• sculpture
• museum
• colonialism
• contemporary art
• colonial history
• Africa

I’ve always been fascinated by globes, which is why I photographed this very special example in 2011, and the FB algorithm recently presented it to me again. It’s said to be the largest model of the world in the world. I discovered it in Corona Park in the New York district of Queens, the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. I went to the Queens Museum, whose creeper-covered wall is on the photograph’s right, mainly to see its model of New York. This impressive piece was commissioned by Robert Moses, director of the World’s Fair, in 1964. New York was supposed to look like an urbanist miracle, the most grandiose of 20th-century cities, the hub of the world.
Facebook fished the picture from the depths of its archives while I was thinking about the estate of an artist whose studio I had cleared out. It included a battered...

• performance
• ceremony
• ritual
• feminism
• colonialism
• body
• spiritism
• Africa

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...