Author: Oli
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Time travelling curatorial aesthetics
The visible surface of a museum, which is to say its collections as they are displayed, tells you what sort of institution it is. Its description of itself, on the other hand, and the way in which it verbally interprets its collections, tell you what sort of institution it thinks…
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A fractured continuum
Photographs, particularly digital or polaroid photographs (remember those?), are both immediate and mediated, both portals and barriers. They are small physical reifications of memory, which both manifest and falsify the past, insisting that our recollections adopt precisely one physical position, and one instant, out of the infinitely many that we…
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Traversing epistemologies
The Cattedrale di Palermo is a chimaera of architectural styles and periods. If someone had drawn it from their imagination, the well-informed viewer might accuse them of anachronism, but this building is certainly not ‘without time’; it’s more ‘panchronic’, or ‘polychronic’. The current structure begins with a Norman foundation in…
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Between mnemonic quanta
The principal characters in Jaime Hernandez’s long-running Locas series are, I guess, the same age as him, which is to say around ten years older than me, but when I first encountered them I was roughly the age they are at the beginning of the narrative, and I have grown…
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Hefty, rough-hewn cuboids of harmony
The river of jazz once had the appearance of a mighty current with many tributaries, but now it more resembles a great delta, where it meets a number of other broad waterways at the point of their issue to the ocean. The past of this river is populated with many…
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History, re-mediated
‘Palazzo’ is a term that is bandied about quite casually in Italy, and although it is technically cognate with ‘palace’, it refers to any kind of grand residence, from the substantial townhouses of the prosperous bourgeoisie to the vast combined residences and governmental seats of dukes and bishops. The principal…
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Migratory death-drives
Emigration seems to offer a fresh start, a blank slate; this is often what is hoped for by those that practice it. In many cases, of those fleeing conflict or extreme economic deprivation, this is a more than reasonable aspiration, and the contrast that is occasioned by a successful migration…
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A horizon obscured by banality
I’m generally unimpressed by assertions of a cultural distance between Northern and Southern Europe. Such ideas usually revolve around differing attitudes to work and leisure, the importance of food and family in the South, the more relaxed lifestyle found in warmer climates, and so on. I don’t dispute that such…
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The sound of the unnamed
H.P. Lovecraft, the lonely, bitter, racist, visionary poet of American horror, conceived ancient malevolences from the beyond the limits of the knowable, unnameable terrors from the vast gothic hinterland where knowledge is madness. It seems quite apposite then that his most famous creation was literally unnameable when Metallica devoted to…
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The elision of geography
At the age of fourteen I was lucky enough to spend a few hours, one afternoon in Los Angeles, with the two writers who were then probably the best known skalds of that city’s architecture – Esther McCoy and my grandfather, Reyner Banham. It was not an edifying afternoon, as…
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Hybridity reified: a cosmopolitan architecture
Like the gardens of the Orto Botanico, the formal beds and pathways through which one approaches the facade of the Castello della Zisa are parched, dry and brown. They are not effaced by a chaos of growth, however, but scourged with an excess of order, a ground whose geometries are…
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A few wooden buildings
Places have memories. This is not to propose the pathetic fallacy that they have feelings, consciousness, thoughts or intentions, but that in the same manner that a certain synaptic pattern preserves a trace of experience in the brain, features of landscape and cityscape preserve traces of biography. Of course subjective…
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A ruptured order
A melancholy sense of lost hegemony and deteriorated grandeur was brought to Britain from southern Europe by the Grand Tourists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and profoundly informed the aesthetics of the Gothic and Romantic movements, as in the archetypically Gothic edifice of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, a…
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A memory of speech
We speak, and sometimes we are heard. An impression remains in the memory of our auditors, and although it is not our speech, we and they treat it as such. Eventually, that recollection is occulted or extinguished, in both speaker and auditor, and for the most part, no trace remains…
Oliver Arditi 