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Notes for my bad memory
Records, random thoughts, special moments (and some trivial ones) that I wouldn't want to forget.
Don't expect anything too brilliant here.


30.06.2024:
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a 1987 semi-autobiographical work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa that examines the Chicano and Latino experience through the lens of issues such as gender, identity, race, and colonialism. Here an excerpt from an excerpt that discusses a different way of seeing-feeling. With strange characters and formatting, due to the copy paste of an old PDF.

La facllltad

La facultad is the capacity to' see in surfa,ce phenamena the me.aning af deeper realities, to' see the deep structure bdow the surface. It is an ins tam "sensing," a quick perception arrived at withaut consciaus reasoning .. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that daes nat speak, that communkates in images and symbals which are the faces of feelings, that is,.behind which feelings reside/hide. The ane possessing this sensitivity is exallciatingly alive to the world.

Thase whO' are pushed out of the tribe for being different are likely to become more sensitized (when not bmtalized into insensitivity) .. Those who do not f,eel psychalagically or physicaUy safe in the warld are more apt to' develop this sense. Thase whO' are paunced on the most have it the strongest-the females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the persecuted,. the marginaHzed, the foreiglll.

When we're up .against the waU, when we have aU sarts af oppressions coming at us, we are forced to develap this faculty socthat we'll knaw when the next person is gaing to slap us or lackcus away .. We'll sense the rapist when he's five blocks down thecstreet. Pain makes us. a,eutely anxiaus to avoid more of it, so wechane that radar. h's a kind of survival tacticJhat.p~eap:.k.-c.aughLc.hetweeot~u-Uknowingly ~ltivate. It is latent in aU of us.

I walk intO' a htluse and I know whether it is empty are occupied .. I feel the lingering charge in the a.if af a recent fight ~r lovemaking or depr,ession. I sense the ,emotIans someone nea.r IS emitting-whether friendly or threatening. Hate and fear-the mare intense the emotion, the grear,er my receptian af it. I feel a tingling on my skin when someone is staring at me ar thinking about me. I can ten how others feel by the way they smen, where athers are by the air pressur,e on my skin. I can spat the love ar greed or generosity lodged in the tissues of another. Of~n I sense -tb..e directian of and my distance lLQ!]'l-P.£Q12k or o~iects_ in the dark, or with my e~ closed,JYjthouUQQ]{jgg)t must be a vestige of a proximity sense, a sixth sense that's la.in darmant fram long-agO' times.

Fear develaps the proximity sense aspect of la lacultad. But there is.a deeper sensing that is another aspect of this faculty. It is anything that breaks into one's everyday made of perception,. that causes a break in one's ddenses and resistance, anything that takes ane from one's habitual grounding, causes the depths to open up, causes a ~in perc!::ption .Ihis shift in perception deepens the way we see cancrete objects and peaple; the s,e.nses become sa acute and piercing (hat we ,can see through thmgs" view events in depth, a piercing that reaches the underwarl~ (t?e realm of the soul) .. As we plunge vertkally, the break, wIth us accampanying new seeing, makes us pay attentian £0 (he saul, and we are thus carried into awareness-an ,expedencing of soul 

(Self).

We lose samething in this mode af initiatian, samething is taken from us: aur innocence, aur unknawing ways, our safe and easy ignarance. There is a prejudice and a fear~f rh~ dark,. chthonic (underwarld), material such as depresslOn,. Illness" death and the vialatians that can bring an this break. Canfront- ifing anything that tears the fabric af our everyday made of'! consciausness and that thrusts us into a less literal and mare psychic sense af reality increases awareness and la lacuftad.


11.06.2024:
Notes from a conference

At a conference on deconolization in museums, the universalism of past exhibitions is criticized. But as long as curators still aim to construct narratives, this trend continues. Why so much fear in simply practicing and activating the particularism of works and artists? As long as the public continues to be thought of as unemancipated to create connections, universalism prevails.

Clive van den Berg seems to really understand what a museum or exhibition needs to be.
In an exhibition space that used to be a jail, sound needs to be highlighted. Sound in a prison is one of the only things that cannot be controlled.

It is necessary to make words more flexible (example: art) to work with those who were not previously considered in the museum.

An exhibition that I unfortunately missed in my life:
https://markk-hamburg.de/en/ausstellungen/lightning-symbol-and-snake-dance/