population in a way so deep-rooted that it continues, barely changed, even today. Germany’s “Erinnerungskultur” (memory culture) is problematic and cannot atone for crimes committed – particularly concerning non-Jewish victims of the Shoah – but perhaps, with the idea of national shame, they’re onto something. The United States on the other hand seems to only have pride, pride with asterisks, but how about some shame or at least public, visible admission of wrongdoing? How about some monuments to the humanity we’ve robbed Black Americans of for four hundred years and counting? How about continual acknowledgement of what we owe? Yes, this has begun, but it has a long, long way to go. Start with reparations.
Anti-Black racism permeates all aspects of American culture. Black maternal mortality rates are about three times that of Whites. Look at George Washington’s English language Wikipedia entry which praises him for being kind to his slaves and having conflicted feelings about the whole enterprise that he nonetheless voluntarily participated in. Read Native Son. Yes, as my White high school classmates complained, Bigger Thomas is not the most sympathetic character, but the entire point is that it wouldn’t matter if he was. If you truly need more (warning: extremely graphic) evidence, go read up on fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. That was in 1955, and if we need to see a video of a police officer kneeling on a man’s neck in 2020, it means that somehow Till’s open coffin wasn’t enough.
None of this absolves Germany but it does underline the gravity of America’s sickness. Did Adolf Hitler snub Jesse Owens or did Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Probably both, but does it even matter, considering that the racism Owens faced in his homeland is an established fact and persisted after his Olympic victories? Stephen Colbert joked that solidarity demos in Berlin protesting George Floyd’s death showed that even the Germans find us to be too racist. But why do we need this comparison at all? Why do we need to reach outside ourselves? Germany has its history and its shame; we have ours and we own it.
Why is all of this happening? Because America is built upon hatred of Black people. Do you believe Black Lives Matter? If so, you should be outraged. There isn’t much to analyze here. No need for historical analogies or rationales for why things are the way they are and what we should do about them. Nothing to question, nothing to compare, nothing to find out, no insights to be won.
// sf // comment
31. May 2020: Today ladyboi, Jessica Ruffin, and Tobias Schmücking have placed items on the table.
It’s been two months since I wondered if the pandemic would overshadow other social justice issues. Or better said, I wondered why the state and public reactions to the threat of disease was much stronger than that to the slow racialized violence and mass death already taking place within the United States. Since then, we’ve learned (as should have been expected) that marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by Covid19, even as they, we, I, materially contend with state violence. How many of us have been killed in this duration, murdered by intent or a simple, painful lack of care? There’s no running count on the cable news. And now—is this the revolution I’ve been dreaming of? Is it now—was it ever—safe to take it to the streets? And who would tell me when it’s safe to breathe?
// jr // comment
Señor Kaiser Permanente
// ladyboi // comment
Dreaming with Schop
Schopenhauer says there is no way to distinguish life from dream. I sense this as true through memory. In the present moment of living, though, there is something that feels… real—wirkend. Not only on me but also that I could reach out and touch, feel, any present object. This potential acting through volition seems to affirm my wakefulness and the reality of my being. And yet, I feel in my dreams, sometimes pleasure but, mostly pain. I didn’t know until I was 16 (or 17) that this was called hypnalgia (dream pain) and considered a psychological disorder. Might Schopenhauer have suffered (and enjoyed) the same affliction? How else could he have come to such a remarkable conclusion—life as a mere dream between two voids (and thus no reason to fear death)? But what consciousness recalls after the dream has ended? God, will, those left behind?
And you—do you dream in numbers? Shapes bereft of meaning, until it is 1 household or gatherings of 10? Those numbers emanating suddenly so much more than arithmetic form—now, instead, the potential for joy and, also, risk. I’ve begun to wonder where to draw the line between ethical relation to known and unknown others. For the public good, can I exist as 1—split as I am?
Last night I dreamt I went out in New York, forgetting my shoes. My socks were orange, the ones I wore yesterday. Walking with socken feet, I wandered and wondered how I got there; as I worked to avoid shards of glass and puddles of I-don’t-know-what. Then, an automated turnstile that sensed the fare on my Metrocard touch-free, even as I tried and failed to remove it from my too-tightly-packed wallet. Could that constitute a dream as wish? Free movement through the city without the worry of displaying the proper New Yorker training or of disease; the effortless swipe and push through the turnstile? The last time I was in New York, I felt a strange alienation (can one alienation be stranger than another?), a sense of my untraining from too many years away. Can one practice re-acclimation or de-acclimation in dreams? Do they materially cross into reality?
// jr // comment
NACH EINEM TRAUM (AFTER A DREAM)
Single 8 mm, 18 Minutes / Germany 2015
Cast & Crew
Annette Schäfer as Luzie
; Music by Christian Dellacher;
Story, Direction, Photography, Editing: Tobias Schmücking
synopsis
Filmmaker Luzie has a strange dream that makes her wake up with the feeling of having found a wonderful story. But she soon discovers this story does not make sense at all.
