collecting

hans bellmer, la poupee

'i collect everything that seems of value or might eventually be needed- doesn't everybody?' Hannah Hoch

'every library reflects a twofold need that is frequently also a twofold mania: the mania to keep certain things, and the mania to order them in a certain way.' Georges Perec

'i need to sleep back to front with someone who adores me. I will think more before I cannot. I love my mind when it is fucking the cracks of events.' Jenny Holzer, Selection from Laments

'the anagram is the key to all my work. the body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it.' Hans Bellmer

'my speech is a warning that at this very moment death is at loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as i speak, and the begin i address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. death alone allows me to grasp what i want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness.' maurice blanchot

'life is organised around that which is hollow' louise bourgeois

'the obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which 'gapes open.' it is an appeal to being as all holes are.' jean-paul sartre

'And God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man' 

SO IDA, ADIOS

'Why do I turn once again to writing? 

Beloved, you must not ask such a question, 

For the truth is, I have nothing to tell you, 

All the same, your dear hands will hold this note.’  Roland Barthes

'I knew a certain Benedicta who filled earth and air with ideals; and from whose eyes men learnt the desire for greatness, beauty, glory, and for everything that strengthened their belief in immortality.

But this miraculous child was too beautiful to live long. She died only a few days after I had come to know her, and I buried her with my own hands, one day when Spring wafted the contents of its censer even as far as the graveyard. I buried her with my own hand, well sealed in a coffin of wood, perfumed and incorruptible as an Indian casket.

And as I stood gazing at the place where I had hidden my treasure, all at once I saw a little person singularly like the deceased. She was trampling on the fresh soil with strange hysterical violence, and was laughing and shouting: ‘I am the real Benedicta! and a vile slut I am, too! And to punish you for your blindness and folly, you shall love me as I really am!’

But I was furious, and I answered: ‘No! no! no!’ And to add emphasis to my refusal, I stamped my foot so violently that my leg sank up to the knee in the earth over the new grave, and like a wolf caught in a trap, I remained fastened, perhaps forever, to the grave of the ideal.' Charles Baudelaire, ‘Which is the True One?’ from Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), 1869