“…But in Said’s insistently political sense, modernity-as-exile – as glimpsed in Lamia Joreige’s recent film, A Journey (2008), which shows a Palestinian refugee camp in 1948, the year of Isreal’s founding – identifies a counter-narrative and the repressed figure of the last century’s otherwise celebrated glorious nationalisms, utopian political projects and vaunted technological achievements; for it reveals their failures, their human wreckage, the costs of their obscene audacity.
I would like to open up that counter-narrative and that repressed figure here, yet avoid reading exile exclusively in the negative, as solely melancholic or chaotic, its identity metaphysically inscribed”
Courtesy T J Demos and Tate Britain. More of T J Demos’ lucid, stimulating writing on exile can be found .
What’s the Time, ?
“My roommates and I received a letter in the mail the other day. It was addressed to “The owners of: [address of our building].” I opened it and it said:
Real estate urgently needed!Dear Owner,
Are you considering selling your house? Please let us know. Together with our partner, PlanetHome, we are urgently looking for houses, apartments, and properties, private and commercial.Kind regards,
UniCredit Bank AGP.S. If you know of somebody and your reference leads to a successful sale through PlanetHome, we will give you 500 Euros!
I assume that every household in our neighborhood, Berlin’s east Kreuzberg, received a similar letter”
Courtesy of Natascha Sadr Haghighian and e-flux journal.
Courtesy of The Doors and YouTube.
“On the desk in front of me, I’ve got a certified copy of Mohamed Sakr’s birth certificate. Born at Newham Maternity Hospital, Forest Gate, East London, on the sixth of February, 1985, Mohamed Sakr’s birth was registered on the 18th of the same month, and the document gives his parents’ names: Gamal and Eman. Forest Gate is the other side of the city, 10 miles and a number of other measures away from where I was born and grew up in Southwest London. But it’s still my city, my country.
…Sakr is believed to be the first British-born person to be stripped of his or her nationality in modern times. Seventeen months after his citizenship was removed, on February 2012, former British citizen Mohamed Sakr was killed in a US drone strike in Somalia”
Courtesy James Bridle and Walker Art Center.
See also James’ work , part of the Science Fiction: New Death exhibition at FACT, Liverpool.