Douglas Gordon's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) addresses itself solely to Zidane during a Spanish Liga Real Madrid versus Villareal CF game in April 2005 at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. As Gordon tells it, a crew of 150 filmed Zidane in real time using 17 synchronized cameras, each camera equipped with its own operator, focus puller, loader, and runner. The crew for the live event, like Zidane himself, worked without a storyboard. Their only directive came from the Goya portraits Gordon arranged for them to study at the Prado. Zidane, notoriously private, delivers a testimony of his innermost thoughts in the subtitles. He doesn't "talk" vocally or give a talking-head monologue; the awkwardness of that genre staple is displaced on an elegantly fonted text track. A private life unfolds over a highly public moment. Something between public and private slips… Read More...

The landlady brought news of your death just as I was on the ledgers of a great discovery, on the edge of the New World’s old treasures. We would have been neighbors. Me: um pequeno ponto no mundo In the world without a world. You: the reluctant shepherd of false starts and lost stars. You: to grasp the reins of chromium horses through intergalactic charterbelts, To map the course of factory smoke in blue ink nephograms. Me: to undead the living, To grasp with the mind’s eye that last image of you in a doorway.   Read More...

Skulls and bones descend on host city Brisbane this week for the 2014 G20 Summit.  For those who weren't invited to attend, Bumf has published a special G20 issue. They asked me to contribute, and the result is Septuplus, a suite of poems comprised of "From the Land of the People Without Money," "Banquet," "Exhaling Birds," "Anthropogenesis," "Global Positioning System," "Oratory," and "Sine Die," with a frontispiece excerpt from Attar's The Conference of the Birds. Here's "Oratory": Read the entire issue here. Read More...

Writer Mirene Arsanios did an interview with me for Ibraaz. Forensic Transgressions covers recent and upcoming work, from fictional epistolary in American Letters to literary translation in Waly Salomão's Algaravias: Echo Chamber to net art in Bio. We also discussed the provenance of this very space. Here's an excerpt: Mirene Arsanios: In 2009, in Rio de Janeiro, you started a blog called 'South/ South', which was transplanted to The New Inquiry in 2012. Can you briefly introduce 'South/ South' and what prompted it? Maryam Monalisa Gharavi: 'South/South' is a crossing point for several ideas. At its broadest it allows for an extended questioning and critique of the dominance of western universalism. There are many 'Souths', inclusive of – but not limited to – the nations of the Global South and the southern hemisphere, and the American South. Their autonomous cultures are undervalued. Their systems of knowledge are undervalued. Their connectedness to each other is undervalued. The spirit… Read More...

Vice posed that question today and referenced "The Killing Class." It ended by recommending meta-cops; I don't know what a meta-cop is. This is the only idea I've ever had on the matter.            Read More...

My translation of Syrian-Brazilian poet Waly Saloma?o's "Jet-Lagged Poem" is in the new issue of Asymptote, which focuses on literature from Latin America. (Special thanks to editor Aditi Machado.) Asymptote, which is committed to the international encounter of language and literary translation, requested an audio recording of the poem being read in the original Portuguese, so one is included on the site. Here's an excerpt of "Jet-Lagged Poem": Large bird of an international route sucked by jet turbines. And bridge, rope, cable car, catacombs of the wine club, sorbets, sherry, scanners, hydrants, magasin d'images et de signes, seven types of ambiguity, all things lose the commas that separate them a wagon full of connectives explodes-implodes the gentian violet sky reflected in the needle of the glass skyscraper stations Bouqinistes megabookstores la folie du voir bistros cinemas cities whole countries engulfed in the storm drain. High cuisine and… Read More...

As the massacre of Gaza reached its tenth day we began laying out the names of the dead, their ages, and the locations in which they were attacked. We consulted information registered by the Gaza Health Ministry (who risk their lives to make this record possible) and compiled by Al-Akhbar English and Al Jazeera English. We are trying to keep pace with the names as they are released, but the list grows before cartridge ink has dried on the page. The document we are using is available for public viewing, downloading, and printing. We are updating it as often as we can. (This is not an art installation.) —Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Judith Kakon, and Cecilia López Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Read More...

https://vimeo.com/83270642             Read More...

Part One precedes this post.   ?     ?     ? Social Media as Corporate Cannibal "You won’t hear me laughing, as I terminate your day You can’t trace my footsteps, as I walk the other way" "I'll consume my consumers" —Grace Jones, "Corporate Cannibal" ?     ?     ? How to Almost Completely Disappear (on Twitter) Last March I spent some time in Iran, where my access to the internet was severely hampered. This limitation made me snappy and tense, possibly in the throes of some sort of vacant withdrawal that I didn't get over until eventually landing somewhere with airport wifi. In a connection-deprived space a lack of self-control can't be faulted as the culprit of this aimless malaise. One could blame the false promise of ubiquity. Going from a country with near-limitless access to one without is like… Read More...

                    Self-erasure, deletion, and effacement. The least addressed ways of being on the internet are the subjects of my obsession. Not total withdrawal but a hiddenness in plain sight. It is not merely that such attributes are the opposites of self-promotion, aggrandizement, and re-insertion in the macro and micro economy of attention, but that they run antithetical to the active material of the internet itself—appearance and surfacing. And I admonish myself from reducing "the internet" to social media, but if I do it's owed to social media's interactive premise, not merely its assumed dominance or prevalence. "Sender" and "receiver"—again, dubious if such constraints can still be deployed in the age of the scroll—are assumed to be connected, even if asynchronously, but their connection is inadequately explained in terms of relations to text,… Read More...

AUSTERITY ABE?CE?DAIRE   Read More...

The Gulf Labor Working Group is a coalition of international artists, writers, and activists who since 2011 have brought focus to the "coercive recruitment and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness)," particularly on the workers building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum/British Museum. Their campaign, called "52 Weeks," is a one-year effort whereby contributors deliver a work, text, or action each week, taking as their starting point the exploitation of workers building Abu Dhabi's premier cultural institutions. I was asked to produce a work (in PDF) for Week 21 of "52 Weeks," and contributed this painting. Previously I wrote a book chapter, "'Everything You Can Imagine is Real': Labor, Hype, and the Specter of Progress in Dubai,"†  on real estate development, labor recruitment practices, and my… Read More...