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Alice Hattrick
Alice Hattrick is a writer and producer based in London. Their book on unexplained illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, titled Ill Feelings, will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021.


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Ill Feelings

Feature

Issue No. 19

Alice Hattrick

Feature

Issue No. 19

My mother recently found some loose diary pages I wrote in my first year of boarding school, aged eleven, whilst she was clearing out...

Art

February 2016

'Look at me, I said to the glass in a whisper, a breath.'

Alice Hattrick

Art

February 2016

Listen to her. She is telling you about her adolescence. She is telling you about one particular ‘bender’ that...

‘To live,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘means to leave traces’ As one might expect, Benjamin’s observation is not without a certain melancholy Traces are lost in the grand sweep of history And, in today’s world of mass-production, anonymous spectacle and gleaming, sterile surfaces, it has become increasingly difficult to leave traces For Benjamin, it had become increasingly difficult to live   Yet people do leave traces in their wake: the refuse and detritus of history; the variegated remnants of daily life; or dust A trace is ephemeral, a locus of ambivalence suspended in the unstable space between construction and dispersal, presence and absence A trace is very little, almost nothing But it is also an index of life   Gabriel Orozco’s artistic practice could be described, I think, as an aesthetic of the trace The works presented in his retrospective at Tate Modern share a sense of temporal precariousness that is far removed from the mythic aura of timelessness that has enveloped today’s world In other words, the ‘eternal present’[1] that the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson diagnosed as endemic in postmodernity, a symptom of the disappearance of the subject through the ubiquity of simulacra; that is, commodified, depthless and mass-produced items that conflate time’s three horizons into an indissoluble ‘now’ (think Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980)) Orozco’s works, however, are provisional They are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone (1992) Plasticine ball and street debris The paradoxically titled Yielding Stone (1992), for instance, consists of a black lump of plasticine formed in the weight of the artist’s own body The work is rolled onto the street where this highly malleable and greasy material absorbs whatever residue it encounters Yielding Stone registers what would usually vanish without a trace, like a memorial of the ephemeral Indeed, one might literally describe the work as sedimented history Combined with its amorphous shape, this has led commentators to read the work as evocative of the archaic or the primordial In addition, its processual nature has tended to be understood in relation to

Contributor

August 2014

Alice Hattrick

Contributor

August 2014

Alice Hattrick is a writer and producer based in London. Their book on unexplained illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships,...

(holes)

Art

July 2014

Alice Hattrick

Kristina Buch

Art

July 2014

There are many ways to make sense of the world, through language, speech and text, but also the senses and their extensions. In his...

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feature

October 2013

A World of Sharp Edges: A Week Among Poets in the Western Cape

André Naffis-Sahely

feature

October 2013

In Antal Szerb’s The Incurable, the eccentric millionaire Peter Rarely steps into the dining car of a train steaming...

feature

Issue No. 15

Translation in the First Person

Kate Briggs

feature

Issue No. 15

IT IS 1 JUNE 2015 and I am standing outside no. 11 rue Servandoni in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. I...

feature

Issue No. 16

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 16

The political and internet activist Eli Pariser coined the term ‘Filter Bubble’ in 2011 to describe how we have...

 

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