in_lovely_blue.jlg/rip

with Xiaojuan Zhang, 2022

Frances Kruk already said it: I ordered a hurricane and I am still on this island.

2 or 3 things I know about clouds and power in October 2022.

Shot in Greece and UK, this is a sketchy meditation on the blue of the heavens, the systematic confusionism and terror under which we live, dead auteurs and whited out retail windows as the economy shifts into a new kind of ‘death spiral’.

Holderlin wanted to run away from Germany to Greece but only got as far as France. He realised it was more Greek than Greece itself, and stayed put. We ran away to Greece but found it occupied by cops and Californian algorithms; kind of the UK but more so, and first.

Wikipedia kept us (in)sane but still this was no garden of Eden. More an airbnb compound by the sea where we researched Abraham and Sarah and the Old Testament of everyday life – call it ‘contracting social reproduction’.

The impossibility of travel under the cloud brought us back home, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to an unanswered phone call to the Mental Health system about a mad woman in my ends – my successfully failed attempt to be of use to her.

I cut this bit out but you can still hear the ‘holding’ music – and in the end that’s key to the image of the moment (until the cloud consumes the telephone & its proletariat completely)? Forget about the loading gif, when you’re really fucked they ask you to call then put you on hold.

With the completion of the Tory-Labour merger, the sky not not falling on our heads (the hurricane you ordered...), negatives double or quadruple. But we’re not all volk, right?

Thanks to my collaborator Xiaojuan Zhang, and to Danny Hayward for added inspo.

JLG: RIP. Isou, IOU.