A version of this essay was written in the spring and summer of 2020, and submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Art in Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Revisions and additions have since been made, though I’ve decided to leave it in the original present tense of its particular historical moment, when time felt palpably broken. In this sense, the future continues to meddle in the past. Two and a half years out, in the parts of the world where we’ve been allowed to forget, where borders and offices and schools have reopened, the temporal and social interregna of the early pandemic feels like a faraway dream. It feels difficult, somehow, to fully engage with or reinhabit the emotions of this period, when a disruption of normalcy spurred so much awareness of the constructs we take for granted. And while the former pace of life has largely resumed, the weirdness of broken time is still latent, lurking beneath the surface of our newfound routines

MS
December 2022
Paris, France



DURING THIS TIME WE FEEL OUR EXISTENCE

In 1993, Jacques Derrida delivered a two-part lecture titled “Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International”. The occasion was a multidisciplinary, multinational conference held at the University of California, Riverside. The conference speculated on the afterlife of Marxism in the wake of communism’s collapse and the transnational expansion of free-market capitalism, marked by major recent global events such as the falling of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. One of the concepts to emerge from “Specters of Marx” is that of hauntology, a portmanteau combining the verb ‘to haunt’ and ‘ontology’, the philosophical study of being, or what exists. “To haunt”, writes Derrida, “does not mean to be present” 1 1 Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge,1993), 202 . “Present”, in this sense, meaning both “here” and “now”. To haunt, then, would mean to both lack physical presence and belong to either the past or the future. Hauntology adheres to the deconstructionist principle that existence is not defined by the positive qualities of any particular thing, but rather by the absence or difference of that which surrounds it.

Throughout “Specters of Marx”, Derrida cites, recites, and analyses a phrase spoken by Hamlet shortly after he’s been visited by the ghost of his father and sworn to avenge his murder: The time is out of joint 2 2 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V . In a 1995 colloquium at New York University titled ‘America is/in Deconstruction’, Derrida returns to this phrase, unravelling and suturing it to his philosophy of deconstruction through a signature string of linguistic contortions. Deconstruction, he writes, is the reminder of “disjointment itself, the possibility of any disjunction” 3 3 Derrida, Jacques, “The Time is Out of Joint”, Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: NYU Press,1995), 14-15 . In French, disjoncter is synonymous with délirer, to be mad or out of one’s mind. Similarly, to be hors de ses gonds, off one’s hinges, may be translated as ‘out of joint’.

We are currently living in mad times. Lockdowns, the closing of offices and schools, and the suspension of travel have drastically slowed down the movements of our day-to-day, yet global events and catastrophes seem to unfold at a breakneck pace. And while mandates have confined many of us to our homes, offering us a truly ~unprecedented~ opportunity to assess and recalibrate the rhythms of our daily lives, they have also consigned us to our devices. Making us hostages of the incessant 24-hour news cycles that drag us through each calamitous development and make it impossible to look away. Luring us further into the insatiable imperative to produce – be it sourdough bread, or virtual exhibitions – in order to demonstrate (to whom?) how we used this time, without realising that it is perhaps Time that is using us. The rotten state of our present moment is also saturated with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. It feels as if the historical events of one century ago – from the Spanish Flu to the Great Depression and rise of Fascism – and half a century ago – namely, the Civil Rights movement – were not isolated incidents but recurring symptoms of powerful cyclical waves that build and eventually tear through the net of the hegemonic order, disrupting its stronghold and offering brief windows for change before subsiding again.

