Dear Bassel Khartabil, responding to your call in this climate of urgency has been a liberating experience. Your work is especially heartening in the midst of an international climax that defies our previous definitions of conflict, and our understanding of its geographies. I was reminded of the significance of this in the emergency room yesterday:… Continue reading War-zones and battle-fronts / Dear Bassel Khartabil / Free culture
Category: michel
the First Device
What should be the ideal character and purpose of the First Device we give to our young? How would such a tool define humanity's future approach to technology, and to our world? How would it shape and direct the mind? What kind of information should it contain? Would it be primarily audiovisual, or holographic, or… Continue reading the First Device
Forest School writing: What did I think this was going to be, the revolution? On the Free/Libre Arts Unconference and TropicalBurn
(1) Notes on the Free/Libre Arts Unconference and TropicalBurn / The difference between me and a free person July 2019, Ixodos at A Casa Lar, Tijuca Forest, Rio de Janeiro Are YOU able to trust in a fully participatory format? / On the academy as capitalist enclosure (edu-factory). / On the (arts) academy as a… Continue reading Forest School writing: What did I think this was going to be, the revolution? On the Free/Libre Arts Unconference and TropicalBurn
perhaps it’s the nihilism, OR “If I were to start over, I would have been researching public fountains”
The following is written in response / review to the State of the Monument (Nov 20, 2018 organised by the Cultural Studies and Contemporary Arts Lab, European University, Cyprus) via Loizidou, C. (2014) Commemoration, Public art and Memorial Politics in Cyprus, 1901-2013 [thesis] If monuments are about asserting or compensating for insecure regimes, then I… Continue reading perhaps it’s the nihilism, OR “If I were to start over, I would have been researching public fountains”
The goddess position: negotiating natural childbirth in Cyprus, 2018 OR Overcoming Foucault by birthing in the clinic: A cultural historian’s near-orgasmic squat into ‘knowing’
I realised early on that I would have to be OK with peeing myself. It seemed counter-productive to labour towards opening up more and more and more with each contraction, and during this maintain an exception for bladder control. I would have to let go of that as well. (I had come across no explicit discussion of bladder control during labour anywhere in the literature and clearly this wasn’t the time to look it up, although in retrospect a birth story from Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth comes to mind, where a woman mentioned that the toilet was where she felt most comfortable. Perhaps she was troubled by the same contradiction while relaxing her pelvic floor. In any case, labouring in the loo was out of the question. I needed to keep moving.) This also meant that I wouldn’t be able to rest much on the bed: wetting the bed was an inhibition I didn't care to break, plus lying down during contractions seemed to make them shockingly longer and stronger.
Cultural historian fails Police Entrance Exam / On the wonders of civil service / A family of (bad) corruption jokes
I really wanted to be a police officer. The dream was dashed when I realised that I couldn't produce passing transcripts during the Police Exams. I didn't have it in me to suspend critical thought in a way that would allow me to go through with it / answer the exam questions. It had become clear that this was the underlying requirement. What was left was to undergo the exercise as a kind of performance.
Protected: On Love-violence (Family-state: resistance-sacrifice and the pain-impossibility of truth) / Redemptive govermentalities in-between Yael’s work, and “the revolution will be spiritualised.”
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
on dwelling w/ Stephanos [leaves, fruit, and stone]
As posted elsewhere: I'm glad that you will be using the house. I have great affection for it. It's been a process for me to let go of the perceived need to turn it into my home, or to come up with a master-plan about "improvements" and instead to simply share the house with interesting,… Continue reading on dwelling w/ Stephanos [leaves, fruit, and stone]
allonan 