The Practice of Everyday Life

And, also as always, one has to get out: there are only lost paradises. Is the terminal the end of the illusion? There is another threshold, composed of momentary bewilderments in the airlock constituted by the train station. History begins again, feverishly.

-Michel de Certeau

chilled hands

walnut heart

The Escape Route’s Design: Assessment of the Impact of Current Aesthetics on History and a Comparative Reading Based on an Example Close to the City of Berlin

Mariana Silva & Pedro Neves Marques

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/61

Stills- How then does the sun return to the earth after the eclipse of the sun

Mladen Bizumic- Global truths vs. Local reflections

Who speaks? What speaks?

Who speaks? What speaks? The question is implied and the function named, but the individual never reigns, and the subject slips away without neutralizing its voice. S/he who speaks, speaks to the tale as S/he begins telling it and retelling it. S/he does not speak about it. For without a certain work of displacement, ‘speaking about’ only partakes in the conservation of systems of binary opposition (subject/ object I/ it, we/ they) on which territorialized knowledge depends
(Minh-ha 327).

In the quote above from the essay “Cotton and Iron”, film-maker and feminist theorist Trinh Min-ha foregrounds the dilemma of cultural representation. In this piece of writing, I will consider two ways in which the politics of representation might be evidenced and navigated in artistic practice.

Trinh Minh-ha poignantly articulates two fundamental issues within the philosophy of language. Min-ha presents firstly the inherent dissonance between the speech act and the subject speaking. Secondly, she highlights the implicated relationship that exists between speech and subject.
Here the subject (speaking or representing) is presented in a double bind of never being able to fully communicate embodied experience, while also being unable to fully displace themselves as subjects from the speech act itself.

This dilemma of representation poses challenges for any individual or practice engaging in communication. In an interview with artist Amal Kenway, Kunsthalle Wien director Gerald Matt queries how representational issues might be navigated amid “...tendencies towards generalization or geographical standardizations...” (Matt 137). Kenway notes:

I make a point however of presenting something contrary to what is expected, contrary to clichés. I do so by focusing my work on a subjective level, by producing art that looks at the intimate. I believe this is an effective way of changing existing perceptions and misconceptions (138).

Here, Kenway presents a concentrated focus on the subjective and intimate as two ways of subverting generalisation and determinism. Employed as strategies within art production and everyday communication, the subjective and intimate lend agency to marginalised representation.


Matt, Gerald. “Amal Kenawy.” Interviews 2. Vienna: Kunstalle Wein, 2008. 134-144. Print.

Minh-ha, Trinh. “Cotton and Iron.” Out there: marginalization and contemporary cultures. Ed. Ferguson, Russell and Martha Gever. New York:The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992. 327-336. Print.

Contemp(t)orary: Part 1

Contemp(t)orary: Part 2