“Everything in fact begins, in Hamlet…at the moment when, in an already repetitive fashion, the specter arrives by returning.” 4 4 Ibid, 19 Likewise, the precise start date of my lockdown eludes me. In the UK, the absence of a clear directive from the government left it up to individuals to begin sequestering themselves away at their own discretion, while others still crowded cafes and smoked idly outside pubs. If I had to pinpoint the moment that time came out of joint for me, I would say March 18th 2020: the day that Paris-based artist Anna Zoria was meant to arrive at my flat in London – a one bedroom in Hoxton that moonlights as the project space Maison Touchard 5 5 Co-founded in 2019 by myself and curator Clémentine Proby in an East London council flat, Maison Touchard was a project space dedicated to exploring notions of domestic, architectural, and social space and practices of everyday life. – to undertake a residency-exhibition titled Maybe You Waste the Banana, But You Gain the Day.

Screenshot from Anna Zoria, I got up in March and April, 2018, colour video, 41:11min.  6 6 Curiously, on several days, including March 18th, the video’s timestamp is out of sync with the alarm clock pictured.


Over the six week period, Zoria planned to develop an installation using video and text to consider the mediated representation and commodification of historically invisible or undervalued domestic chores and tasks – tracing a line between the radical feminist practices of the 60s and 70s, from Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art! (1969) and Chantal Akerman’s pioneering film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), to a nascent contemporary subgenre of YouTube vlogs produced by Korean housewives enacting (and presumably capitalising on) their daily chores for millions of subscribers. More broadly, the project intended to explore the technologically-aided collapse between public and private (or domestic) space that is increasingly characteristic of contemporary life. Rather than present the findings of her research in the form of an exhibition following the residency period, Zoria wished to collapse these spatio-temporal boundaries by receiving the public while she slept, vlogged, and worked in Maison Touchard. Visitors would be invited to witness and contribute to the evolution of the installation by participating in a schedule of programmed talks, workshops, and screenings with London-based artists and practitioners similarly engaged in the critique of everyday life. We set the stage for Zoria’s arrival by restoring the gallery to its original function: a room for living, furnished spartanly with a king-sized mattress, an anglepoise bedside lamp, and a desk. The space of the exhibition, however, could only produce itself in due course, as the artist’s rituals, gestures, and social interactions unfolded and inscribed themselves over time.

But on March 18th, France sealed its borders, Anna Zoria never arrived, and the only one who would be residing in this gallery-cum-living room for an indeterminate amount of time, alone, was me. This was particularly ironic given the solitary nature of Zoria’s practice, which is concerned first and foremost (in the artist’s words) with “doing nothing” and by extension, the quotidian, the domestic, as well as the reproductive labour and rituals these entail. But as the days went by, irony turned into eeriness. In simply inhabiting my flat and moving through the repetitive gestures of my day – eating, cooking, showering, cleaning, procrastinating, sleeping - I couldn’t shake the spooky feeling that Zoria’s practice was being vicariously enacted in the space through my actions. This was particularly palpable in the living room, where everything remained both frozen in time, in a state of perpetual beginning, and haunted by the no longer and not yet.

***


In Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, Mark Fisher reconjures the concept of hauntology in the context of the 21st century. According to Fisher, the steady dismantling of the social welfare state in the United Kingdom, rise of neoliberalism and shift into a post-Fordist era of globalisation, computerisation, and casualisation of labour has produced a ‘hauntological’ contemporary culture stuck in a mode of retro-pastiche and imbued with longing for a future that never arrived. “There is an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that…there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.” 7 7 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: zer0 books, 2013), 9-21 Fisher contends that the 21st century is marked by anachronism and inertia: the speed of production has ramped up, while remaining “saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past without recalling any specific historical moment”. Cultural production in this era is characterised by a “nostalgia mode”, meaning a formal, rather than psychological attachment to the past, perhaps best exemplified by the feature of crackling vinyl on digitally produced tracks. The musical artists associated with hauntology in the early 2000-10s shared a preoccupation “with the way technology materialised memory”, coincidentally around the same time that the internet and digital communications assumed an ever more ubiquitous role in our increasingly immaterial lives.

