A Life in Titles (2017) is a series of hand-drawn cards constructed from my field note diaries during a period of living and studying in Paris. I recorded phrases overheard in public, alongside fragments from intimate conversations with peers and loved ones. These later became divination devices, speculative ‘high theory’ tools and codes used to read my own and others’ fortunes and misfortunes. Now these cards have become ways of connecting distinct realities. What follows are small excerpts from fabulated authors — an array of auras, projections and characters searching for ‘something other than what we usually mean by explanation, as if what can be shown cannot be said’.
A disturbed anthem
Card 1/30: Every Concert Hall Is a Slaughterhouse by J.S Beatlow
Every concert hall is a tick.
Ridged posters bark orders in bold serif fonts,
Italics tilted slightly right,
as if fascism has a good side.
The slogans are bored.
I think of last night.
Anthony, leaning across the kitchen table with a butcher’s knife.
Not pointing it — just letting it glint.
‘Listen to me,’ he said.
His story was a résumé of names, a catalogue of affiliations, the upsell of one’s output, minimum effort, maximum return.[2]
The wind players in front of me look pissed off.
How do they sit so still, so upright?
Is it just years of musical flagellation?
Or does posture come from having never been struck?
To my right: a man grinding his teeth like stripped gears.
To my left: a woman who smells like dog hair and drought.
Under their coats: the stale itch of thrush.
Red, creamy, raw inner spots.
Untended.
I imagine yelling.
Just once.
In the middle of this concerto.
A single sound from my throat,
feral, full.
Would they yell back?
Would they ask me to leave?
Pretend it didn’t happen?
I remember what Sam told me —
not Sam, the news.
Aulnay-sous-Bois.
Paris, 2017.
Théo.
Twenty-two.
No criminal record.
Stopped by police outside a housing estate.
Thrown against a wall.
Beaten.
Held down.
One officer forced a truncheon into his rectum,
by accident they say.
A wound so deep, so violent,
that it tore his internal organs.
He needed major surgery.[3]
His family called for justice, not revenge.
Riot police lined the streets.
Cars were set alight.
But what is fire to the ruin of a body?
They called him respectable.
A ‘respectable young man.’
As if violation must be measured by decorum.
As if innocence is a requirement for not being raped by the state.
The music has moved into a kind of loop now,
repetitive arpeggios mimicking birds that no longer fly.
Avian flu on sine waves.
So-called ecological murmurs for elite publics. I think they call this programmatic music. Music that suffers from the architectures of desire and paranoia, subduing through the harmonies of awe.[4]
Every Concert Hall is a Slaughter House.[5]
Fog horn
Card 2/30: The Roman Chimp – Modern Governance and Obedience by Dimitrie Yang
Once, a chimpanzee followed a Roman delegate to Egypt, back when Egypt was just another arm of the Roman Empire. It was a land fertile not only for crops but for aristocratic primates.
This particular chimp was allegedly caught in an orgy with a group of young hermaphrodites. By order of the delegate, the chimp was granted anything it desired: an extension of the Empire itself. At the time, wheat and barley were going for three denarii a bale: so valuable they were considered the very pride and backbone of Rome.
The chimp travelled with the delegate to make sure local farmers kept up their end of the bargain, supplying Rome with grain. But in a village an hour south of Cairo, peasant farmers and slaves began reporting strange anomalies in the sun, unseasonal rains, and stunted crops. In response, the delegate let the chimp loose on the workers: beating several of them to death with its fists, pounding knuckles into skulls, licking its lips, and biting the nipples of farmers' wives. Each death ended with a deep, guttural groan.
The chimp, over time, was becoming eerily human-like — eating with a knife and wearing a brass plate around its ass. The violence of Empire was disappearing into indifference. It wasn’t the peasants who forgot, it was society at large.
The farmers attempted to reach the sun’s heart, to make it rest. The sun, which had once been the giver of life, now grew ever hotter, swelling in size and lust for eternal light. As a desperate offering to Ra, God of the sun, they sacrificed an ox’s lung to help the land breathe. But the fields began to rot, stinking with decaying flesh. The sun refused to relent, and the beatings grew more frequent, more brutal. Day and night blended into a constant, oppressive heat. Shadows began to disappear; the sun never sets on Empire.
