Given Heed Already to a Great Many Things

Whoever follows traces must not only pay attention; above all, he must have given heed already to a great many things. (The hunter must know about the hoof of the animal whose trail he is on; he must know the hour when that animal goes to drink; he must know the course of the river to which it tums, and the location of the ford by which he himself can get across.) In this way there comes into play the peculiar configuration by dint of which long experience appears translated into the language of immediate experience. Experiences can, in fact, prove invaluable to one who follows a trace—but experiences of a particular sort. The hunt is the one type of work in which they function intrinsically. And the hunt is, as work, very primitive.

The experiences <Erfohrungen> of one who attends to a trace result only very remotely from any work activity, or are cut off from such a procedure altogether. They have no sequence and no system. They are a product of chance, and have about them the essential interminability that distinguishes the preferred obligations of the idler. The fundamentally unfinishable collection of things worth knowing, whose utility depends on chance, has its prototype in study.

Walter Benjamin
from The Arcades Project, Convolue m, Idleness

What is Still Unknown Yet Already Exists

How can one care for something that one can only think of controlling and exploiting? Feeling separate from nature leads to this interaction, which is so negative and devastating. In some fields of science-and among certain scientists—there's a strong inclination to impose one's will on and control over what's being studied. Some scientific methods are wonderful, but everything we perceive depends on our capacity to listen, relate to others, feel and see the network, and intuit what is still unknown yet already exists.

Delcy Morelos
from a conversation with Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña, here.

Jeremy Johnston: The Anxiety of the Open Question

“It's pure curiosity. It's 95% just constantly asking questions: what's the right direction for this work of art? How should you install it? Will it survive outdoors? By asking these questions, by expressing curiosity, you're in a train of thought that leads to the most interesting places...I think what sustains it, and maybe this is also something of our personality as a studio — is not reaching, not forcing it into one conclusion or another.”

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And That Has To Be Enough

I don’t think that people on our side have any right to assume a good outcome. I think that the real, authentic motive for doing what we’re doing is because it’s right. And that has to be enough. If we have to have some guarantee that it’s going to be effective, sooner or later, we’ll become discouraged and quit.

Wendell Berry
from an interview concerning protests

Shifting Coordinates

Image from the June 2026 exhibition, Shifting Coordinates, at the Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo, Norway.