“In Asia, many spectators ask me the same thing: why do you make incomprehensible films? After a screening, they have tons of questions. Why this? Why a wall? What does it mean? I don’t know how to answer. I advise them to contemplate the moon. Because the moon cannot answer you. And nobody asks her questions for that matter. If you really look at the moon, you sense and feel new things each time. Her sight makes us more sensitive, more tender. Maybe it’s a budding solution to the world’s problem. In a way, my films… It’s what my films can’t do. The sight of the moon makes us tender, more sensitive, able to feel other people’s sorrow. In a way, my films are exercises for the audience. Those who enjoy them know how to moon gaze. If you’re a moon gazer you know how to watch my film.”
— Tsai Ming-liang at the Cinémathèque Française before a screening of Stray Dogs (2013)
When I was a girl at home—I reckon I was eight or nine years old—I started making quilts. My mama taught me, show me how to cut the pieces and quilt, too. Back in them days, I didn’t care how they looked, I just put them together using old clothes mostly, and sometimes go down to Linden and get scraps they were throwing away in the clothes factory. The man over the factory down there let folks go through the throw-away stuff. The dump truck going to come get it anyway.
A creator of precisely patterned quilts and free-form, abstract works of rectangular strips—"get-togethers,“ she calls them—Polly Bennett has maintained this diversity of style since her earliest quilts from the 1930s.
“If a person cannot solve a conflict with a friend, how can they possibly contribute to larger efforts for peace? If we refuse to speak to a friend because we project our anxieties onto an email they wrote, how are we going to welcome refugees, immigrants, and the homeless into our communities? The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair. And so this discussion must begin in the most micro experience. Confusing being mortal with being threatened can occur in any realm. The fact that something could go wrong does not mean that we are in danger. It means that we are alive. Mortality is the sign of life.”
— Sarah Schulman, Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair
