here we listen to broadcast

“Today images abound everywhere. Never has so much been depicted and watched. We have glimpses at any moment of what things look like on the other side of the planet, or the other side of the moon. Appearances registered, and transmitted with lightning speed. Yet with this something has innocently changed. They used to be called physical appearances because they belonged to solid bodies. Now appearances are volatile. Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existant. And this is precisely what the present system’s mythology continually needs to exploit. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more. Consequently — and oddly, considering the physical implications of the notion of appetite — the existant, the body, disappears. We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks.” — John Berger, Steps Toward A Small Theory of the Visible

“Until recently, history, all the accounts people gave of their lives, all proverbs, fables, parables, confronted the same thing: the everlasting, fearsome, and occasionally beautiful, struggle of living with Necessity, which is the enigma of existence – that which followed from the Creation, and which subsequently has always continued to sharpen the human spirit.” — John Berger, Steps Toward A Small Theory of the Visible

Jeremy Grayson John Berger ca. 1972

Mihajlo Arsovski Tipografske grafike Helvetica a1 1972 [x]

Slowly things empty, like those big bones one finds on the beach in summer - horse bones or bones of prehistoric animals; they are empty of the stuff inside, the marrow; all that remains is a solid white, a lack of colour, with invisible holes, like the colour rooms take in winter when it rains violently. You hold the doorknob, or the handle of a tea cup and you can't tell whether you hold them or they hold you or whether they, or you, can be held. And suddenly as you are about to drink your tea, you see between your fingers the porcelain handle by itself; - the cup is missing - you examine it: so white, so weightless, almost bone - you think it beautiful, shaped like a half zero - it longs to be complete, while, across, in the wall, out of a deep crack, seeps the warm steam from the tea you did not drink. Yannis Ritsos, Departures, III, from Yannis Ritsos Selected Poems, trans. Nikos Stangos

Herbert List At the Mediterranean Sea Liguria 1936

“London-based artist Emma McNally charts the astronomical, the anatomical, the topographical, and the topological.  — I think of these drawings as fugitive, heterogeneous grey areas. They are the turbulence between noise and signal. They are a space of difference and deferral, a weather system of graphite. They are also broadband realms where signals at multiple frequencies are being transmitted and received— including those not usually within our “range”: sonar, ultraviolet, the very fast and the very slow. I’m constantly trying to disrupt the figure-ground relationship to make blurred areas where the conditions of focusing are undone.” [x]

Robert Frank Franz Kline, New York City 1954-56

Franco Grignani Four Cubes 1963

Octavio Paz Instantáneas Papeles Privados Editions 1993

James Barnor Evelyn Abbew c.1955

Useless interrogation: I know nothing. An old man fallen asleep, I wake as a baby, and you can read your learning from my wide blue eyes; I only glimpse it in recidivist streams. * A red-fingered child pats grey cakes at the seaside, I ask for one, he says no, not even for a real cake, no. Well now, old prophets, what do you want from me: the twenty-four sky prisms, when I look blind into hearts and read them. * If you want your fortune, I'll reel off your identity, your expectations, but I'm deaf to my own words - no plundering secrets. Sándor Weöres, Terra Sigillata, from Selected Poems, Sándor Weöres, Ferenc Juhász

Mirtha Dermisache From Nueve newsletters / un reportaje 2003 [x]

Jacob van Zuijlen Iceland c. 1933

Herzog & de Meuron, Volkshaus Hotel, Basel, 2020 [x]

Gins Madeline Word Rain (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) Grossman Publishers New York, NY, 1969

Massimo & Sonia Cirulli Archive Bruno Munari in his Milan studio 1949

Richard Serra Intersection II 1992-93

Wisława Szymborska, Conversation With A Stone, from Grain of Sand: Selected Poems

Georgia O'Keeffe Bo II (Bo-Bo) 1961