The Jungle
… the undocumented created an architecture of a shadow society whose political form is unaddressed. It is described by words like Township, Settlement, Slum, but again like camp, each of those words presents us with shortcomings.
Shut it Down #YarlsWood
On a wet windy November day in Bedfordshire, outside the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre, Judith an ex-detainee is on the mobile sound system: My sisters on the inside, On the 8th August I was on the inside and you were on the outside.
Revisiting Laing
Anti-psychiatry drove at the foundations of both institutions – the family and the asylum. But in the process the asylum in its idea form, providing caring sanctuary from violence, inner and outer, has waned dangerously in the collective imagination.
Neue Stadt (of art and labour)
Here labour (of the artist) exists in the knowledge that it is transient, it serves the purpose of the time. A wageless labour that may be redeemed as labour if frozen by Capital as Art. Then it can stay – for as long as it wants.
One Piece at a Time
Johnny Cash’s song is about how he makes his own dream Cadillac by smuggling out all the parts from the factory over twenty years. It’s essentially about stealing from work but that’s not how it’s meant to be understood.
10000
We have a situation in which the ‘aura’ of the unique object, which Walter Benjamin had described as being eradicated by mechanical reproduction, is reversed. Here, artisanal labour, the handmade, is in fact employed to mimic the aesthetic of mechanical reproduction.