This is not a blog, it’s a visual dialogue. And you can see how long I’ve been silent.
LA / june 2021
L'été (1968)
Clay prism listing the Sumerian kings, circa 1800 BC
from The Ashmolean Museum
Schooldays: Sumerian Satire & the Scribal Life
Schooldays (c. 2000 BCE) is a Sumerian poem describing the daily life of a young scribe in the schools of Mesopotamia. The work takes the form of a first-person narration and dialogue in relating the challenges the student faces and how he resolves them by having his father bribe his teacher with expensive gifts.
By Petros Kouiouris for Schön Magazine
surface
Kiton boutique, 2003
from eat. work. shop. New Japanese Design (2004)
Basra, Iraq. Once it was known as the Venice of the Middle East. Today many of its canals are polluted and its buildings in need of repair.
“Stitches of experience are dropped, never to be picked up again. Words fade, events vanish, and the self becomes an ocean strewn with islands of exact recall and other islands of vagueness; identity becomes a vast and mysterious archipelago, surrounded by fog and with unknown currents and tides and indecipherable shorelines that are almost impossible to chart or navigate […] Experience is not imprinted. The components of ordinary human experience do not register. Life on earth passes by you. You are invisible to yourself. Surely this is the definition of a curse. And when I think back on that summer now, it is with disbelief. I was barely more than a teenager, a time when one’s identity is a subject of constant intrigue, curiosity, and fascination, a framework for existence with which one is only beginning to become familiar. Choosing to obliterate even a tiny piece of it seems now, some forty years later, like a form of insanity.”
— Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency
By Johan Deckmann