Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 49

Narcissus in Bloom: A Work-in-Progress

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Regarding the Pain of Royals

Following the funeral of Prince Philip yesterday, Caroline Davis suggested for the Guardian that When future historians come to retell the story of the pandemic, the image of the Queen sitting alone, masked and in mourning, will surely rank among the most poignant. I’m not so sure… Whilst Prince Philip’s coffin was being loaded onto […]

Bad Queer

CW: I want to talk about gender, specifically my gender and my feelings around it. I want to try and put into words a feeling that I’ve long denounced and tried to hide, but that feeling doesn’t really have a name for me. Not yet. I suspect it never will. My life has been defined, […]

XG Reading Group 2.5: Narcissist Realism

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Next Week’s New

Thanks to Rickard Eklund for inviting me to speak to students on the Materialities course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm yesterday. It was a really interesting afternoon. Rickard had spent the morning using the I Ching to generate a title for their forthcoming exhibition, and I spoke a bit about my research […]

Communities of Loss: A Brief Reflection

Drive is a kind of compulsion or force. It’s a force that is shaped, that takes its form and pulsion, from loss. Drive is loss as a force or the force loss exerts on the field of desire. […] That the drive is thwarted or sublimated means that it reaches its goal by other means, […]

Knowing the Unknown Knower

Blogs and search engines are different approaches to the same problem, different occupations of the same place. They point, though, in different directions. Faced with the challenge of providing a trusted guide through a chaotic, indeterminable, changing field, search engines say “trust the algorithm”. In contrast, blogs say, “trust doesn’t scale.” So while the former […]

Winter Walks XIV

Photographs taken in Marsden, during a walk by the Butterley and Blakeley reservoirs, in February 2020.

Ecologies of Class: Prince Philip’s Conservationist Politics

Buckingham Palace announced this morning that Prince Philip has passed away at the age of 99. In the interest of partisanship, most of the press has skirted around saying anything too critical, neglecting to mention his most horrific gaffes. I’m all for not speaking ill of dead before they’re even in the ground, but as […]

Burning Heather