Luzie investigates the nature of this dream and starts to produce a short film based on two images from her dream. More and more she is convinced there must be a lost element in her dream that would bring back the full meaning of that story - if only she could find it.
on the handmade aspect of the film
"Nach einem Traum" was shot on Single 8mm, mainly Fujichrome RT 200 N that was very often pushed 2 steps (200 ASA > 800). This enabled me to shoot with available light or with affordable lighting. (The nature of the film´s topic is nocturnal - therefore I was looking for dark locations.) With a few exceptions* I had completely hand-processed the film in my own kitchen-laboratory. This hand-processing left its mark on the film: scratches, dots, mistakes and light **... and a very grainy look in those scenes that were pushed two stops. I used those marks wherever it made sense with the editing - and luckily there are many shots and scenes where this element of chance fit in perfectly. So the structure of the film reflects not only the topic of the film but shows: this film was worked on!
// ts // comment
17. May 2020: Today Elena Solomon, David Frohnapfel, Ganga Rudraiah, Teresa Pittman-Chavez, Simone Stirner, and Jessica Ruffin have placed items on the table.
tables turned
It was an old, cane table; the webbing had suffocated under a fading coat of white paint. Someone who lived on Bishop Garden St wanted to help Amma out and had donated the table along with two chairs. One night that table lay overturned on the floor, after it bounced off father's legs. From where I sat, the landlord's rage had filled out the rest of the top frame of the scene. Rent had not been paid for months. Nana had only asked for more time. A failed negotiation. An overturned table.
But for today's gathering, I wish to turn that table as I call upon T.R. (my spirit animal!) to report on the various ways one can sing and dance on tables.
// gr // comment
Cat highway project
Cats like to climb and frequently human floors and furniture have to be shared with giants, so I am slowly building an elevated walkway for them to move and lounge on. These are photos of the project as it currently stands (additions in the works). Quarantine has allowed me the time to finally sit and put these up. It's nervous energy, and it's also meditative and calming. I feel like I'm finally catching up to myself in quarantine, which really has never happened before.
// es // comment
Tables are a places for joyful connection, but also, often, discipline. Sit there until you finish your dinner. - Don’t put your feet here, your elbows there. - This table wasn’t made for you. – Here’s a pencil, you have 3 hours to prove your worth. I suppose that’s why these days writing comes easier on a couch or a chair, my 2 legs forming a surface free of the disciplining structures of 4 legs and a slab. Even with my shoulders hunched and stomach crunched, though, there’s a certain discipline in keeping my legs straight and flat. This week, I took to imagining slipping under the table, opening an other space. Crouching, hidden from view, freer to reach out to a hand, tickle a foot, or share a secret among friends. Would you like to join me there?
// jr // comment
Energy generating deviceGrowing up as a queer child in a White working-class environment in Germany in the 1990s meant that you have to navigate the fact that your gender performance and sexuality has been framed by society through discourses of disgust, undesirability, unhappiness, and disease. Or, as Sara Ahmed puts it: “Queer arrives as an affective inheritance of an insult.” Many queer children could barely find affective breathing spaces for escaping the daily verbal aggressions from a heterosexist world as society’s dominant grammar that constantly draws all attention towards it.
I remember in elementary school when children played tag on the schoolyard running around, laughing, and yelling at each other: “You are gay! You are the one with AIDS now.” A child tagged had to tag another one and transmit his gayness like a virus through the schoolyard. For a short moment in time everyone of us could be gay, but as far as I know, I was the only one where it stuck. It is a lifelong question for many of us to figure out how much of the heterosexist violence implemented by insult has been internalized in our psyches and continues influencing our identities in harmful ways. I am often wondering how much of my gender performance today is a response to a survival mechanism to reduce daily fear of heterosexist aggression.
I’m still often infantilized for not being there yet, at that final destination of respectable masculinity. In most professional environments, I am voluntarily and involuntarily threatened by the unacknowledged heterosexism of my ‘peers,’ as if my queerness is something naive I should grow out of during the maturing process of professionalization and social climbing. Ahmed has also brilliantly conceptualized privilege as an energy saving device: Less effort is required to pass through when a world has been already assembled around and for you. So please make it stop, stealing my energy!
#feelingbackward
// df // comment
// tpc // comment
// ss // comment
03. May 2020: In the last 2 weeks, many of you sat down at the table to read, listen, look, and think. Thank you for your thoughts and gratitude. Today Jessica has placed a new item on the table.
Most days I wake up not sure what to do with myself. Write? Read the news? Stay in bed? Once I do manage to get out of bed, I have my coffee at this table in my garden. Some days, I listen to music, other days, I sit and listen to the wind, passing cars, and the birds. As someone fortunate enough to not be a frontline worker, I’m spending most of my time in isolation. With the lack of regular human contact, my attention often turns to the birds. In a way, they have become new friends. I watch as they seek material for their nests and listen to their conversations as they deliberate their next moves. I say hello, but we have yet to develop a common language beyond movement (they fly away when I move too quickly). Sit at my table, if you like, and listen to the birds, perhaps you will decipher their language or… just enjoy the sounds.
