Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“Why do we still fail to realise that difference adds depth and complexity, creating a more resilient system for all?”

“For the less zealous, a silent city may come with trade-offs. Enforced quiet—imposed, say, through city-wide regulations—is far from a cure-all. Not only would it limit activity and deflate the vitality of urban life, but it would inevitably shrink that third space between home and work. The street—the liminal zone of travel, meetups and play—would be reduced to quiet desolation.”

“The lonely have often found comfort outdoors. In The Living Mountain, an unfussy meditation on Scotland’s Cairngorm mountains, Nan Shepherd writes: ‘Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’”

“Staying true to my guru’s ‘keep up’ imperative and quite recently having become a yoga teacher myself, I continued to teach through the production period, having a crew of yogis doing body drops and chanting ‘Har’ in our office even the night before we went to print. Why, you could ask, is keeping up so important? If you keep up a daily practice, you will eventually start to align. If you are aligned, things start to happen. Not to you, but for you.”

“Fake bags can be understood as providing a commentary on the intricate history of cultural appropriation and commerce.”

“Paper straws are still carbon- and energy-intensive to produce, and several types are not even recyclable, unlike their plastic counterparts. This is ecological gesture politics, in which a tiny concession (straws make up 0.025% of ocean plastics) precludes more meaningful sacrifices, such as giving up driving, flying or eating meat.”

“Outlining historical connections in colour can only get you so far—there’s an element that’s missing if you don’t experience it in person. In honour of this, the exhibition is itself an exercise in experimenting with colour, with the Vitra Design Museum´s collection acting as the material that Marcelis is manipulating. The museum’s team are happy to give themselves up to this process, partly as it has allowed them to re-discover ‘objects that were previously virtually unknown or at least somewhat hidden,’ as Steinmüller describes it, and provide these objects with ‘the space to glow.’”

“Cohen’s argument is not a pep talk that promises losers that ‘the only way is up.’ That way of thinking plays into the same unhelpful binary: By optimistically imagining a win on the horizon, we are still acting out our fear of loss. Instead, salvation lies in humility, which Cohen describes as ‘the consequence of an awareness that truth doesn’t belong to us.’ Like loss, humility is characterized by an absence: of pride, self-regard, entitlement. This absence humbles us when we lose, and when we win—as Cohen writes, ‘Humility reminds us of the large portion of arbitrariness that determines any personal success or failure.’”

“Three hours later—some part of which I’d spent fearing for the life of the 76-year-old artist when he fell off a table during an extended force-feeding session—sat down with the two performers over red wine and pizza. I was grateful not only that Paul and Lilith had showered extensively before dinner, but also that the two—perhaps the greatest, most convincing, and most abysmally terrifying pair since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—were now in a state of absolute lightness. All the perturbance from that afternoon had evaporated. They seemed free and familiar, like 8-year-old best friends at a birthday party, and you could tell from the faces of the other dinner guests that their catharsis had clearly rubbed off.”

“Like a time-capsule, the photographs of the interiors of the Nakagin Capsule Tower units—shot by Noritaka Minami over the course of many years—transport me back in time to the Tokyo of the 1970s, where I spent my childhood. More immediately, they take me slightly less further back, to a time eight years ago when I rented a unit in Tower B.”