Und irgendjemand flüstert leise: Kapital oder Kapitulieren

Friends of Gas – Schrumpfen

Wie bei einem naschhaften Kind sind meine Augen größer als mein Magen.

The ecological value of the term Nature is dangerously overrated, because Nature isn’t just a term – it’s something that happened to human-built space, demarcating human systems from Earth systems. Nature as such is a twelve-thousand-years old human product, geological as well as discursive. Its wavy elegance was eventually revealed as inherently contingent and violent, as when in a seizure one’s brain waves become smooth. Wash-rinse-repeat the agrilogistics and suddenly we reach a tipping point. 

The Anthropocene doesn’t destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form. Nature is the latent form of the Anthropocene waiting to emerge as a catastrophe.

–Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology

Anyway, I think I will restart my work with the Illustrated Botanical Dictionary. I am going to capture subjects in daylight with color photography; I will compile them into the Illustrated Botanical Dictionary. For that, they must be color photographs. This is because I would like to completely cast off any trace of the hand that remains with the darkroom process of black-and-white photography. The hands themselves have made the art. The hands are the others within oneself. But of course the hands are the self. Manipulation and a thing manipulated by the hands are still an extension of the hands. The world is manipulated by the hands. My Illustrated Botanical Dictionary will come to exist by cleanly severing all ties with hand-manipulation. In that sense, the color photograph is already in the other world. Release the shutter once, and everything comes to an end

Takuma Nakahira, from Why An Illustrated Botanical Dictionary


Berlin, February 2018

The city is like something living, the city continues to propagate in the daylight. This is perhaps on the surface proof of the wholesome activity that continues and the health of the city in which we reside.

But, within the crevices of this kind of city, there are hole-like openings here and there. These are like openings into the reverse lining of the city. Stopping on the landing of a somewhat dark “negative” stairs, the wind begins to blow. If you descend from here, where exactly would you end up? The terror of being ensnared in a trap and the anticipation of an anti-world; perhaps it is the “healthy city” that surrounds us that is a mere momentary hallucination.

— Takuma Nakahira, Overflow

Berlin, March 2019

The city: all the things that constitute the city, ivy creeping over a wall, manhole covers, or a solid steel frame structure seen from a moving car, once momentarily illuminated by a single flash of light within the darkness, they seem to be beginning to revolt on their own perhaps. But this is nothing more than a fleeting hallucination. When morning comes, blanketed with daylight, these again return to “things” as the necessary conditions constituting the city.

— Takuma Nakahira, Overflow