I did this project in 2019, with 115 vernacular photos from my collection and pairing them with modified fragments from Heraclitus. I used an e-commerce platform but you couldn’t buy any of the images. I took the site down at the beginning of 2024 and archived the project here.
Prologue:
They find themselves downstream from Heraclitus, believing Jalal Toufic that every name in history is I, and with whispered hands arrange fragments into gifts of constellation
Details:
Ahurei is a project by Perry Shimon. 115 photographs are taken from his collection of 20th century vernacular photography and paired with accompanying texts reflecting on the fragments of Heraclitus. The project uses the lingua franca of e-commerce to host concerns of memory, time, relation, value and canon-making. The ambiguity of the surviving fragments from Heraclitus’ sole lost work On Nature, are echoed in the enigmatic found images collected on the artists travels. The work is situated at the close of the film era in the nascent beginnings of the digital.
Notes on viewing:
The work is best experienced on a desktop monitor, read sequentially from start to finish and scored by the Mande Variations by Toumani Diabaté.
Let's start with time is a game best played by children.
He reminds me of my brother, a soul submerged in sleep, hard at work and helping make something of the world.
Let’s think on those things in line with our principles that can bear the light of day. Stories at whose center are questions, looked over by mothers, signs in partial, figures in shadows, repeating patterns…
A wisdom that’s the oneness of things, guiding and permeating all minds.
Are we most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of a child at play?
Some familiar shapes we find easy to assume.
What was scattered gathers.
Something like a diorama, a little bigger and smaller maybe, on power and desire.
A person, when they get drunk, is led by a beardless youth, tripping, knowing not where they step, having their soul moist begins selling jokes to well-established performers and become best known for coming-of-age teen comedy movies that combine magic realism with honest depictions of suburban teenage life.
If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would distinguish them.
What is drawn together and what is drawn asunder, the harmonious and the discordant, things whole and things not whole.
Night-walkers, Magians, Bakchoi, Lenai, and the initiated…
Have we had enough hero’s journeys?
As much as we tried, we couldn’t seem to fix times’ tides, its waves, its jumble of subjects left behind. What was gathered blows away.
The awake share a common world.
Seemingly separate by an envelope of timbre, constellations of this far away family.
It scatters and it gathers.
It was the seasons that bring all things. I can’t remember if this was home or the photo studio, anyway we seemed happy then…
A weathervane, white blood cells, temperature.
The limit of dawn and evening is the bear; and opposite the bear is the boundary of bright Zeus, he whispered in brightly colored logos.
There’s a riot going on acapella through a scrim of tears and art in the world is like water in water.
A night story her father told her about a lizard who came in the tassels of a rickshaw. A baby seal or a bluetooth speaker. My laughter is outside me.
Matrilineal Korean shamans and a serpentine guest ghost host machines inability to poem well. God, words are affordable, scrutable, like painted rocks on the Carrizo plain.
One day is like any other, Jules and Jim, artificial preservatives, scary machines and intellectual squalor. Made with its constituent parts, a small crude rendering of us.
She that was sacrificed in Aulis sends this message, Iphigenia, still alive, though dead to those at Argos. Her image survived Vesuvius, on the walls of the house of the Citharist. Not much is known about the author, and what is has been derived is almost entirely from unreliable sources. Perhaps it’s better to ask Anne Carson.
Goddess Artemis saved me and substituted a deer, which my father sacrificed believing he was thrusting the sharp blade into me. Then she brought me to stay in this land.
Ewes lambing on a rainy night (124 bpm). Small domiciles shrouding a national monument form a flickering processional. I intersect vertically below the overpass, aware and alien from our designated time strata. Too much light and cool to sleep. I’m unresolved somewhere in Berlin, a Turkish vegetable market maybe. I’ve lost something I’ve hidden so as not to have to carry it. Drone pollinators, austerity and maximum security fragility. There’s a restaurant called lovely day across from a small neighborhood garden whose fate is inextricably linked with the fate of the planet.