Fisher questions why postmodernism produces a culture of pastiche and repetition. One possible answer, via Bifo Berardi, argues that the combination of precarious work and digital networks endemic to neoliberalism leads to a besieging of attention. The effects of this combination result in ‘consumers’ who are too exhausted and overstimulated to engage with anything but familiar quick fixes; and ‘producers’ – for whom cultural innovation depends on a withdrawal from sociality and pre-existing forms – who are increasingly unable to disengage from “socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links.” The broken time of the pandemic has highlighted how this disjunction has progressed even further. Fisher already articulated it in a 2014 essay titled “No One is Bored, Everything is Boring” 8 8 Mark Fisher, “No One is Bored, Everything is Boring”, Visual Artists Ireland, 2014. https://visualartists.ie/mark-fisher-one-bored-everything-boring . “In the intensive, 24-7 environment of capitalist cyberspace, the brain is no longer allowed any time to idle; instead, it is inundated with a seamless flow of low-level stimulus.” A chilling observation, since boredom, in all its overwhelming affective oppression, can also be an injunction for creativity, growth, and revolt.

This was the belief of many 20th century critics of modernity who theorised boredom through the sociopolitical lens of industrialisation (a new stage of capitalism) as the materialisation of free time for a new middle class and the drudgery of tedious mechanical labour enabled boredom to emerge as a widespread affect. Walter Benjamin, for example, considered boredom “the threshold to great deeds…a warm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silks” 9 9 Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999),106 . But it is also important not to overlook boredom as integral to the human experience. According to the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, the capacity for boredom serves an important function within our psychological development. In his view, boredom is “akin to free-floating attention”, a stark contrast to the incessantly directed attention that characterises our overly stimulated and mediated lives online. This irritable feeling allows the individual, by negotiating the emptiness of waiting or searching for something unknown, to discover its own crystallising desires, and by extension, a sense of self 10 10 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993) .

Building on Fisher’s essay, the media theorist Tina Kendall, in an illuminating study of the gendered performance of boredom on social media by teenage girls, concludes that it is “precisely the subject’s capacity to feel bored…that is being eroded in the era of digital networks” 11 11 Tina Kendell, “#BOREDWITHMEG: Gendered boredom and networked media,” New Formations, Vol. 93: Memory, Territory, Moods, Summer 2018, pp. 80-100. . The speed at which the current algorithmic technologies capture, commodify, and react to user engagement bypasses human consciousness altogether, modulating our affective experience before we can even become aware of it. In Ghosts, Fisher understands the technological apparati of late capitalism as the direct cause of our temporal alienation and exhaustion, which prohibits any meaningful cultural engagement with the present. Today, as Kendall’s study suggests, the further advancement of these same technologies seem to be robbing us of our temporal agency altogether, the very ability to experience ourselves in time and autonomously choose how we spend it.

Phillips defines boredom as “a state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins” 12 12 Ibid, 68 , echoing the ‘no longer, and not yet’ of the spectre. I had never considered the similarities between the boring and the haunted: both are, at their core, temporal glitches or disjunctions within rational, linear time that are laden with generative potential. I am particularly struck by how deeply these two states resonate, not only with the conditions I find myself under while writing this essay, but with Zoria’s practice in and of itself. Zoria’s art reflects the “formal nostalgia” laid out by Fisher above, from the recurring use of cassette tapes and the application of VHS-style filters to digitally shot videos, to her appropriation of 1960s feminist and anti-capitalist slogans of protest such as “the personal is political”, or the Situationists’ “ne travaillez jamais”. However, it doesn’t necessarily evoke a melancholy for lost futures. Rather, like the boring or the spectral, her practice is an exercise in intercalating an increasingly accelerated and dystopian hijacking of time by capitalist forces with embolisms of resistance that insist on the many cyclical (emotional, biological, spectral) experiences of its passage.

