The Medicine Chest

Items

• 

  A label in the Natural History Museum

  A label in the Natural History Museum accompanying a discovery made by Mary Anning.
• 

  Burrowing

  Extract from 'A Child in Time': "Later, in the sorry months and years, Stephen was to make efforts to re-enter this moment, to burrow his way back through the folds between the events, crawl between the covers, and reverse his decision. But time – not necessarily as it is, for who knows that, but as thought constituted it – monomanically forbids second chances" (McEwan 1987: 14).
• 

  L’Ellipse

  In the triple–screen projection 'L’Ellipse' (1998), Pierre Huyghe slowed a jump cut from Wim Wenders’s 1977 film 'The American Friend' and expanded it by adding his own footage of the film’s leading man, Bruno Ganz, now older, acting out a scene that the film itself skips – a walk across a city, from one apartment to another, between important phone calls.
• 

  Holes

  The landscape of the Karoo and the Northern Cape – the land of the |xam – is rich with holes in the ground. Below the surface of the earth burrowing animals navigate their way through the roots of grasses and shrubs, small trees and creepers. Holes are made and inhabited by scorpions and spiders, mice and shrews, suricats and mongooses. One of the most energetic of burrowers is the anteater whose holes, in places, transform the landscape. Anteaters are such active diggers and their holes so numerous that abandoned burrows are quickly occupied by bat-eared foxes, hyenas, hares, civets, bats, jackals, owls and porcupines (Skotnes 2010: 26)