User:Alessia/special issue xxiv

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List-making

Writing lists can be both a blessing and a curse in one's daily routine. Extremely rewarding, extremely frustrating.

Everyone has his or her own style about writing lists, some people write them and follow them to the letter, some write them to forget about them soon after abandoning themselves to the gentle passage of time, some write them to feel as bad as possible, to spur themselves on with carrot and stick.
Or not, it's just a piece of paper, or a note on your cell phone, or a list of good resolutions that you already know you won't follow, that you won't have either the desire or the will to lose weight or read 100 books, but it's part of the ritual, of renewal, of really believing in something.
Writing lists of things to do, of objects, of dreams, of thoughts makes it all more tangible, neat, tidy, to buffer the incurable desire for control over time, it can get manic, and mania has been known to have a certain appeal, creative appeal, maybe not, maybe I'm just saying that to feel better for a moment with my manic tendencies for documentation and to-do lists to best box my life into smaller, more digestible bits.

I was looking for something cool to make lists about, something enlightening, I was thinking about myself and what would be interesting to list in my life, or how to make them extremely interesting or extremely boring, no half measures.

Then I found Kateřina Šedá.

First going through my notes, I found one from six years ago telling me to look for Kateřina and her work. I deleted the note. My phone's memory was, and still is, full.

A few days later, quite by chance, I found myself at Tent's closing party, in the Witte de Withstraat, on the second floor, far from the eyes of assailants of oyster stalls and fancy beer in cans drinkers, I found myself in front of 512 drawings by Kateřina hanging next to each other. An illumination. What a coincidence.

So I certainly can't not talk about it after encountering Kateřina's work three times in my life and not giving it enough consideration, this time I guess it's the right time, like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle it fits now perfectly.

Je to jedno, it doesn't matter, is the name of her work that I came across. The project started from Kateřina's desire to uplift her grandmother, who was sinking into depression following her husband's passing. Kateřina convinced her grandmother to draw the tools she had used in her shop for over three decades. In this act of creative list-making her grandmother wove a thread connecting past and present in a deeply therapeutic way, through a self therapy listing action.
After rediscovering Kateřina , I have long wondered whether the very act of writing lists, of any kind, is a positive or negative act, and of course the answer is that it depends.
List of things to be grateful for?
Is this a good example of a positive list?
Why not lists of things not to be grateful for?
And immediately I thought of Pillow book, by Sei Shonagon, and her courtesan lists. Hateful things is certainly a list of things not to be thankful for.