Public - Volume 29, Issue 58, 2018

Michael Gaudio is an art historian whose far-reaching scholarship has transformed archival and theoretical approaches to the visual cultures of the early modern Atlantic world. In this interview, Gaudio considers smoke’s (dis)organizing vocation within the archives of early colonial modernity. Following smoke’s pathways leads to a discussion of the structure and limits of representation; ephemerality and protocols of reading; the racialized vexations of materiality; and the possibilities of thinking the question of medium otherwise.

Jade Windscreen Powder: w Tissue Sludge Compostition

A collaborative project between Kang and La Melia, Jade Windscreen Powder: w Tissue Sludge Compostition results from a shared interest in screens and netting, which each has explored previously in their own, individual artistic practices. This text, part of an ongoing series of e-mails, takes the form of a fictional, expansive conversation between Tick and Laver, a pest and a weed, respectively. It begins at the edge of a forest and moves between a garden, an art gallery, a memory, Surrey BC, a daydream; environs are provisional and fleeting while identities shift in voice and shape. The artists glean from a wide-cast net of references, from science and technology studies, to poetry, to queer theory, to personal stories and fantasies. The initial objects, the screen and net, become a permeable membrane, an ultra-sensitive space or container, becoming with that which it contains. Encounter becomes shape with a name.

Premiering in 2013, Jason Osder’s documentary film Let The Fire Burn chronicles the Philadelphia Police Department’s 1985 bombing of the Black revolutionary organization, MOVE. The bombing and subsequent fire – which the police commissioner let burn through 61 homes – resulted in the deaths of six adults and five children as well as the displacement of 250 people. Composed entirely of archival footage, Osder’s representation invokes a historicization and delimitation of an un-ended story about anti-Black state violence that, this essay argues, results in the obscuring of both MOVE’s continued struggle for freedom and the social conditions that make such actions possible. By thinking through collective memories of Black suffering and the ways in which they are mediated amidst a continued global assault on Black people, Hunter-Young explores what the temporal and spatial properties of smoke, and its relationship to fire, may signal about the sociocultural work of Osder’s film.

Through her work, research-based artist Elise Rasmussen explores epistemological aspects of ‘blueness’ as it relates to early photographic technologies (the cyanotype) and mountain exploration (the cyanometer, a device for measuring the blueness of the sky motivated the first expedition to the peak of Mount Blanc). As the colour blue ‘blue’ did not appear in written language until its pigment could be extracted by ‘man’ for ‘his’ use [sic]. Elise reflects on notions of (in)visibility, considering how, like smoke which blurs and blinds, blue plays with perception, and how both blue and smoke forces us to question the indexical capacity of photographic media to document reality.

In... memoriam Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.

Claudia Rankine, Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, shares two poems from her bestselling collection, Citizen: An American Lyric, that express thematic and formal links to the concept and force of smoke.

The Ashes Series depicts the suffering of war not through human displays of emotion, but rather through the absence of human life in once occupied homes. It investigates the impact of the destruction of these private, domestic spaces in war and media images of such destruction. These intimate spaces are literally ripped open and become public through external violence and the act of destruction. The images exist in the aftermath of atrocity, with the presence of the human spirit represented only by the monochromatic whiteness of the ashes. The Ashes Series represents the artist’s attempt to make sense of destruction and to preserve the moment of serenity after the dust has settled: to give the ephemeral moment extended life in a mix of beauty and violence.

Site Specific Work 2015 builds upon Miwon Kwon’s notion of the ‘discursive vector.’ It reflects the site specificity of discourse surrounding the issue of child sexual abuse. Juxtaposing five levels of rhetoric, it highlights discursive spaces and suggests alternative interventionist narratives as well as notions of cultural protectionism.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist, queer theorist, and filmmaker, whose ground-clearing work has developed a critical theory of late liberalism that would support what she calls ‘an anthropology of the otherwise.’ In her most recent monograph, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, she probes the politics that undergird the distinction between Life and Nonlife, tracking its pernicious vocation both within contemporary regimes of power and within the critical languages that infuse the contemporary theoretical scene. In this interview, Povinelli speaks about geontopower; the spatio-temporalities of dust, smoke, and smog; and the breath of the geological.

