“In Japan, there was the benshi narrator. In Thailand, there were the versionists who would travel in troupes in the provinces, where they would present films accompanied by a live aural performance that served to supplement the projected image in various ways, from narration to dubbing, commentary or even critique. You can read this practice as an extreme localization of the foreign or generic.”
IMAGE CRISIS — By Andrew Maerkle
“I think it would be too ambitious to say that the lectures in themselves offer an escape from capitalism, because that’s obviously not what’s happening. The starting point can be just a single question that I’m trying to answer. For Asia the Unmiraculous, this is the question of the relationship between race and capitalism.”
Music is not immaterial, but it is molecularized based on territory, as with bird calls. It makes boundaries and is in turn made by the boundaries, which I see as a kind of self-collapse. This point of self-collapse is what interests me: where one needs the other but cannot be differentiated from the other at the same time.
“We really, really, really hope that they will reopen. I was telling Meiro that for the first time in my career, over my many experiences of censorship, I feel there is a chance for the situation to be solved, and that maybe the Aichi Triennale could be a symbol to the world for how to deal with this kind of situation successfully.”
DISSONANCES EXPRESS MARGINALITIES by Andrew Maerkle
— “Mainstream First World cultures have figured out how to appear ever more open and accepting, while being ever more efficient at cloaking social exclusions. The trick is to keep people obsessed with identity constructs via a particularly infantilist and ethically charged individualism. The result is conservatives, liberals and leftists all policing ourselves, all proud defenders of ‘morality’ as something presumed common and shared.”
“The main challenge for me now is thinking about how to make architecture that is durable – not only materially durable, but also socially durable: architecture that can endure the pressures of commercialism and capitalism and the constant changes of life today.”
ARCHITECTURE IN NAME AND DEED by Andrew Maerkle
— “Since the 20th century we have produced a huge quantity of spaces, but we have lost our sense of place. Place is a singular point. You cannot reproduce or replicate it. You cannot replace one place with another place.”
“Hou Hsiao-hsien comes from the generation who were dealing with the experiences that their parents lived through, which they heard about as they were growing up. That meant they were very close to the history. But what I’m dealing with is more remote . . . I can jump from doing a 13th-century Noh play to something that happened 40 million years ago to something from the colonial period.”
NOT ONLY BLACK-AND-WHITE by Andrew Maerkle
—“The fact is there is no true history. History is always written from a specific position or perspective. This is one of the key issues I address in my works. My works question history and the way that these ideologies are constructed.”
“I was working on site, transcribing and arranging these aphoristic notes I had compiled in the memo app on my iPhone, and as I wrote everything out I started hearing this voice in my head saying, ‘There’s no way this could ever be realized.’ I went back and forth with myself about it. Then at the end I thought: ‘Capitalism right now . . . needs to change!'”