The din of construction is constant. The city is like a vertical palimpsest, a structural sort of Wikipedia, razing and revising itself.
I feigned excitement for an old retriever. Her owner apologized for the polluted river that she was swimming in. Grand deco, street-facing windows with incongruous objects piling. A shop called utopia with knifes and sage, vape and dream catchers. A bird falls from the rafters of a drug store and writhes on the hot ground activating the motion sensor. The doors aperture opens, spilling out cool air. We find a small Salvadoran restaurant where a young woman is counseling the owners on how to help their troubled son and we listen quietly eating avocado and plantain.
Passions when he says persons. Time as simultaneous. All over print gut bacteria and magnified skin. A work that is hospitable.
In my telling he would do the same thing every day. Swimming in the morning. Resting and laughing with friends. Getting gifts from the outdoor markets. Visiting loved ones with olives, bread and fruit.
A familiar choreography. To what extent will we go for a little bit of aura?
It rests by changing.
They are estranged from that with which they have most constant intercourse. A bomber jacket with unrecognizable insignias and a fur collar. Short like a matador and silky to the touch. A black box video recorder with footage inside of somewhere smokey and dark, lots of people and commotion. Mesh envelopes with money and art. People grabbing the bills as it opens and parsing through misshapen photo sized panes of stained glass cellophane. Gelatinous slides of icons. Glyphs and blurry signatures.
The acacias come to bloom like fireworks in eonic time.
They haven’t learned this kind of stillness yet, it’s performance, and her strong feet grip the earth to keep them from floating away.
An image developed in the Styx, somewhere on the spectrum between Helvetica and Hell’s Kitchen.
Ventriloquizing in the symposium they say love is born into every human being: it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Downstream these comedies wash up on the shores of social aggregators, lonely agoras where new age lovers weave twin flame threads and financial astrologers sell their premium wares.
I can’t slow down this picture.
It must meander to deposit sediment. Each little sheet of flow ends up being like its own membrane. It's important to note that these hydrogen bonds are not that strong. Tardigrades, poststructuralism and neoliberal hegemony. The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of their own.
35 million instances of #i and Agnes dancing with veils. Facial recognition software, stargazer lilies and a Helen Levitt stoop scene.
We step and do not step into the same rivers.
The aleatory impact on perennial bunch grasses, the learning of many things teaches not understanding.
That something will shimmer with a kind of preternatural significance.
The transformations of fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea is earth, half whirlwind… It may (might is too strong a word) be about her dream where everything floats while she's sleeping and falls back into place when she wakes.
Wantonness needs putting out, even more than a house on fire. One Christmas morning in anemic America I watched a racist white woman yell at two Brazilian boys mistaking them for terrorists; a child put down the stick and hug a piñata; a silent surveillance film of a man giving CPR to a child on a supermarket checkout conveyor belt; footage of sea sapphires that can make themselves invisible, who shimmer and sparkle and can be found almost anywhere there is water; a pelican eating a pigeon; Werner Herzog talking about nature; goths raving to a remix of the Thomas the tank engine theme below an overpass; volunteer caregivers giving food to abandoned laboratory chimps from New York; a boy crying while being licked by a puppy saying she's just so beautiful; a bullfighter being gored through the face; remixes of the bullfighter being gored through the face; a jaguar eating a crocodile; an amateur tech video of a watch that records constantly and with tap of a button sends the last minute to the cloud; a fire tornado that resists words; beautiful collages; Brooklyn bridges; cats in trees; Jesus sneakers; sentimental music; Hopi Indians; credit card offers; Hans-Peter lindstrøm's 42 minute long space-disco little drummer boy; planned obsolescence; year end lists; Harry Gruyaert; the mites that live in our nose pores; the secrets they reveal about human history; Wim van Egmond recordings of microbes doing poetic things; instructions to access and edit users advertising preferences; screaming gophers; Donald Trump; friends; ouroboros.
I heard there are islands of stability.
It scatters and it gathers.
You will not find the boundaries by traveling in any direction, so deep is the measure of it.
