The Medicine Chest

Items

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  Rede de elásticos (Elastic Net)

  The Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920-1988) produced relational objects to be inhabited and activated by groups of people. Her net made up of elastic bands attached to each other, allows a complex structure, a complex grid, inviting a choreographed dance between strangers as they play with it by pushing and pulling these bands.
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  Wednesday, 1 April 2020

  Marseille, France: A resident of a block of flats is passed food by his neighbours using a rope made of blankets.
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  Flood

  Photo of water in Jagger Library by photographer, Lerato Maduna. On 18 April, the Jagger Library — the medicine chest's home — caught fire. The fire started on the lower sections of Rhodes Memorial at the foot of Table Mountain, and set alight landscape, monuments, and many of the university’s buildings. The library only caught fire in the late afternoon, but became a raging inferno as books, artworks, manuscripts that were worked on frequently, institutional, and administrative records of Special Collections, as well as the entire African Film collection, all went up in flames.
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  Ma

  The Japanese have a word, ‘ma’, for this interval which gives shape to the whole – this ‘gap’, ‘opening’, ‘space between’ or ‘time between’. Ma is not something that is created by compositional elements, rather it can be understood as the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements. A room, for example, is called 'ma', as it refers to the space between the walls. Or a rest in music, which indicates a pause between the notes or sounds (Pilgrim 1986: 255).
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  Where their lives took on true weight

  In Alice Munro's short story 'Post and Beam', the two protagonists return home from a short vacation: "Up Capilano Road, into their own part of the city and their own corner of the world, where their lives took on true weight and their actions took on consequences. There were the uncompromising wooden walls of their house, showing through the trees" (Munro 2001: 212).
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  House

  Lokrete with metal armature Grove Road, London, E3 (Destroyed 11 January 1994)