thethingssafhaslearnedsofar

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On a planet where ultimately very little is truly native, Abu Asad questions which plant species become accepted as the rightful inhabitants of nation states over time and which are forever relegated to the foreign. Tulips, though first imported to Holland from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, are today proudly claimed a national treasure. No such fate has met the Japanese knotweed. The plant remains pursued across countries and continents as every conceivable attempt is made to eradicate it. Japanese knotweed survives where other species cannot. Its nonhierarchical root system enables it to thrive in industrial wastelands, erupt through concrete, and even disrupt electrical lines. And yet little thought is given to the underlying causes aiding this plant to flourish, from pollution to reduced frost brought on by climate change. The plant is blamed for the wrongdoings of others in the name of expediency and self-preservation. For Abu Asad, these plants reveal to us the human condition. Even as many try to expunge it from the earth, Japanese knotweed’s resilience continues to insist on presence.

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Red Dirt Rug

When I was a little girl I would sift dirt through an old screen door just for the pleasure of feeling the fine soft earth between my fingers and under my feet. … This work by Rena Detrixhe embodies the complicated history of our relationship to nature. In Oklahoma, like many places, human presence has deeply altered the landscape. This rich red earth is the land of the Dust Bowl, the end of the Trail of Tears, land runs and pipelines, deep fault lines and hydraulic fracturing. There is immense beauty and pride in this place and also profound sorrow. The refining and sifting of the soil and the imprinting of the pattern is a meditation on this past, a gesture of sensitivity, and the desire for understanding. It is a meticulous and solitary act. The form of the rug, from a western perspective, is an object of luxury; it is a symbol of authority and power. Though it is also an article of beauty and cultural significance and the result of many hours of careful labor. Through this form, I attempt to question the tension between nature and human impact while suggesting the ubiquitousness and preciousness of the earth just below our feet. https://www.renadetrixhe.com/2016-red-dirt-rug?fbclid=IwAR0dW5m6nyXF4Y_RqqToQTjVYJQmDmFS1QPOpGwPugiWiWfD5L5e_2cEuXY

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Lebanon - Then and Now

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Domestic Tension - Wafaa Bilal (2007) In 2004 one of Wafaa Bilal’s brothers was killed in an airstrike in Iraq. In January of 2007, Bilal was watching an interview with an American soldier who while sitting in the United States, directed drones to fire missiles thousands of miles away in the Iraqi desert. He was shocked how the soldier completely disconnected physically and emotionally from what happened on the ground in Iraq. This gave him the idea to turn ordinary people into drone operators who could target someone far away - except, in this case, people would not be following orders. They would have a choice about whether to shoot. You could see the human being on the other end. Wafaa’s suffering would be visible. During his month-long performance art piece, Bilal was shot at 70,000 time, and received 80 million hits on the internet from 128 countries. The white walls of his gallery turned fluorescent yellow. This begs the question why did strangers who knew nothing about Wafaa take it upon themselves to hurt him? Does technology and modern life and the anonymity they offer make us less caring as human beings? On day 11, a shooter from Estonia began bombarding his lamp until it fell apart. “It was sad for me because the lamp represented the only thing that stayed alive beside me in this space, especially at night.” Viewers online could see Wafaa’s sadness. Later that day, one of those viewers came to visit him in person with a brand new lamp. Another viewer brought him a pair of socks. “I noticed the other night when you went to sleep that you had one black sock on and one white sock, so I brought you some socks.” There were lots of people online who helped Wafaa too. Sometimes they took control of the paintball gun by repeatedly pressing down a key and pointing the gun away from Wafaa. He called them his virtual human shields. “The whole idea has reinforced my belief in humanity and human kindness. So thank you very much for keeping the hope alive. And please keep the conversation going.” Words are an excerpt from Shankar Vendantam’s hidden brain podcast - the episode is titled “the empathy gym”
https://wafaabilal.com/domestic-tension/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtvvVbeaSHk https://www.npr.org/transcripts/744195502

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“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

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“Working from home or living at work”

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Fighting for the rights of the oppressed is everyone's responsibility.

I’ve never looked at a suffering person and thought that their struggle is not my responsibility. I did not earn the luxury and comfort I have in life, it was gifted to me from Allah. I could so easily have been born a starving child in Yemen, a Uyghur in a concentration camp, A Palestinian in West Bank, An African American who faces systemic racism everyday. I never not relate to these people, If I have the power to make a difference I will do it, even if it has no direct impact on me... it is my responsibility. 

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect

When people are wrong or when they're performing poorly or, for lack of a better word, when they're incompetent, do they know they're incompetent? One day in 1995, a large, heavy middle-aged man robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He didn’t wear a mask or any sort of disguise. And he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank. Later that night, police arrested a surprised McArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the surveillance tapes, Wheeler stared in disbelief. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Wheeler thought that rubbing lemon juice on his skin would render him invisible to videotape cameras. After all, lemon juice is used as invisible ink so, as long as he didn’t come near a heat source, he should have been completely invisible.Police concluded that Wheeler was not crazy or on drugs—just incredibly mistaken.   The eponymous Dunning-Kruger Effect coined in 1999 by then-Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, is a cognitive bias whereby people who are incompetent at something are unable to recognise their own incompetence. And not only do they fail to recognise their incompetence, they’re also likely to feel confident that they actually are competent. It's not that you're ignorant and also happen to be overconfident. You're ignorant, and it makes you overconfident.   So in life if you think you're doing well, it means one of two things-- either you're doing well or you're not doing well at all. https://qz.com/986221/what-know-it-alls-dont-know-or-the-illusion-of-competence/ https://www.thisamericanlife.org/585/in-defense-of-ignorance

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American Culture and Frank Lloyd Wright 

Frank Lloyd Wright had long wanted to make a more democratic form of housing. He had experimented with inexpensive building methods and visionary urban (and suburban) design ideas. Now he had a chance to put some of these experiments and ideas into practice in a single project.

