Miraya McCoy’s cultural highlights

Miraya McCoy lives in London and works as an editorial assistant on Bloomsbury’s philosophy list. In her spare time, she’s helping out with a research project on the Indian reformer Rammohun Roy. She loves flying glider planes.

Podcast: Cursed Objects

I stumbled across Cursed Objects the night before a theory exam at university, hoping for some passive revision. Flicking through theory bros and monotonous academics, it was a relief to land upon these two sardonically irreverent voices discussing – amongst other things – the bleak absurdity of a Walter Benjamin-themed ‘escape town’ attraction in Portbou, the place where he committed suicide in 1940, while fleeing the Third Reich. In each episode, historian Dr Kasia Tee and journalist Dan Hancox take ‘cursed’ objects – from the surreal to the deeply serious – as starting points for meandering conversations on material culture, history and politics. If Benjamin lived in Archway, I know who he’d be having a pint with.

https://www.cursedobjects.co.uk/

Album: Essex Honey, Blood Orange 

In Essex Honey, Blood Orange (Dev Hynes) summons the memories of an English adolescence to his present home in New York, from the organ-like synth that opens the album – echoes of school music and seagulls – to the shimmering reverberations of late summer. The songs are fragmented, breaking down into scattered rhythms that speed up, coalesce, and suddenly digress, making space for a remarkable list of collaborators. The album’s defining quirks, though, are the moments at which its instruments seem unaware that they are part of a whole and, hovering in the middle ground, open out onto a kind of lost world: the eccentric melancholy of the persistent two violin notes that open and ring across ‘Countryside’; the glissando in ‘Westerberg’; and, most of all, the cello that breaks in throughout the album to deliver a breathtaking series of non sequiturs.

https://open.spotify.com/album/5RUma3H9uzDLXxwT7JzTel?si=4e-PVf0MQriwb2P4fcg4_w 

Book: Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History, Federico Campagna  

Otherworlds is a narrative history of the Mediterranean told through its moments of collapse and transformation. How did the last pagan philosophers, faced with the ineluctable sweep of Christianity, continue to breathe life into a disappearing vision of the universe? How did early modern seafarers, living on the horizons of history, remake themselves in deserting one faith and country for the next? The book presents the imagination as ‘the only engine of survival’, suggesting that the fragile line of a story may be the only path between this world and the next. It challenges us to see history from the inside out, alive to its fissures and the errant imaginations able to slip across them.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/otherworlds/federico-campagna//9781350536388 

Art: Behzad Dehno

My first encounter with Behzad Dehno was at the Nordic Library in Athens last year, where he had commissioned a collection of artworks in disguise – hidden objects, written work, slowly dispersing paraphernalia – to mingle with the books. The Danish-Iranian-Turkish artist’s next project is a dialogue between London and Copenhagen, tapping into the postal system and interrupting other infrastructures of dissemination: noticeboards, street signs, bus timetables. Dehno says he wants to peer into the gap between the actual and the imagined, which allows for – in many of the best people (often those with an affinity for trains) – an unsubstantiated affection for the postal system.

https://artmatter.dk/profile/behzad-dehno

Ceramics: Dead Dad Book, Vicky Lindo and William Brookes

Vicky Lindo and William Brookes’ Dead Dad Book is a moving series of narrative ceramics, on display in the V&A’s British Studio Pottery room until the end of September. It arose from an effort to piece together the life of Lindo’s father, who disappeared when she was nine years old. His journey from Jamaica to England, his struggle with trauma and addiction, and his death in far-away Ireland are recast in these arrestingly intricate vessels that gather and illuminate the scattered details of a life. The sgraffito words and images record well-worn, miniature fragments of memory: ‘My dad has helped a man who has fallen off his bike / My dad has cut his leg badly, there is blood everywhere’, as well as epic symbols of migration.

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1530663/my-dad-jug-lindo-vicky/