The work here doesn’t always know what it is. Some of it began as research and became something else. Some of it is an attempt to use form — sound, image, essay — to say what citation cannot.
Architecture of exhaustion — Friction, dignity and the six-square-meter cell. Essay / longform piece, forthcoming in Collateral Journal [auto-theoretical text with sound]
In this piece I move through a six-square-meter sublet in London to think about frictionlessness as a cultural logic — the contemporary drive to smooth, manage, and pre-empt discomfort in the name of care. Drawing on Louise Bourgeois, Édouard Glissant’s concept of errantry, and my own experience of errant dwelling, I argue that friction is not a failure of care but its most honest condition. Against the managed affectivity of the “inclusion software,” I propose regrounding: the small, frictional acts by which the body reasserts its dignity as infrastructure when all external infrastructures are failing.
The Lay of the Land — Mixed media composition on contemporary errantry [in development]
Here, I keep researching errantry as a practice of refusal and return. This piece is still finding its form — part sound, part text, part cartography of the object.s of refusal and the interplay of fear and awe one can find themselves in when returning.
Thinking-out-loud and field notes appear on my Substack, moving day.
Kahina Meziant 