Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first abbreviation of experience. An epic stitched of words was an abbreviation of the war, the long years of which were reduced to a few nights of recitation; the written text that recorded the epic was a contraction of the oral narration which pushed aside its sensory richness, melody, life in a thousand details. In accumulating, every level of abbreviation reconstituted an infinite flow, a new dilation that would be contracted in its turn. From the plurality of pages to the index and the table of contents; from the plurality of books to card catalogues.

The abbreviated elements were further arranged, situated...

• family
• birth
• motherhood
• communism
• social movements
• critique of neoliberalism
• community

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

• war experience
• war

• communication
• utopia
• semiotics and semiology
• communication media
• linguistics
• science fiction

• art
• aesthetics
• Modernism
• phenomenology
• art theory