The Jacobs family would own the first house in a movement Wright called Usonia (United States of North America). This was a word he used to refer to an idealised vision of the United States at its democratic zenith. Usonia, Wright imagined, would be a nation of modest but comfortable, well-made and beautiful homes for the working- and middle-classes. Usonia embodied an idea that proper architecture could shape culture — design could make the world a better place. A beautiful house, Wright thought, would inspire its residents to eat better, dress better, listen to better music, and be better people. For Wright, housing the American people was a matter of individualisation, mass-customisation, rather than cookie-cutter mass-production. He saw America as a country of individuals, and his vision for the nation was one of decentralisation, where people would spread out away from cities on private lots (a Utopian vision of suburbia), living independently, humbly, within nature. The first of its kind, the Jacobs House would become known as Jacobs 1, or Usonia 1. It is located in the suburbs of Madison and stands out very obviously from the surrounding homes. From the street and at a glance, it looks like a wooden wall — the house turns its back on the road. On the other side, expansive glass opens the home up to nature. It was designed for its occupants, not to show off to neighbours. Usonia 1 also features a carport, a now-familiar term reportedly coined by Wright. Instead of a garage, a wooden awning offers shelter for cars. This was a cost-saving measure as well as a lifestyle-shaping device, forcing occupants to discard rather than store extra stuff. And like so many of Wright’s architectural works, it is more than it first appears — a closer look reveals careful detailing in the arrangement of wood slats. Inside, the space is small but floor plan is open. There are no walls between the kitchen, living and dining rooms. Again, this was both a design strategy and cost-saving measure, of which there are many examples within the home. The lights on the ceiling, for instance, are just bare sockets with wires running through a steel channel — this is widely considered the first example of track lighting. Flat roofs, built-in furniture, and heated floors were also unusual if not unique features. In Wright’s perfect world, he would custom-design houses for everyone. And not just the architecture — he would design the dishes, furniture, maybe even the clothes (he once designed a dress for the wife of a client). This was all about changing culture, one home at a time, and by extension redesigning America. Good design, he believed, would make the country more beautiful but also enlightened. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/usonia/

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“I've no use for these graspers. Pleasure-seekers overlook life's true pleasures. They aren't serious, which makes them boring, and they can't help being bored with me, since I'm bored with them.”                                      -Robert Walser An Excerpt from Robert Walsers’ - The Microscripts, 2,000-some pages of stories, comedy, little dramas, a novel about a robber who doesn't steal much of anything written in tiny German handwriting as pictured above. Bernhard Echte spent 20 years translating these microscripts.  So why did Walser spend so many years writing things that even he probably couldn't read? He explained to someone, in those years when he was really depressed, when publishers didn't want his work anymore, he had bad writer's block. He describes it as a cramp in his brain. And he explains that writing this tiny hurts. So he can take the cramp in his brain and put it into his hand, instead. And once he does that, his mind is clear, and he can think again. On a page of a calendar he'd cut into pieces, he writes about why he did it all in pencil. One day, he figured out that a pen made him nervous-- all those mistakes, cross-outs, in ink. But if he used a pencil instead and labored over this tiny writing, he explains, "This labor looked to me like a pleasure, as it were. I felt it would make me healthy. A smile of satisfaction would creep into my soul each time, like a smile of amicable self-derision. It seemed to me, the pencil let me work more dreamily, peacefully, cosily, contemplatively. I believe that the process I just described would blossom into a peculiar form of happiness." That his handwriting was small is in close connection with his convictions about life and what is interesting in life. He was not interested in great importance and things which are big and everybody knew about. The interesting things are the small things. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/687/small-things-considered/act-three-10

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Richard Serras’ Verb List 1967-68 Serra famously said, “Drawing is a verb.” In Verblist, he compiled a series of what he called “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.” Serra has talked at length about the central place this language-based drawing occupies in the development of his early sculptural practice. This work on paper suggests a common ground underlying Serra’s practices in all mediums—from early sculptures to later monumental works, which not only twist and curve but also enclose, surround, and encircle. It shows Serra’s debt to action painting and his proximity to Conceptual and performance practices; the list was published in the journal Avalanche in 1971 and testifies to the artist’s close relationship to dancers like Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, with whom he shared not only a milieu but a commitment to carrying out verbs.

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Legally, you are not dead until someone says you are dead. In China Doctors are not allowed to declare that you are dead, only the state can give you the permission to die. https://tinyurl.com/waynlanewuhan

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“Human beings live their lives in time. Our sense of ourselves in the present is always in part a function of our remembrance and constant reinterpretation of our pasts along with our projection of future possibilities. We live for the person we hope to become. We look forward to who we will be a month or a year or a decade or more from now — and we commemorate the transitions from present to future with rites of passage celebrated in public with loved ones and friends. This makes us futural creatures. A life without forward momentum is to a considerable extent a life without purpose — or at least the kind of purpose that lifts our spirits and enlivens our steps as we traverse time. Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder. A present without a future is a life that feels less worth living, because it's a life haunted by a shadow of futility.”

- Damon Linker

https://theweek.com/articles/909137/when-time-stops

Artworks by Francine Van Hove

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This is the purpose of this blog