With Njoki, Keyti, Omnia, Ali, Princess, Zoubida, Eric, Jumoke, Katherina, Jemima, The Oxford Etymological Dictionary, and the hills of Kigali.
Cartographic imagination gives ground to the images we see and make, and “there are things/ we live among and to see them/ is to know ourselves”. Our withness is the cable that holds up the bridge. What are the coordinates to map a territory of porous borders of self? Keyti raps the news wrapping the evenings in disrespectful laughter. “Take me by the hand, show me the way I can go…” Take me by the hand and show me the way to get lost, to get lost in the mutuality beyond what Marx imagined as the commons. The infinite limitations of what we make as our collective subjectivity. Njoki holds space to author a doorway to another way of grouping. Is there anything but the group? We think of habits and habitation but inhabit a neighbourhood where depth is infinite, “bottom is there but depth conceals it”. Where is the bottom of the utopia we are making? Omnia, is there a revolution without love? What mechanisms sustain us when we step out the map? If to be a scout is “to listen, to heed”, how do we listen to the dissonance of dreams? Speech is food for thought; we want to feel, so we go on a hunger strike. Early on, Ali’s criticality shines a light on who is in the room and who isn’t. In that other room we find ourselves, Kigali gives us soft dancing, and Zinzi says the city is a concert with iPhones on. Which you did you find at the end of it? Is there an end to what we didn’t know was happening until we saw it, infinite horizons like Jumoke’s 360 degree view of the world? Zoubida looks for love spots. Love supports the interval of the relations we are next to, similar to, contained by, and adhered with. Thank you, Eric, for being our compass, the compassion you share for the friends we will be. Neighbourhoods are sites of creation so we tear that shit down and see what else to make outside the new numb, new numbness and numbers of malls, those village squares whose commons is commerce. How do you curate beginning with the premise of nothing? We don’t know and don’t know how to know, and maybe we don’t want to know. We unmake ourselves in collaboration and that is a bridge that will never be on any map, and as Thom might say: ‘they thought I was making poems but really we were making poetry.’
