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We Are Out of Place


Until 1999, my sculpture was participatory in the sense that I built reading rooms, reading gardens, bridges, workers' lounges, etc. Previously, I knew architecture not as a "thing between four walls in a spatial sense, but as a place for resting, sleeping, working." But since then I have enclosed the sculptures so that people cannot enter; they have to walk around the sculpture and view it. Adorno's ironic statement—"it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home"—now guides my work. Outside of these enclosed spaces, we are out of place, as though banished, estranged, expelled, or as Lukács says, experiencing a "transcendental homelessness."

Siah Armajani
from Notes on Exile

Mary Lattimore: The Potential for Experimentation


“I really love to go places to make records. I got an art residency at Headlands, outside of San Francisco, for a couple months to record among the redwoods. That’s where I made Hundreds of Days—barely any cell phone service, very rugged beach, and it was in a national park. I got so much inspiration from just being alone there in a cold, misty Northern California barn.”

More
A lovely track from Sushumu Yakota, a Japanese artist who was born in 1960 in Tachikawa City—west of Tokyo. He studied economics and graphic design simultaneously, moving to Tokyo where he had a successful design practice in the 1990s all while recording and releasing over thirty albums. This particular track is from the late 1980s. 

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

We Possess No Other Life


It would be futile to turn away from the past and think only about the future. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that there is even a possibility. The opposition between the past and the future is absurd. The future brings us nothing, gives us nothing; It is we who, in order to build it, must give it everything, give it our life itself. To give we must possess, and we possess no other life, no other sap, than the treasures inherited from the past and digested, assimilated, recreated by us. Of all the needs of the human soul, there is none more vital than the past.

Simone Weil
from L'enracinement