Tag: nature
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Ghost Town Luxury
Jing Jin City is a luxurious not-quite ghost town in the north of China. By 2004, some 3,000 luxury villas had been constructed about an hour’s drive from Beijing, along with golf courses, entertainment complexes, a museum, a temple, two colleges, and an 800-room Hyatt Regency hotel. By 2020, 300,000 people are expected to live…
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The Weight of Stone
The Weight of Stone (2014) is a body of work about the former mining town of Kopparberg in Sweden. Kopparberg used to be a sprawling mining town from the 17th century until the mid-1950s. The last mine closed in the ’60s amid an already failing economy and high unemployment, which is still the situation today….
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Proper Burial / Clean Machines / Wheat Head
Proper Burial Each thing we take from the earth requires we bury something of equal value. Dinosaurs buried each other, where they fell, feathered, and massive. Still later, we bundle whole ships with furs for warmth, and spices to trade beneath the earth. One age buries another, patting dirt upon civilization. Dogs understand the…
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Parakeets and Purity
Because the land, the country, is such a focus of horticulture, there are important moments when its extraordinary fetishisation has connected it with movements of the extreme right: rhetorically, to simplify, the land becomes the fatherland. George McKay, Radical Gardening I live in north-west London. Sitting in the living room…
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Editorial: Clean Unclean
My side of the desk is scrupulously clean. The other half is a mess of dust and papers, temporarily abandoned books, a pair of tights, a lump of local granite. The line that separates the two is not as clear as I’d like. From the other side, my wife’s stately, slender Mac spaceship turns its…
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Of a Mouse, To a Mouse
The clean pink two back feet he has have long toes almost like a bird’s. Unlike a bird’s, the tail, a draggled earthworm, limps behind his search. Head joined on distinctly to a face but not a neck to speak of. See his oildot eyes like little fleas and yes, they’re shiny! really! Shining eyes!…
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In Richmond Park
Here is the cusp of November colour: deer in a nicotine prairie. Trunks snaked by squirrels, clouds and crows over yellow and russet leaf-rag. On thin legs, bulbous-jointed like twiglets, picking their way through the tussocks, three females pause, wary of me inching toward their group. Of the two stags, one chooses now to move…
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Beauty and Revolution / A Token of Concrete Affection
Now is the time to visit Cambridge if you’re a fan of concrete poetry. At Kettle’s Yard is Beauty and Revolution, an exhibition of work by Ian Hamilton Finlay, while the Centre of Latin American Studies plays host to a group exhibition entitled A Token of Concrete Affection. Both are furnished from the private collection…
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Open Call: Clean Unclean
Cleanliness, they say, is close to godliness. And the pig has long resided in the realm of the unclean. Even today: “It’s like a pigsty in here!” – as if the pig has much choice in how he lives… More than ever do we feel the urgency of cleanliness: clean hands, clean homes, clean minds….
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(Re)Imagining the Insect
54 million years before humans appeared on earth, there was once upon a time an insect that died, its cadaver is still visible and intact, the cadaver of someone who was surprised by death at the instant it was sucking the blood of another! Jacques Derrida, Typewriter Ribbon, 1998 It is all very…
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Lost in Fathoms
Stumbling dim across the surface of the earth: humanity. Our legacy not culture or religion or science, but ruin. Our lasting traces that of footprints, not brain waves. Is this what makes us unique? A geological force in our own right? Certainly this is the view announced in 2012 at the 34th International Geological Congress…