***


Everything begins before it begins  13 13 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, 202
— Jacques Derrida

I was in Paris the day I discovered Anna Zoria’s work at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where a group exhibition of recent alumni was on view. The morning of my visit, I had just submitted a thesis, marking the culmination of a year’s worth of research mired in the entanglements between memory and space. The focus of my writing was on the work of Georges Perec and Chantal Akerman, two artists born of a fractured heritage in the wake of the Shoah and tormented by a lifelong sense of displacement. I was interested in how the broken transmission of generational memories seemed to endow them with a heightened sensitivity to the immaterial properties of place. How through their rigorous attention to the endotic (vs. exotic) and everyday in their films and texts, they managed to evoke its energies, histories, and social character.

Perec and Akerman’s attempts to harness a sense of place involved the very deliberate manipulation of the reader/audience’s experience of time. For Perec, this was achieved through the exhaustive enumerations of the objects and places that populated his gaze. He writes in Species of Spaces, that “the submission to experience is a work of meticulous description” 14 14 Perec, Georges, Species of Spaces and Other Writings, ed. John Strouck (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 132 But it is also a work of meticulous adherence to Perec’s text, as one discovers that the experience is derived through the time spent reading his descriptions. Akerman perhaps put it best during an interview in 2004. When asked why her notoriously slow, durational films, which often centred on banal domestic activity, incited outrage among audience members when they have surely just as easily spent two hours of their life in traffic or doing laundry, Akerman replied that it is because “during this time” – the time of her films – “we feel our existence” 15 15 Chantal Akerman, “In Her Own Time: Miriam Rosen in Conversation with Chantal Akerman”, interview by Miriam Rosen, Artforum, April 2004 .

After submitting my paper, I felt compelled to visit Perec and Akerman’s graves in the Père Lachaise cemetery, to acknowledge the time I had spent steeped in their stories and ways of seeing the world, and to mark the close of this cycle. But I wonder if it wasn’t their spirits guiding me as I stepped into the sun-drenched atrium of the Beaux-Arts and stumbled upon Zoria’s multi-media installation Showers (2019). My eye was drawn to the grid of ninety-nine hand scrawled pages that had been neatly adhered across the surface of a tall translucent wall. Two pages jumped out at me. They read: “Nothing Happens” and “Hyperrealist Everyday”, the title of Ivone Margolies’ comprehensive study of Akerman’s films.

Before approaching the wall, I inspected the long table in front of me, on which clusters of various household items had been carefully spread out. A cassette player in the centre of the table was loaded with the installation’s titular work: ten recordings of the artist’s showers from June 12th - 21st 2019, accompanied by a track list identifying the various podcasts, interviews, and news broadcasts that she’d been listening to in the background. To the left, on a gauzy tea towel, sat the artist’s travel-sized alarm clock, daily tear-away calendar, and a Lucite box containing the previous days’ pages. These chronometers (which follow the artist throughout her daily life and recur in her work) were bookended by objects associated with hygienic rituals: a plastic Muji pill box stuffed with bits of rock candies, resin, and wax, Q-tips dipped in melted caramel, and a wooden toothbrush on one end; a water jug, face carving made of soap, and papier-maché box on the other.

Returning to the altarpiece of texts, I found an amalgam of notes, to-do lists, appointment reminders, and quotes from the likes Clarice Lispector, Moyra Davey, Robert Filliou, and J.G. Ballard among many others. The documents spoke, in various ways, to the qualitative experiences of time’s passage. One unattributed fragment seemed to sum up the installation: “Myth, ritual, repetition. Represented by our daily rituals. Does not, after all, offer any resistance to the relentless progress of profane time.”

Installation View. Anna Zoria, Showers, 2019. École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.


The devotional, near compulsive, treatment given to the ordinary objects collected in Zoria’s installation signalled that there were things I was likely taking for granted. Showers also offered an example of Zoria’s practice of recycling past works and texts into endless combinatorial installations, stoking the feeling that everything is timeless and about time, and thus placing the emphasis on the viewer’s experience of the work, determined by the amount of time and attention they choose to spend on it.