With the bodies of fallen workers scattered across the land, the peasant farmers began organizing a strike, a walkout from the fields, never to return. Secret songs emerged among them, coded messages disguised as melodies, a veil for rebellion.
A hum meant no.
A long glissando: tonight.
A staccato: attack.
A rise in volume: yes.
The workers believed that the soul of the murdered inhabited the murderer.[6] A slippery vengeance that played out through the loss of voice, as time wore on. The chimp, and the soldiers of Empire, grew huskier with each passing day, their pleasure groans after killings replaced by nothing but a weak squeak.
The secret songs began to slip beyond the fields.
Back in Rome, the patricians and plebeians fought among themselves. Bakers refused to bake. Textile workers stopped weaving tunics. Feasts turned to famine, and under the solar politics of sweat and metabolism a groundswell of revolt was rising.[7]
murmurs from across the river
Card: 3/30 Authenticity in Babylon: A love story between art makers and the audience by Harry Theo.[8]
In an apartment building just off İstiklal in Istanbul, a singing teacher welcomes strangers into her home. She doesn’t speak Turkish but singing doesn’t require words.
One of her students is a Swedish woman on a one-year working visa. She suffers from phonophobia — a fear of voice, including her own — caught like a virus from the all-too-common trauma of being put down when singing your heart out. The attachment to ‘good’ singing seems almost universal. Each time she tries to hold a sound longer than a word, she trembles.
The teacher coaxes her gently, tricking her into sound with laughter and poetry; getting her to read slowly, to linger on each word until it becomes an anchor. There was a moment, months ago, when the student laughed so hard that operatic tones slipped out of her, unknowingly. After six months of lessons, twice a week, the student finally hums a long, sustained note.
Another student is Afghan. Her story is different. She loves singing: Western songs, traditional songs, religious music too. She speaks English well and tells the teacher that her family forbids her from singing, or even attending lessons. She’s a child of a businessman relocated to Istanbul from Saudi Arabia. She sneaks away from university to come to singing class, her movement severely restricted, not just by her family but by her passport.[9]
larynx weather
Think of all the animals and other-than-human bodies that migrate daily: plankton rising to the surface to feed, then sinking back into the depths to hide at night; humpback whales moving to cooler oceans along the southern coast of so-called Australia.
Out in the Mid-West of Western Australia on Amangu Country, in the small town of Carnamah, there’s a sticker on the café counter that reads: SAVE THE SHEEP. It’s stuck askew, slightly peeling — like all truths. The font is bold, the sentiment bolder. And yet: what’s being saved, and who’s doing the saving?
The phrase was created by Western Australian farmers in protest against the Albanese government’s proposed ban on live sheep exports. They argue that Australia has some of the world’s best conditions for animal export, and that the ban will significantly affect local industry and, therefore, community.[10] With no alternative measures in place, the economic and social pressure folds into this slogan.
Standing there, holding my overly sweet chai in a town that smells of diesel, hay, and uncomfortable silence, I realise the sticker isn’t about sheep at all. It’s about wounds. Or something else.
Maybe it’s the sheep asking to be saved—not from death, but from narrative.
SAVE THE SHEEP becomes
SHEEP SAVE US.
Orthodox chant
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[1] Michael Taussig, Corpse Magic: Echoes Active in the Slyer-Slain Nexus, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2025, p. 1.
[2] See Kosta Sym, Prestige Pigs (1940), which traces the entanglement of pigs with status, ritual, and art. In many cultures, pigs have functioned as markers of wealth and exchange (e.g., Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu), as sacrificial offerings in antiquity, and as the centrepiece of feasts where social capital is redistributed. In the arts, the pig oscillates between the abject and the exalted, from satirical or allegorical figures to culinary refinement and material transformation (pigskin, vellum, haute cuisine). As such, ‘prestige pigs’ condense the animal’s role in socialising, performing class, and articulating power, turning subsistence into social and cultural capital. Sym also highlights the interpersonal consequences of these symbolic and material roles, showing how they extend into personal relationships and ecological stewardship. See also: Art World(s) at the End of the World by Kirsten Franning.
