Agnes came to visit, flying with her friend to Ireland where we met and travelled to Berlin, Kassel, Venice and back to London. It was her first time traveling out of the states. We made an itinerary that was mostly organized around documenta and the Venice and Berlin Biennales, interspersed with friends and food. The 3 shows complemented each other, offering different approaches, histories and registers to explore. It felt culturally gluttonous and temporally austere. I had mainly wanted to share some things that have made a great impact on me, while also doing research for my dissertation.
I returned to install an exhibition for the graduate show, coterminous with a terrible heatwave, and both consuming me to the degree that I haven’t had the chance to properly process and begin further exploring all the things we encountered. Events at this scale seem to continually unfold and recur, taking on new valences over time. At present, a few feet of quickly thumbed iPhone notes, a jumble of location-stamped voice memos and a couple thousand images wait on my phone to be turned into something more story-shaped and able to share.
The headlines announce it’s the highest temperature recorded in British history. A friend offers me their house by the sea but I’m not feeling up for a lonely adventure and the heat makes me even more ambivalent than usual. I wander around in a daze bearing witness to this anthropogenic event. A woman lifts her dog off the hot sidewalk into her arms so that their paws don’t burn, kissing them behind the ears as they walk slowly. I comb the shelves in an air conditioned charity shop and find some interesting titles about Ireland and central Asia. The last time I was in the same shop, I met a young man with a scanner attached to a cellphone, methodically going through each title and selecting ones that fit a certain criteria. I asked him about what he was doing and he shared that he worked for a small company that sold books on amazon. He and 7 other people would go around and look for books that, according to a dataset the scanner indexed, demonstrated previously recorded online sales of an amount that would make it worth their time in addition to the cost of storing and processing them. It kind of broke my heart to see him joylessly scanning the shelves of a charity shop. A pleasurable preoccupation of mine that has become a part of my reference library project. I asked him how he felt about this work and he responded that after years in the service industry he developed social anxiety and this was just a job to him, and one that had some flexibility. He shared that he was listening to a podcast about crypto and decentralized economies and in return I shared my concerns about the false promise and social claims used to sell these new speculative financial products—ones I locate somewhere between a ponzi scheme and a casino.
I went for dal and momos at the Nepalese place that had all their doors open and a pleasant cross-breeze. I smiled at the only other people at the restaurant, a young couple sitting at a table outside. We start chatting about dal and cucumbers to help with the heat, and then our respective art practices. Jyrrel shared some soundcloud mixes and was excited for an upcoming trip to Japan, which had suspended tourist visas and he managed to get a work visa to DJ a party. He told me about a new app called Step that was an alternative to google maps and let you share lists of places you like with friends. This always struck me as almost the first thing you want to use the internet for. I wish we could have a version of this that was not-for-profit. A wikipedia of shared locations and affinities.
I began writing this text on the 5th floor of the Tate Modern, where I imagined the conditions would be regulated, at least for the art’s sake. Hundreds of others had a similar idea and gathered inside, sprawling on the cool floors in the turbine hall and walking barefoot through the former oil tanks. At closing, the crowds filtered out into the punishing heat. I made my way slowly to the lido where it began to rain, just as I entered the water. It was euphoric. Later in the evening, balming a restless sleep, a cool breeze offered such a bodily pleasure.
