Not for one minute does it cross some people's minds that it would have been better not to have needed museums.

See also: Nora Al-Badri's 'The Post-Truth Museum' (2021-23)

Perfect to watch with Dahomey, to establish not only the continuities of the museum as colonial instituation but politics of restitution expressed via historical methods of the documentary medium. A conversation between a grounded camera gaze, waking artefacts and the emotions of touch and contemplation.

still thinking about my copy of 'The Scorpion' (1920s novel about a lesbian obsessed with Karoline von Günderrode) that i lent to a friend and never saw again. R.I.P. to the parallels to be drawn regarding lesbian transhistorical desire and reccural as method of historical socio-political critique (adding Wolf's 'Kein Ort, Nirgends' to the equation).

(realized i forgot to log this 2020)

I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, So I can
Watch you weave then breathe your story lines
And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, So I can
Keep track of the visions in my eyes

Apichatpong loml

A sucessor to Chocolat (1988), transferring the same themes of the colonizers oblivious privilege, the illusion of belonging in a sharply uneven power balance, into a far more brutal and caustic picture. It almost seems like a logical continuation of the formers historical timeline, the crumbling which starts first breaking itself here in the letting of blood, the fires that burn in and through a violence which has been kindled far before.

Enigmatic and dreamlike, immerses in surrounding waters and forests with their undercurrents of violent, forgotten and silenced histories. Ghosts finding brief moments of calm memory in sparking iridescent lights. A blurring of boundaries and the interrogation of the possibility of convergence in difference.

The irony in the only way to memorialize the trauma being by way of the meticulously crafted documents and photographs of the perpetrators. But there lies so much strenght in reclaiming them while never stripping them of their destructive power, transforming them into legible proof, into mourning of the ones lost.