[3] Angelique Chrisafis, 'French Police Brutality in Spotlight Again After Officer Charged with Manslaughter,' The Guardian, 6 February 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/06/french-police-brutality-in-spotlight-again-after-officer-charged-with, (accessed 25 June 2025).
[4] Zarina Lang, Aura and Farming in Artwork , 4: ‘In many video games, to farm is to grind endlessly at a digital task to gain experience, currency, or items. The games are notorious for sucking hours, days, months from lives. Random acts performed in pursuit of aura. The aura economy extends across generations—Millennials and Boomers alike: politicians holding babies, selfies with senior artists, photos of luxury dinners, etc.—aura farming in action. Aura is the aspirational self-extended and indexed into the market, its circulating forces designed to enchant and accumulate. In a publish-or-perish or exhibit-or-perish industry, does the writing itself and the artworks also become nodes in this farming? I return to Taussig's Agribusiness writing. In Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, aura refers to the unique aesthetic presence and authority of an original work—its authenticity, its “here and now” in time and space. But in aura farming—with its massive energy demands for the endless reproduction of images and content—this “here and now” is simulated ad infinitum. Illusions of professional and personal status flood the feed.’
[5] Kelly Burke, 'MSO Says Concert Pianist Who Dedicated Performance to Palestinian Journalists “Abused His Position”,' The Guardian, 2 September 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/article/2024/sep/02/jayson-gillham-melbourne-symphony-orchestra-palestine-tribute, (accessed 1August 2025).
[6] Taussig, op. cit.
[7] In an interview with Daniel Finn, Sarah Bond recounts how in Ephesus, a group of bakers were reprimanded by the governor of Asia and forbidden to meet as a faction, ordered not to withhold bread, and instructed to maintain civic order—based on an inscription detailing their withholding of supply, likely aimed at pressuring for better prices or contracts. See Daniel Finn and Sarah Bond, 'The Hidden History of Class Struggle in the Roman Empire,an interview with Sarah Bond' Jacobin, 2 July 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/07/ancient-rome-labor-slavery-strikes, (accessed 02 August 2025).
[8] This card points to an axis of magical cynicism and magical pragmatism. These forces shape the practice of fieldwork, turning artwork into writing work.
MAGICAL CYNICISM (verb):
- A paradoxical condition of the contemporary subject: a deep skepticism toward institutions, politics, and systems of power coexists with a stubborn enchantment for aesthetic pleasure.
- A spell cast by the late empire, performed with irony and cinematic flair. Often accessorised with passport stamps and digital detoxes. See also: post-tourist, melancholic utopian.
MAGICAL PRAGMATISM (noun):
- A practice that rejects spectacle in favor of function, without abandoning poetics.
- A mode of action rooted in constraints and relational-research-creation.
- The slow conjuring of other sensory maps. Often humble in appearance but transformative in affect. See also: Blind Vision and Voice in the Expanded Field.
[9] Stephanie Tassel, I’ll be in Greece this Winter, 78: 'With over one million Australians overseas at any given time, travel, leisure, and passport mobility have become defining aspects of national identity. Privilege was once described to me as the ability to step off a plane anywhere in the world and feel comfortable. Australia holds one of the most expensive passports in the world, yet the passport system, often seen as a neutral tool of travel. In medieval Europe, passports were letters of protection granted to elites, not freedoms for the many. By the 20th century, passports had become borders on the body. These hierarchies persist: citizens of former colonial powers hold powerful passports, while those from colonised or conflict-affected nations are stymied. Afghanistan’s passport exemplifies this disparity—ranked dead last by the Henley Passport Index—granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to a mere 25 countries, while requiring visas for approximately 170 destinations. This is no accident. Passports encode who is trusted, who is welcome, and who must continually prove their legitimacy.'
[10] 'Phase Out of Live Sheep Exports by Sea,' Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), Australian Government, https://www.agriculture.gov.au/biosecurity-trade/export/controlled-goods/live-animals/livestock/live-sheep-exports-phase-out (accessed August 18, 2025).
[10] Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), op. cit.