The Athens-based artist discusses how desire figures in her new film, the relationship between writing and images and the influence her home city has on her practice
In December, while the international papers were busy excerpting the American Senate report on the Bush-era’s CIA torture, nay, ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme (use the language they choose for you), I sat at a table with my students in Geneva reading Etel Adnan’s epic poem from 1980 The Arab Apocalypse. ‘[A]n Arab tortured mutilated vomits the sun hangs from his feet. Meticulously. A yellow sun’, a student read. In August, I lay by the sea on Samos – Turkey glittering and bleaching just across the blue sea at my feet – and read Adnan’s seminal novella Sitt Marie-Rose, from 1978. It refracts the Lebanese Civil War through the story of a woman, sun-like, at its centre – a teacher, mother, revolutionary, and lover of a Palestinian doctor – a centre slowly ripped apart in front of the deaf-blind children she teaches. ‘Fouad is the perfect killer […] He prefers jeep-speed-desert-bird-bullet to girl-in-a-bed-and-fuck […] Bullets crack and resonate in the amphitheatre that is Beirut. The location is perfect.’
Quinn Latimeris an American poet and critic based in Basel, Switzerland. Her latest book, Describe This Distance (Mousse Publishing, 2013), about the work of Sarah Lucas, was published this year.
My artistic and literary crushes this year were numerous, and despite being exhausted by best of lists by early December, here are a few things that blew my mind/heart/etc. in 2013:
