“The Man Who Fell From Heaven” Petroglyph, Robertson Point, Prince Rupert Harbour, Canada. © 1983

zoleikha with her handmaidens after her second dream of yousef / yousef and zoleikha united after potiphar's death, 16th c., iran

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably risesand sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Bianca Blakeney by Sam Crawford for CAP 74024 Magazine April 2022

EVA FERRI: You insist on the centrality of the writing, you called it a chain that pulls up water from the bottom of a well. What are the features of your approach to writing?

ELENA FERRANTE: I work well when I can start from a flat, dry tone, that of a strong, lucid, educated woman, like the middle-class women who are our contemporaries. At the beginning I need curtness, terse, clear formulas that are free of affectations and demonstrations of beautiful form. Only when the story begins to emerge with assurance, thanks to that initial tone, do I begin to wait with trepidation for the moment when I will be able to replace the series of well oiled, noiseless links with a rusty, rasping series of links and a pace that is disjointed, agitated, increasing the risk of absolute collapse. The moment I change register for the first time is both exciting and anguished. I very much enjoy breaking through my character’s armor of good education and good manners, upsetting the image she has of herself, undermining her determination, and revealing another, rougher soul; I make her raucous, perhaps crude. I work hard to make the fracture between the two tonalities surprising and also to make the re-entry into the tranquil narration happen naturally. While the fracture comes easily—I wait for that moment, and slip inside it with satisfaction—I very much fear the moment when the narrative has to compose itself again. I’m afraid that the narrating “I” won’t be able to calm down. But above all, now the readers know her calm is false, that is won’t last, that the narrative orderliness will break up again.

— Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia, 2016 

‘Concrete Mirrors’

Concrete Mirrors deals with the iconography of space conquest during the 60s, back to a climate of suspicion and paranoia linked to the cold war. Presented as a fake photograph-documentary, this project puts together three corpus of images of different nature and status, combining types of reality, these are documents, and virtuality, those are places.

David de Beyter Photography

Anna Maria Maiolino, Piccole Note, (ink on paper), 1984 [MoMA, New York, NY. © Anna Maria Maiolino]

Salt is creating nonfiction writing, poetry&content curation | Patreon

Become a patron of Salt today: Read 4 posts by Salt and get access to exclusive content and experiences on the world’s largest membership platform for artists and creators.

Welcome. As I am figuring how to go about freelance writing, I want to partially support myself with Patreon. What you will get from me are weekly essays on Black pop culture/Black female sexuality/Black radicalism, long form essays on any of the aforementioned subjects and the occasional poem. I want to use Patreon as a platform to launch my writing and eventually photography and ink drawing.

The Key To Nothing ⥲ Aide-mémoires séri. Tanya Rusnak, Décembre, 2019

@pursimuove