Things seen / unseen
Djibouti City:
To the undiscerning foreigner, a culture of colonial residue permeates
Military ethos
Nomads, Somalis in self-imposed exile, French soldiers
Ghost town at night, the garish lights of the arcades
Heat
Djibouti Kempinski Palace:
Unchecked luxury
More United Arab Emirates than “Africa”
Myth of the spy
Weekend playground for French military
Self-contained paradise
Property extends far beyond the brick walls that enclose, or the winding palm tree-lined driveway – prized real estate – a whole peninsula (the only decent beach), psychological rift in / out
Addis Ababa waste disposal:
Disorganized infrastructure leads to improper waste disposal
Complex, informal structures sprout up, feeding a mass culture of bricolage (“making-do”)
A choreography based on the different phases of the recovery of disused objects
My ex-lover:
First boyfriend
We both suffer from a general inclination towards inertia
Trash:
The treatment / disappearance of which can also be read metaphorically in light of human waste (abject subjectivities, junkies, prostitutes, white trash)
Ambiguous signifier: excess or scarcity
“Redemption”
The Index par excellence
Time:
There is a trace of morbidity in every act of decadence
Death can be postponed
Projections of the future inevitably involve the fetishistic freezing of an image (a becoming-static) – death drive / necrophilia
Every body in motion stays in motion – every body at rest stays in rest
“the social ladder, a subject on which it was the done thing to joke; and themore serious possibility of being ruined”
