Chicago

[Former industrial soap factory]

Material list: childhood memories and imaginings: Detroit & Netanya.
Open wounds, incisions, pouring and procedure / Memory as abject and fluid interjection / a Jan Steen household, “So the Old Sing, So Twitter the Young’” / tactile memories of leaking and draining, of clinical intervention / Queer fantasies and seepage / loss of control / Dutch Vanitas still life with a skull, flowers, lit cigarette, silver pitcher, china and bread / Oscar Rejlander: The Two Way of Life / Kristeva: “These bodily fluids…are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver.”

Mexico City

[Early 20th century Jewish cultural and gymnastic center for bundists and intellectuals in Mexico]

Purim spiel for the crypto-Jew, flower altar to the “Jewish Gene” – Y-chromosomal Aaron.

material list: signs of crypto judaism (records of the Mexican inquisition, Masonic Order): To place a rooster’s head over the door of the room where a birth will occur / To grow apples and granadas in front of one’s home / To send out a man wearing red holding a tambourine, or a man wearing only one shoe and one foot bound in fabric, to summon clandestine worship / To bind the bride and groom’s hands with white cloth / To bathe in a tub of water, rose petals and herbs, cut your own hair and change the linens on Friday evenings / To light Shabbat candles under tables, in closets and in boxes / To face the wall just before dying / To place money in the mouth of the recently departed / to observe the laws of Niddah (impurity / menstrual-reproductive hygiene) – performing ablutions, or Netilat Yadayim (hand washing) / To sweep your home from the outside-in / To eat tortillas and membrillo, and drink chocolate on Friday evenings (to replace matzo & wine) / To pray wearing a makeshift Tallit over one’s head made from linen tablecloth / To sell fabric (tela), to be a merchant. Dramaturgy: The Inquisition’s San Benito “X” on Catholic flower rounds, an auto de fé / “Judios” — demonic caricature performance of Jewish bodies in Nayarit celebration of Semana Santa, allusions to Naphthali (deer) and Levi (wolf) mascots of Hebrew tribes.

Warsaw

[Large animal surgical-autopsy theater]

Imaginaire, national epic and monument. material list: Royal marriage, court painter and factotum: intercellular space, body and identity. human inventory: “Place sanctified with the blood of Poles killed/fell for the freedom of the fatherland” / Giuseppe Maria Crespi: “Lucius Junius Brutus Kissing the Earth as the Universal Mother” (Warsaw National Museum of Art) / “Nil Omni” / Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson” / Polish cinema and the epic of self imagining / Pan Tadeusz: “A reconciliation mediated by a swarm of ants” / Aescherson, “The Akwizgran Discrepancy:” “gaps, crevices, interstices, [and] oversights” within much larger systems of sovereign power / monument to the Warsaw underground, monument gestures and positions