Showers also comprised a video diptych, Blue Moon Side B and Blue Moon Side A (both 2019). Displayed on two iPads side by side, the videos are treated with a filter that adds a timestamp, rippling waves from side to side, and a yellowish discolouration evocative of old VHS tapes. Each video depicts the artist lying on an empty bed listening to Elvis Presley’s “Blue Moon” from the same cassette player that was on the table. In Blue Moon Side B, the artist is clothed and faces the camera while in the subtitles an elegiac letter from an ex-lover is rhythmically doled out to fit the duration of the song. In Blue Moon Side A, the artist is nude and faces the wall. She fumbles a bit with the cassette player but soon the song’s lazy percussion takes over, and the first lines of T.S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton” unfold across the screen. Revisiting these videos today, I am struck by how Eliot’s words – published in 1936 – presage Derrida’s:

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.”

The Blue Moon videos belong to a subcategory of work within Zoria’s practice classified by the site of their production: the bed. In early March, ahead of her planned arrival in London, Zoria shared Work Place (Working Title), 2016-18, a small black and white silver gelatin print of the artist’s bed, accompanied by a cassette tape recording of the artist discussing the work:

Screenshot from Anna Zoria, Blue Moon Side B, 2019, video, colour, sound. 2:56m.


“I was thinking a lot about how I spend a lot of my time and do a lot of my work, which is doing nothing, in bed…it occurred to me that in order to go to the studio and sit and do nothing, I had to keep a job where I had to do a lot of something. And then pay the rent on the studio, and then show up and not do anything. So. Technically I realised, I can get rid of the studio, and I can get rid of the job, and I can carry on doing the same thing. At home. For free. From the comfort of my own bed…So doing nothing at home in bed was equally productive to doing nothing in the studio. For me. And when no ideas came, I considered it to be the best work of all. Just lying in bed. Doing nothing. That was exactly what I wanted. The experience of doing nothing in bed as work.”  16 16 Anna Zoria and Rhys Edwards, Letters from a Residency in Lithuania (London: Maison Touchard, Unpublished), 221-227

Like a material metaphor for the paradox of “doing nothing”, the bed is a temporal site where action and idleness converge. Its function is tightly tethered to some of our most fundamental biological cycles, which only occur over a course of inaction, such as sleep, convalescence, or palliation. From procreation, to prostitution, to childbirth, the bed is also, as Zoria goes on to say, a historically female locus of labour. Curiously, despite its many and varied uses, the duration of time we spend in bed is heavily circumscribed by social norms. Spending a full day in bed is rife with connotations of illness, indulgence, depression, or slovenliness (even today, as our collective professional and social activity has been relegated to the domestic sphere). Insisting on spending a full day in bed anyway, without capitulating to the expectation of turning it into an office but instead turning the office work into something related to the experience of passing time in bed, feels to me like a quiet but defiant reclamation of temporal autonomy, as well as a cheeky, subtle and undirected act of sabotage 17 17 The term sabotage originated in the textile industry in early 19th century France, during the industrial revolution, though its precise etymology is disputed. One seductive, but completely unfounded, theory describes how disgruntled weavers, unable to compete with the newly invented Jacquard loom and fearing their jobs, would throw their wooden clogs (sabots) into the machines to wreak havoc, effectively slowing down production and costing their employers without having to strike and risk their positions outrightly. .

Letters from a Residency in Lithuania, where Zoria’s description of Work Place also appears, is the title of a collection of voice notes exchanged between Zoria and the Vancouver-based artist-curator Rhys Edwards between 1 January and 1 March 2020, while Zoria was an artist in residence at the Rupert Centre for Art and Education in Vilnius, Lithuania. At the end of each day, Zoria would transcribe the voice notes and add the printed pages to a growing wall of text, which ultimately numbered around two-hundred pages, or the equivalent of fifty exchanges. Maison Touchard had intended to publish the letters on the occasion of Maybe You Waste the Banana, But You Gain the Day, and during the lockdown, in the absence of all else, I spent many days reading and editing these exchanges. Working from “Zoria’s” bed, I became virtually immersed in the cyclical rhythm of their thoughts and feelings over a recently passed period of time, during which the artist was similarly confined to an empty studio and alone.

