User:Alessia/special issue xxiv
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List making
Overdosing.
This is my thing. Lists are my thing.
The strive to live in a systematic way, to find coherence in the chaos, creating patterns creating structures (to then forget them). Where is control? What about overwhelming sense of losing control? I don’t need to be so mean tho. I am a list. List.
This time as always I’ll try to think about lists without thinking about them?
One of the first thing I think about is a book: A Sand Book by Ariana Reines. It’s a poem book. She has a really raw and kind of occult writing style, she play with her own inner tension, in between different levels of realities. She plays with words, cutting them as she is using sharp knifes, soaked in lyricism. She plays with structures making them tangible, fresh meat to cut. Her poems look like intense lists of emotions, images, seemingly disconnected at times and overall they still punch directly your gut in the most brutal way.
Everyone their 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.
Mapping
https://hoodmaps.com/rotterdam-neighborhood-map
Non places and psychogeography
What I like about this special issue is that we got out, finally. I wanted to suppress myself at some point, the aquarium is an alienating space, wdka in general is. Concrete and glass is the best to make you feel discomfort.
Going around looking at the city in a bit of a different way is fun, refreshing.
I always say my favourite colour is red, so for my own list during a looting typical monday I decided to focus myself on everything red.
There is still the non places aspect I would like to explore directly, as I was living in a city that itself I feel is a non place so it was difficult to observe it as a “normal” active lively city.
Now that I am here I can see the differences, the little obscure hidden corners, I can see trash and not romanticise it as part of the landscape. What about blind sides? Sounds good as a title.
This got me into a rabbit hole anyway, nothing new I would say, as anything is great material to get into rabbit holes of information. It seems as a great hobby, to just get lost this way in the branches of a theme, swimming toward the horizon and forget what was even the starting point. I have faith every fragment, at some point, will merge together, revealing a nice magical mosaic trash,something cool.
Thinking about colour in the city, on an aesthetic level, there is quite a lot to say.
How much colour is used in urban preservation, and how much it affects people mentally and physically. It Would be nice to research palettes depending on the zones of the city.
While researching colors I got into psychogeography.
Amulets
Reading list
✰⋆Smith, Phil. “The Contemporary Dérive: A Partial Review of Issues Concerning the Contemporary Practice of Psychogeography.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2010, pp. 103–22. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44251315.
https://hogeschoolrotterdam.on.worldcat.org/search?databaseList=&queryString=The%20map%20is%20not%20the%20territory%20&format=Book&subformat=Book%3A%3Abook_digital&changedFacet=format&clusterResults=true&groupVariantRecords=false