Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A fractured continuum

    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 occupied during any given experience,… Read more

  • Traversing epistemologies

    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 1185, although some elements are… Read more

  • Between mnemonic quanta

    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 up with them. They are… Read more

  • Hefty, rough-hewn cuboids of harmony

    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 futures. Free jazz was once… Read more

  • History, re-mediated

    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 seat of Sicily’s Norman monarchy… Read more

  • Migratory death-drives

    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 may well be so great… Read more