ecstaticmagic

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Jennifer Allora, Guillermo Calzadilla, Returning a sound, 2004

Vieques is an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used by the U.S Navy and NATO forces as military testing ground as from the 1940s. Civil disobedience and active protest movements initiated by local inhabitants and an international support network led to the end of the bombings and progressive demilitarization in 2002. Allora & Calzadilla became involved in the defense of this cause in 2000 and made a series of works relating to the story of this island. This video demonstrates the beginning of their ongoing interest in the interplay between militarism and sound. In Returning A Sound, Homar, the motorcycle driver and activist, drives around the island as if reclaiming the territory. The muffler was altered so it no longer silenced the noise and became a musical instrument instead, like a trumpet to announce decontamination and recovery in echo to the terrible exploding sounds that had shaped the lives of the Vieques inhabitants for 60 years.

https://kadist.org/work/returning-a-sound/

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This world of escapists I had lived among, this crowd of reformers, artists, writers, labor leaders, philosophers, and scientists, they had been terribly busy all the time 'doing the job' as they were wont to call it, the job, in fact, of avoiding the responsibility of themselves, and of getting onto themselves, and their activities had not left them time or leisure to be : for merely being. They reasoned and they rationalized, they fed themselves and they made love, they wrote, painted, telephoned, and talked at a furious rate—but they never radiated. They had not the time to be: to be anything much, and never the time to be kind, kind, as I was learning now, a man could be.

—Mabel Dodge Luhan, from Edge of Taos Desert

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“My work is my body, my body is my work” – Helena Almeida

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[Translation] is a rendering, as in provision of help or a service, or a melting down to clarify, or a processing to extract what’s still usable, and another rendering, as in performance. It should also be a surrendering.

Peter Fallon

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Flags, Paris 2022. Edgar Mosa & Joe McShea for Loewe.

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Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.

― William Martin

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Faig Ahmed. 

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The Couple, Louise Bourgeois, 2007 – 2009.

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Truly, it is not knowledge which defiles a man, far from it. Knowledge is like the sheerest transparency, precisely the most perfect and purest, like the purest water, which has no taste at all.

Soren Kierkegaard

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Green Light Corridor, Bruce Nauman, 1970.

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‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.’ — Bruce Nauman

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Tameca Cole, Locked in a Dark Room Calm, 2016.

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I Have Nothing Left, 2017, recto/verso, satin, poly-satin, quilted pleather, upholstery, wool felt, embroidery floss, metallic thread, satin cord, sequins, 71 × 50". From the series In the Wake, 2017.

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Milch 50.  Carsten Nicolai, 2000.

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Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver

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Studio image, Tauba Auerbach.

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“In a community of care people are turned toward one another. They have given up the false, perpetually deferred dream that happiness lies somewhere else with other people.” —P. Travis Krocker