An excerpt about living together from a near-future dystopian novel, Calypso’s Way. In the cosmology of the novel feudalism, expanded family collectivities, and organized crime co-exist. Smoke appears, like a minor character in the story, to indicate events that once occurred in a corner of the fictional world where domesticity is urgent, grave, and incessant, and characters survive by performing the tasks of the everyday. If the work stops, then what?

Dagmar Atladóttir and Sandra Huber combine practices of Icelandic paganism and contemporary witchcraft, via methodologies of ceramics and automatic writing, to create a God’s Nail, which attunes to voices between myths, fantasies, and deities. Created with earth and water, and passed through fire in the kiln, the God’s Nail points to histories of the accused witches burned at the stake during the European witch-hunts as well as the importance of the elements in contemporary witchcraft. Situated within the wildfires that were raging during the summer of their collaboration, the essay also discusses the violence of colonization and capitalism that was unleashed during the ‘burning times,’ the trend of ‘witchiness,’ and the importance of occulted channels of communication, which can act as refrains between the seen and unseen, heard and unheard.

These images are an attempt to render emotions and relations visible, by blending human subjects with digital sculptures. The performers have been instructed to enact a variety of emotional states. The digital additions enhance, distort and/or problematize these emotions. What is happening when an emotion projects itself, or bursts out of, the mind of the subject?

This text meanders, like a snaking river, through topics such as migration, land use, phonetics, naming, and animal symbology, to produce a constellation of thought around the letter S.

Fratila re-thinks and re-imagines how disabled persons have a role to play in the pro-jected ‘future’ using sound as a primary medium. As public and private spaces con-verge and set categories like the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ become more and more inse-parable, the disruption of an exclusionary framework becomes a priority for artists, researchers and curators alike. Rather than merely taking up existing public spaces as a ‘disabled’ sound artist/researcher, she engages her audience in dialogue around the future and potential for ‘disability’. Fratila’s work considers the ways in which our growing use of/growing reliance upon digital technology and media can give way to ‘disability’ being employed towards progress and understood as necessary to our fu-ture, with specific reference to her multimedia installation, Durere (translated from Romanian: Pain), a motion-sensor activated instrument that weaves together interac-tivity and disability against the backdrop of an ever-evolving ‘future’ using sound, video and 3D-printed models of the weights she uses daily for her chronic illness.

Drawing from a questionnaire circulated amongst the authors of this thematic issue about how we want to live in 50 years, ‘Habitat 2067’ considers the politics of designing an ideal future community for ourselves. Working with and against 1960s utopianism, we consider the (im)possibility of using design to answer social and political questions. We use speculative fiction to explore how desires, fears, and anxieties about aging shape our vision of the future. We have included an image with artwork by Tristram Lansdowne that can be folded into a polyhedron, so that the reader is able to assemble their own Habitat 2067.

The acclaimed political philosopher and media theorist Jodi Dean is the author of numerous monographs, including Crowds and Party, The Communist Horizon, Blog Theory, and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Taking her most recent work on the theory of the comrade as its point of departure, this interview addresses Dean’s critique of enclosure and the individual form; the politics of genericity and fungibility; the limits of post-representationalism; and the futures of the political in an age of anthropogenic climate change.

This paper focuses on CitéMémoire, a multi-year outdoor exhibit located throughout historic Old Montreal. Organized around the confluence of Montreal’s 375th birthday, Canada’s Sesquicentennial, as well as Expo 67’s 50th anniversary, CitéMémoire uses large-scale interactive projections and augmented reality to tell the city’s history from the time of European contact onward. The exhibit’s technologies of immersion guide audiences through a spectacularized historical landscape, rendering notions of heritage and nation into palpable archives that audiences encounter directly through their bodies. This article demonstrates how archival and cultural technologies, which choreograph audiences’ bodily, imaginational, and affective positionalities, prove central to the ‘dreamwork’ of settler coloniality.

In our culture, women are pressured, by conventions of decorum and supposed hygiene to conceal any sign of their menstruation, and yet what a common and inescapable visual presence this blood is in women’s lives. Fungi, which bloom out of the charred remains of burnt-out forests, remind us that change occurs in cycles. Ersmark engages cyclical temporality and the ambiguous visual status of menstruation, to render mushrooms that appear at ephemeral, but which endure and proliferate. The paintings’ psychedelic permanence remains — like stains on a mattress.