april
‘April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.’
T.S Elliot, The Waste Land
march
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february
veridis quo
Essays: Eric Rohmer's Oppressive Summers, John Fawell 🔗
Articles:
Kobby Adi: The Logic of the Shift, Stephanie Bailey
A World That One Can Be Enveloped Into and Meditate Upon: Isaac Julien – Curatorial Leadership Summit, The Armory Show 2024, New York: Isaac Julien in conversation with Lauren Cornell
The World’s Fair That Ignored More Than Half the World, Rachel B. Tiven 🔗
The Trouble with Art Biennials Today, Joshua Segan-Lean 🔗
Allegory vs Realism; Female vs Male Depictions 🔗
Watched:
Richard Ayoade on his writing style, creative processes and The Unfinished Harauld Hughes
Lacan - Mirror Stage, Desire, Imaginary and Symbolic "I"
Igby Goes Down
We need to talk about the National Portrait Gallery.
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus"
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Inside, Video
I am Martin Parr
‘Since the 1970s, English photographer Martin Parr has held up a sometimes tender, sometimes critical and always mischievous mirror to our times, forcing us to take a hard look at how consumer society has shaped our lives. Discover the maverick behind some of the most iconic images of the past century on an intimate and exclusive road trip across England with the uncompromising Parr, whose subjects, frames and colours have revolutionised contemporary photography’
january
2025
Reading:
The Lighted Window, Evening walks remembered, Peter Davidson
Essays:
Everyday Camouflage in the City, Rafael Gomez-Moriana
‘On the Natural History of Destruction’ and Cultural Memory, W.G. Sebald
Conservation and Regeneration: Complementary or Conflicting Processes? The Case of Grainger Town, Newcastle Upon Tyne, John Pendlebury
Wencun Village, China, by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu’s Amateur Architecture Studio, Yiping Dong Today
Dream Works, newly published translations of the work of two overlooked design prophets, Frieze
‘Erase the traces’: urban experiance in Walter Benjamin’s commentary on Brecht’s lyric poetry, Luciano Gatti
Dasein, authenticity, and choice in Heidegger’s ‘Being and time’, Anna M. Rowan
Adaptive Modernism and beyond: towards a poetics of new Scotland, Ullrich Kockel
Pierre Bourdieu’s Toolbox: Fields, Power, Practices, and Habitus in the Analysis of Peacebuilding, Catherine Goetze
John Grierson’s ‘First principles’ as origin and beginning: the emergence of the documentary tradition in the field of nonfiction film, Martin Stollery
Adaptive modernism and beyond: Towards a poetics of a new Scotland, Ullrich Kockel
Articles:
Frieze, October 2024:
Ring Cycle, Daisy Lafarge on Tacita Dean’s 2003 work Crowhurst
Interview: Jack O’Brien on queer erotics and the stories of surfaces
The Excerpt: The Use of Photography, Annie Erneux
Missive: A Ramble along the River Ravensbourne, Angela Lambo
Documentaries:
Joyce, Yeats and Wilde 🔗
Willa Cather documentary 🔗
Yours, Willa Cather 🔗
WB Yeats 🔗
Why England erased this Welsh village 🔗
Sir Walter Scott documentary🔗
Robert Louis Stevenson documentary 🔗
1972: The curious case of the blocked window, BBC Archive 🔗
Electric Paris - Electricity at the Turn of the Century 🔗
Sears Houses-- Kit Houses Sold by Sears, Roebuck, 1908-1940. From Two on Two, WBBM-TV Chicago 🔗
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Inside, Video documentation, 2022, Kunsthalle Osnabrück 🔗
notes
‘In maritime law, flotsam, jetsam, lagan, and derelict are terms for various types of property lost or abandoned at sea’
060857: Grainger Street Newcastle upon Tyne Ermel Trevor 1995
Foucault states that, “writing transforms the things seen or heard 'into tissue and blood' (in vires et in sanguinem).
"Retrospective causality"
In psychoanalytic theory, Freud's concept of "retrospective causality" or "Nachträglichkeit" (meaning "afterwards-ness") suggests that the present can influence our understanding and interpretation of the past, rather than the past solely determining the present.
Richard Nickel, ornament salvage, c.1958. Mrs. Abraham Kohn Residence, Chicago, IL 1885- 1886. Adler and Sullivan, John Vinci, photographer
‘In 1831 Malcolm MacLeod (Calum an Sprot) was tending cattle on the rich farming land of Ardroil on the west coast of Lewis, when one of his animals wondered out onto the sands of Uig Bay. As he followed the cow onto the beach to retrieve it, Malcolm noticed a small stone chamber. In the chamber was a wooden box. And in the box were 78 elaborately carved chess pieces (along with 14 other gaming pieces and a belt buckle). The treasure Malcolm uncovered, carved from walrus ivory and whale teeth, may well have been in its hiding place for over 500 years, having been carved most likely in Trondheim in Norway sometime in the 12th century’
Callendar House
‘Callendar House is a mansion set within the grounds of Callendar Park in Falkirk, central Scotland. During the 19th century, it was redesigned and extended in the style of a French Renaissance château fused with elements of Scottish baronial architecture’The Antonine Wall (Latin: Vallum Antonini) was a turf fortification on stone foundations, built by the Romans across what is now the Central Belt of Scotland, between the Firth of Clyde and the Firth of Forth. Built some twenty years after Hadrian's Wall to the south, and intended to supersede it, while it was garrisoned it was the northernmost frontier barrier of the Roman Empire
Grahamamston Iron Company
The Use of Photography, Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie
‘Lined up next to each other, these snapshots are like a diary to me. A diary of 2003. Love and death. The decision to exhibit them, make a book of them, is to put the seal on a part of our history.I don't know what these photos are. I know what they embody, but I don't know what they're for.know what they are not: images in frames on a mantel-piece, next to a father, chubby babies and a great-uncle in uniform’
Sears’ houses
‘Sears, Roebuck & Co., based in Chicago, sold "mail order houses" from 1908-1940. In this story, the "Two on Two" news magazine visits the Sears archives to learn more about these unique homes...and also goes on a "house tour" to some of the Sears homes in the Chicago area. Produced in the 1980s, WBBM-TV’
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God knows where I am
‘The body of a homeless woman is found in an abandoned New Hampshire farmhouse. Beside the body, lies a diary that documents a journey of starvation and the loss of sanity, but told with poignance, beauty, humor, and spirituality. For nearly four months, Linda Bishop, a prisoner of her own mind, survived on apples and rain water, waiting for God to save her, during one of the coldest winters on record. As her story unfolds from different perspectives, including her own, we learn about our systemic failure to protect those who cannot protect themselves’
‘This ring was designed (1901) by the architect William Richard Lethaby (1857-1931), one of the founders of the Art Workers Guild and Principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts, as a wedding gift for his wife Edith Crosby (1850-1927)’
Architecture parlante - the idea that a building reflects its purpose in its shape or decoration. This is an idea that came about in 18th century French architecture, especially in the ideas of French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
The Symbolic- based on language and gives meaning to everything around us
The Real- a deliberately ambiguous term that suggests both material reality and that which cannot be symbolized
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Architecture parlante - the idea that a building reflects its purpose in its shape or decoration. This is an idea that came about in 18th century French architecture, especially in the ideas of French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
Lacan’s three principles;
The Imaginary- the world of immediate sensory perceptionsThe Symbolic- based on language and gives meaning to everything around us
The Real- a deliberately ambiguous term that suggests both material reality and that which cannot be symbolized