This project was not the intended outcome of Zoria’s Rupert residency. In fact, she had applied with a proposal to explore the subject of Fluxus and George Maciunas in the context of Vilnius, where Maciunas was from, which she never did. (Not explicitly at least, Maciunas and ideas on Fluxus do weave through the exchange). Zoria initiated a correspondence with Edwards as a way to keep a record of her experience at Rupert outside of the designated work expected of her in exchange for a period of free time and space in isolation. Like Anne Boyer’s poem “Not Writing”, which is actually a long list of all the texts and documents the poet is not writing while writing the poem, Zoria appropriates the rhetorical device of paralipsis (emphasising a subject by professing not to mention it) to refute the hierarchy and boundary between “art” and daily life, or productive and reproductive labour, in a way reminiscent of radical feminist art practices mentioned previously, such as that of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In an accompanying text titled “What Is ‘Not Writing’?”, Boyer elaborates:

“Not writing is working, and when not working at paid work working at unpaid work like caring for others, and when not at unpaid work like caring, caring also for a human body, and when not caring for a human body many hours, weeks, years, and other measures of time spent caring for the mind in a way like reading or learning and when not reading and learning also making things…and when not reading and learning and working and making and caring and worrying also politics, and when not politics also the kind of medication which is consumption, or sex mostly or drunkenness, cigarettes, drugs, passionate love affairs, cultural products, the internet also, then time spent staring into space that is not a screen, also all the time spent driving, particularly here where it is very long to get anywhere, and then to work and back, to take her to school and back too. There is illness and injury which has produced a great deal of not writing. There is cynicism, disappointment, political outrage, heartbreak, resentment, and realistic thinking which has produced a great deal of not writing…” 18 18 Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2019), 49-45

Ultimately, Letters from a Residency in Lithuania, while conceptually not being the work, became the work, i.e. the measure of Zoria’s output in the residency. From the moment she sent her first voice note, Zoria rebuked the imperative of artistic production that she was similarly challenging in Maybe You Waste the Banana, But You Gain the Day. The exchanges deal with the organisation of time, daily tasks, and archiving daily life; and covers a host of existential concerns ranging from the anxiety of beginnings and waiting for ideas to arrive, procrastination, questions of usefulness, waste and spirituality. It is difficult to convey just how sweeping the conversations in this collection of letters are, or to enumerate even a fraction of the cultural, historical, mathematical, and personal references that proliferate in the thoughts exchanged herein. There is a sense of movement as the conversations unfold, but never a sense of arrival. Ideas are repeated, circled back to, books are referenced incorrectly; some days external, concrete realities like illness or the dissolution of a marriage interject and redirect the flow of thoughts.

Letters can also be seen as embodying a certain formal nostalgia, as it assumes an epistolary format (an age-old method of communication) but via the modern technology of voice notes. Despite this contemporary twist, the correspondence still respects, to a degree, the stop-and-go temporality characteristic of epistles (from letters to email) as opposed to the immediacy of texting or telephoning. The epistolary in general follows a zig-zagging temporal trajectory that is disjointed from the linear unfolding of days. Letter sending and receiving is a form of time travel, of the past butting into the future and vice versa. Day 17 of Letters corresponded roughly with the anniversary of Mark Fisher’s death. Zoria, then unfamiliar with Fisher, was compelled to look him up, and in her voice note to Edwards reads a quote from a memorium on Fisher published in the New Yorker. “He was rousing a call to arms that the tiniest event can tear a hole in the great curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalism.” 19 19 Hua Hsu, “Mark Fisher’S “K-Punk” And The Futures That Have Never Arrived”, The New Yorker, December 11, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mark-fishers-k-punk-and-the-futures-that-have-never-arrived I’d like to imagine that with each piece, Zoria (and those able to experience themselves in time while encountering her work) contributes to a growing constellation of tiny holes in this curtain. In the voicenote, she continues: “I think that maybe in some ways doing nothing is a sort of revolt. It can be also a revolt, to not participate. To not add anything anymore. So I think that I will end this note here. Although I have so much more to say. But I will end it here.”





BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1. Akerman, Chantal, “In Her Own Time: Miriam Rosen in Conversation with Chantal Akerman”, interview by Miriam Rosen, Artforum, April 2004.

  2. Benjamin, Walter, Das Passagen-Werk (1927-40), ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1982); trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).

  3. Boyer, Anne. Garments Against Women (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2019), 49-45.

  4. Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge,1993), 202.

  5. Derrida, Jacques, “The Time is Out of Joint”, Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: NYU Press,1995), 14-38. (Accessed: 15 August 2020)

  6. Fisher, Mark, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: zer0 books, 2013).

  7. Fisher, Mark, “No One is Bored, Everything is Boring”, Visual Artists Ireland, 2014. https://visualartists.ie/mark-fisher-one-bored-everything-boring.

  8. Hua Hsu, “Mark Fisher’S “K-Punk” And The Futures That Have Never Arrived”, The New Yorker, December 11, 2018.

  9. Kendell, Tina, “#BOREDWITHMEG: Gendered boredom and networked media”, New Formations, Vol. 93: Memory, Territory, Moods, Summer 2018, pp. 80-100.

  10. Perec, Georges, Species of Spaces and Other Writings, ed. John Strouck (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 132.

  11. Phillips, Adam, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993).




    All images courtesy Anna Zoria.

  1. Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge,1993), 202  []
  2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V  []
  3. Derrida, Jacques, “The Time is Out of Joint”, Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: NYU Press,1995), 14-15  []
  4. Ibid, 19  []
  5. Co-founded in 2019 by myself and curator Clémentine Proby in an East London council flat, Maison Touchard was a project space dedicated to exploring notions of domestic, architectural, and social space and practices of everyday life.  []
  6. Curiously, on several days, including March 18th, the video’s timestamp is out of sync with the alarm clock pictured.  []
  7. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: zer0 books, 2013), 9-21  []
  8. Mark Fisher, “No One is Bored, Everything is Boring”, Visual Artists Ireland, 2014. https://visualartists.ie/mark-fisher-one-bored-everything-boring  []
  9. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999),106  []
  10. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993)  []
  11. Tina Kendell, “#BOREDWITHMEG: Gendered boredom and networked media,” New Formations, Vol. 93: Memory, Territory, Moods, Summer 2018, pp. 80-100.  []
  12. Ibid, 68  []
  13. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, 202  []
  14. Perec, Georges, Species of Spaces and Other Writings, ed. John Strouck (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 132  []
  15. Chantal Akerman, “In Her Own Time: Miriam Rosen in Conversation with Chantal Akerman”, interview by Miriam Rosen, Artforum, April 2004  []
  16. Anna Zoria and Rhys Edwards, Letters from a Residency in Lithuania (London: Maison Touchard, Unpublished), 221-227  []
  17. The term sabotage originated in the textile industry in early 19th century France, during the industrial revolution, though its precise etymology is disputed. One seductive, but completely unfounded, theory describes how disgruntled weavers, unable to compete with the newly invented Jacquard loom and fearing their jobs, would throw their wooden clogs (sabots) into the machines to wreak havoc, effectively slowing down production and costing their employers without having to strike and risk their positions outrightly.  []
  18. Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2019), 49-45  []
  19. Hua Hsu, “Mark Fisher’S “K-Punk” And The Futures That Have Never Arrived”, The New Yorker, December 11, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mark-fishers-k-punk-and-the-futures-that-have-never-arrived  []