Anxiety and flowers

Saturday Morning

I had a just before waking dream that someone from this room proposed learning French as an activity for the lab group (I don’t quite remember who it was)…. But for a moment within my dream, I was panicked by this idea but then upon reflection proposed instead the act of translating a specific document into French by way of learning the language. I then started compiling a list of text and articles to create a critical framework for this undertaking, Walter Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Sarat Maharaj, Homi Bhabha mimicry, ventriloque, repetition mimicry, ventriloque, repetition…. a frenzied gathering of material, a building of a raft to enable something to float, a hammering together of stray bits of wood to create stilts… I am not sure, but something like these activities.

Upon waking I sat drinking a coffee wondering about my own anxiety around creating a critical framework. The need to translate the translating into a set of terms of context demonstrating and bringing into visibility what is at stake. What is at stake in this critical framework, this carpentry of criticality…

A memory around translation and language. I was eighteen

I went to Germany to attempt to improve my skills in this language. I worked in Hotel Langenfeld serving beer and making beds. I stayed with friends of my great uncle and aunt. I was bored and not enjoying this experience at all. It was in the run up to Christmas and the house was full of delicious German Christmas biscuits. On many occasions I sat up watching late night movies eating my way through my hosts home baking. It was in this way that I learned to like Cary Grant. Previously his slightly musical, quizzical tone of voice had not impressed me, but dubbed into a strong deep booming German, at this impressionable age he was spellbinding.

On Tuesday evening I went to the Bloomberg space for Ivan and Heather Morrison’s’ distribution of their project and I wanted to bring this project in today…. continue the dispersal

and read a paragraph from Sally O Rielly’s text which I suppose how answers some of my anxiety around critical context, we think around the complexities because we ‘owe’ this to someone…..