// jr // comment
First Gathering
19 April 2020: Items have been placed on the table by Teresa Pittman-Chavez, Ganga Rudraiah, Simone Stirner, Veronica Jacome, Jessica Ruffin, and ladyboi.
// tpc // comment
I recently threw out my back. I credit Zoom after Zoom on my couch or on my floor, an unsuccessful protest to the ergonomic, home-office setup. Constricted, I decided to create from old favorites. Both vases were made in 2019: one, inspired by rust and concrete, the other, by the body.
// vj // comment
Cancellation
// ladyboi // comment
Struggling to abstract
03.18.20
What is ethical relation in the midst of a pandemic? Physical but not social distancing. My hurt to your hurt – my wound to yours – but still, not too close. Can we really pretend that this crisis is any different from others? Cancel everything, black people are being murdered, asylum-seekers are in cages. Zoom offers a replacement to the status quo. But we know all of this. The question is why nothing changes.
03.28.20
In theory, the primary characteristic of a crisis is the moment of decision – the opening. What isn’t clear in that description is the aspect of temporal extension. Just like the slow movement of the horizon as one falls from a great height, the temporality of crisis may indeed be slow, with no clear end. In such a case, it becomes difficult to imagine that only one decision would suddenly close that gap, no matter how much we may wish it. Indeed, each second renews the catastrophe. An opportunity for a new decision and a new failure. That is, even hope carries the shadow of defeat.
*****
I can’t hear the words “I can’t breathe” without thinking of Eric Garner. So, now, is it selfish of me to wonder if the shortage of ventilators will consume and overcast his suffering? Yes, this pandemic is a terror, taking too many before their time – especially those heroes on the front lines. But some of those heroes took Eric’s life and refused to hear, when we asked to breathe.
04.05.20
The difficulty of trying to contain the fear while being told by institutions to maintain a sense of normalcy. We are afraid of what it would mean for us to create in a way that feels and really is most natural. That’s not our fault. We’ve been produced and cultivated to feel that way. And so, I think – maybe the solution is to just read more Adorno or self-servingly produce the minima moralia for my present. The fact is that the world is and has been on fire. Still, I don’t want to pretend that this means we ought to abandon theory. We rely on the possibility to imagine something otherwise just as much as we need the ability to confront the material present. This was true yesterday….
// jr // comment
// ss // comment
double snare
We recruit innumerous adjectives to go sloganeering about a favorite subject, our leading fixation – life itself. And let us suppose we are primed to enunciate that life is difficult. Here, the readiness with which ‘difficult’ (like any other adjective) pawns its meaning to ‘life’ is also an opening into the thought of difficulty. What becomes a quiet and unceasing chant carries with it a latent sense of little to no hesitation in pronouncing life’s difficulty. This kind of preparedness for representation is to me, simply, the acknowledgment that life is already sensed as difficult before the word announces that specific quality or condition. Indeed, language is an afterthought to experience and not to any originary stimulation even if it seems to naively glue them together. Put another way, the legibility of an experience in representation does not predate emotional process, rather, it is vitally linked to the interminable formation of sense. To the extent to which it is descriptive, the terse and simple phrase of ‘Life is difficult!’ is also saturated with untranscribable events, keeping alive what constitutes the making sense of this difficulty. Then, there is value in looking at difficulty in how the very thinking of difficulty is done with such ease: the phenomenon of getting used to things is amplified in the simplification of what life is. If I perceive life as difficult, it means I have accepted or grown adaptively to difficult aspects of life, that difficulty itself is already about getting used to hardship – an ongoingness that is nothing but the acclimation to suffering. This is the double-snare sound of a difficult life: becoming accustomed to complication is difficult and that is also precisely what difficulty is about. On the other hand, and from every angle, a tumbleweed – as a metaphor for life – is what it is: tumbling weed. With every turn and shaky pause, the habit of tumbling/living is already a confrontation of reality which is nothing but difficult. However, the routine-inducing affect of animate difficulty is also its measure of easiness, and ultimately, an aesthetic counterpoint. When we feel something is not easy to do or be, difficulty is sensed; when something is being difficult, we are experiencing another or even oneself as not easy to be with. And when we think of a difficult emotion, it means that some getting-used-to was required to perceive the bearing of that emotion as difficult. Emotions are difficult when they become tedious for representation; emotions can become suddenly or fleetingly difficult, but they are, in fact, aesthetic processes, and their difficulty is issued from becoming habituated to the not-easy conditions of emotional being. But if life is a case of routine, where we ‘naturally’ and regularly tumble through suffering, what might we gain from realizing that life is already effortlessly difficult? Is not this the lightness of suffering, found in the declaration that ‘life is difficult’, but a fragment of our striving and loving?
// gr // comment
04.14.20
I’ve learned that in a crisis there is still weather. Storms raging at sea, destroying our homes even as they rage within our bodies. There are still sunny days with cool breezes and days overcast by clouds. These material conditions are also enfolded in our souls. In the fog of the unknown, a new flower still blooms. It doesn’t ask why.
// jr // comment