"This article explores aspects of a homeless man's everyday life and his use of material objects to maintain a sense of place in the city. We are interested in the complex functions of walking, listening and reading as social practices central to how this man forges a life as a mobile hermit across physical and imagined locales. This highlights connections between physical place, use of material objects, imagination, and sense of self. Our analysis illustrates the value of paying attention to geographical locations and objects in social psychological research on homelessness."

Ch.8. Chronotopes of crime: perceptions of danger in urban space

Santiago Sierra

"at its best tactical urbanism acts as a catalyst for change and serves as an exemplary point of difference—green space in a sea of asphalt or a vivid art installation in a disused storefront. At worst, the hallmark of most DIY subcultures—that the producer and the audience are one and the same—plays out across an urban scale. Successful projects stand out because they offer up a program type that disrupts quotidian city life but doesn’t alienate potential participants."..."The future of tactical practice may actually depend on such projects becoming weirder in their choice of programs, and increasingly visually unnerving. A case in point: an ad-hoc memorial created in honor of artist Mike Kelley after news of his death was announced on February 1. Fellow artists, friends, and fans brought candles, flowers, and stuffed animals to a driveway near Kelley’s LA home, creating a place to mourn that mirrors two pieces the artist exhibited together in 1987, More Love Hours and Wages of Sin. The first is a composition of discarded knit afghans and abject thrift-store toys, the second a tower of melted candles. Neither piece is beautiful. Both are disturbing assemblages meant to provoke."

"The moralism is misplaced because it hinges on an impossibly utopian notion of how viewers, and seemingly all viewers, could respond to an image." ... "If inaction when confronted with the ocean of pictures is truly a problem, then the real complaint is with human nature, with politics, with the media, with life, and not, uniquely, with pictures of ruins."... "If pictures of ruins are ruin porn, then presumably visiting actual ruins is ruin sex (see how stupid this metaphor is). I know which I would rather do. And Chernobyl must be a mind-blower".. "this attraction is first of all about being in the place. (Photos of ruins function in the same way that all kinds of photos function: they fire the imagination and provoke a desire to see for yourself.) The idea that best explains my love of ruins is the quest for re-enchantment. The abandoned ruin is a special zone charged with an intensity and a potential for revelation that most ordinary, complete and comfortable places lack. The more corporate daily experience becomes, the more some sites of ruination can offer an interlude of release into a refuge that is not accessible to crowds (it may well be unsafe), not overseen by officialdom, and not commercialized. Some regard these fractured spaces as being loaded with radical and even utopian potential. I know I have felt moments of inner peace, elation and great possibility in these supposedly melancholy places; I have also experienced enough to admit that risk is a keen part of the pleasure. Walking on the Great Wall of China, I came to the end of the maintained, official concourse. No one was around to stop me — there was no one around at all — so I ignored the danger sign, climbed over the half-hearted barrier, and kept on going in the immense silence above the landscape along the top of the unrepaired wall."

"yellowfacing (as with blackfacing) is not simply about playing at difference but about reaffirming and securing traditional meanings about racial difference that are constituted by their asymmetrical and contrasting relationship to the universal ideal of whiteness."

'billboards in outdoor space is indicative of how we treat our public. it's up to the public to take that space back.'... 'it's not appropriate to be a consumer all the time.'

"That is, this photograph and the discourse around it must begin with the unspoken premise that the homeless always already embodies inhumanity, and that only by the discerning intervention of the privileged is the deserving individual rescued, if only for a brief moment, from this oblivion. Put another way, his rehabilitation by others follows after his degradation by the same. Thus the conditional distribution (contingent upon the homeless man’s clothing being read by an “expert” as fashionable self-expression) of a limited recognition (because there is no discussion of either economic restructuring or capital flight, let alone an examination of the violences of the “good life” and its markers) makes no demands from the privileged."

"... their spectacular and participatory performance does provide the emotional energy needed to keep on fighting. And that may direct attention to other resources."

"Did I ever mention how much I hate the white avant-garde tradition? He revels in the modernist circumstance: the Western bourgeois and usually masculine subject imagines himself artist and rebel, bemoaning/celebrating his alienation while seeking to impose some more basic “truth.” "

"Fetishism recognizes
that things themselves attract us and direct our behaviors with their
own structures and substances. The Freudian analysis, however,
aims to lead the patient to see that the powers that he or she finds
in things are powers that his or her own unconscious has projected
into them; similarly the Marxist critique of “commodity fetishism” is
an animist theory of fetishism. We now need an ontology of fetishes,
a fetishist ontology of things. The substances of things are not
simply outside us, outside the sphere of human consciousness, and
there are not only relations of causal determinism between them
and the human mind. Things, in their structures and substances,
attract us and inspire us and direct us and organize our movements,
order us."

"A critical stereotype of the technological naivety of the colonized, it [téléphone arabe] serves as a figure for pre-technological social networks, the resourcefulness and reliability of humans over machines that, in colonial situations, resists and threatens colonial power, and that can even trump First World technologies. Recuperated by Arabic speakers, multilingual residents of former French colonies, immigrants or their transnational descendants in the metropole, the téléphone arabe arabe becomes a joke, mocking the legacy of exploitation by, and resistance, to metropolitan technology as well as its postcolonial adoption and absorption, in a self-critique that merges with the colonial critique. While the telephone creates transnational, global subjects, its local practices also circulate and nuance global practices."

soldados, amigos

I swear that's my uncle at 1.10.

The production of natural history in museums

ana australiana.

"imaginal exchange"