A hidden harmony is better than an apparent one.
They found most writing embarrassing. Condescending and authoritative when it could have been humble, inquisitive and appreciative.
One trips even on even ground.
Have you heard about what's happening at the cinnamon mines in Goletta?
The hidden attunement is better than the open.
Thales foretold an eclipse.
We were late, the Cycladic museum was closing and our visit was short and confusing.
A cool liminal space, not nostalgic, not optimistic, poised, open, cautious, open…
I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
The transformations of fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea is earth, half whirlwind…
Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, living the others’ death and dying the others’ life.
The seasons that bring all things.
The beginning and end are common.
For what thought or wisdom have they? They follow the poets and take the crowd as their teacher, knowing not that there are many bad and few good.
Of all whose discourses I have heard, there is not one who attains to understanding that wisdom is apart from all.
We clamor for the right to opacity.
iTunes blocks apps that report on drone strikes, the first casualty from self driving cars, a robot sent in to kill the shooter, and I feel I found my great great daughter and I.
On memory.
It scatters and it gathers.
2 years ago yesterday a sad family was looking at birds.
Rivers, sophists.
And the blue of the sky thinks itself in her.
Is this not the most beautiful picture of brotherly love, on a porch in space?
This piece is filled worn shabby chic to be the first half of the day before my eyes and I love you so much better than a week and a good time with the new version of this.
I have sought for myself.
He kindles a light for himself in the night-time, when he has died but is alive.
Trading in lost memories.
Captured memories.
Escallonia can smell like maple or curry or black walnuts and the closer you get the fainter it becomes.
For those things not easily remembered or inferred I will name some from this moments perspective. Right now your favorite food is Ethiopian. You're really inspired by Pina Bausch videos. You're highly sensitive to heat waves, the ones that ripple off the concrete, and you've made me notice this beautiful thing I had stopped seeing.
Some clay, a boat, another moon, I'm making her laugh, and touching her back.
These old hat romantic tics, devices, it's time for a great sloughing off, like a giant sandpaper tongue licking that rectangle between great jones and astor place and it tastes of tuareg bedouin guitar distortion and rare earths, neodymium, terbium and dysprosium, and it's streaming all over without actually touching anything in indium tin oxide.
A longer, smaller elephant holding a skeletonized leaf and a sonorous brass bell at the end of it’s trunk, just outside the window frame.
Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire. Provided that words do not change their meanings and meanings their words.
7 Cycladic figurines in Athens, 1 repeating, 1 Cycladic figurine in San Francisco and 1 Cycladic figurine temporarily removed.
Cold things become warm, and what is warm cools; what is wet dries, and the parched is moistened.
Passed on in its conditions for assessment, these writings and images are scrutinized and enjoyed in similar ways.
I’m not hungry for 1,000 bonus miles.
As sordid as the history was, it was surely not worth the beautiful sounds of the orchestra.
The sun will not overstep their measures.
They learned their mother made a body of art work being sold at gallery. They were interested in the artist statement which they couldn’t remember now. She made rugs with patterns of territories and large plastic grey vessels with labels picturing borders and walls.
A gradual shift in perspective.
A recollection quickly receding in the distance.
The edges moving in.
Charnel grounds or diminishingly yours…
Another vessel.
A bardo of sorts.
A rendering.
A flickering.
Vantages vantage.
A constellation.
What could have been
Jalaleddin on the kanun, thoughts on fog.
She held on tightly as she floated away.
Those who are asleep are fellow-workers in what goes on in the world.
It pooled in fleeting meaningful eddies.
It rests by changing.
Those bodhisattva eyes
They say you look other than you say, you smell filtered through progress.
Atonal and eternal, time experiences voice, quality of light, spatiality, locations…
Quality of time?
They found themselves again, as if waking up from a long dream, safely afloat and filled with lightness.
For a time the most beautiful family in America.
A position we take turns holding.
A language of infrastructure - is there any other kind of language? Listen ambiently below the threshold of full consciousness. The broken speech of the immigrant. Divine hospitality.