Postcards for Mia
These postcards were made and sent by anthropologist Michael Taussig to his granddaughter, Mia, while she was between the ages of three and five, from trips Taussig made to Europe, Australia and Colombia. They represent a form of fieldwork that emerged alongside the notes Taussig was taking in his professional capacity, one equally as made from “collages of fragments and haphazard connections […] works in progress, probing, wondering, shooting off in tangents and full of half-formulated ideas on the move.”
As Taussig writes in the book’s afterword, the postcards foreground drawing as a form of exchange (the process so vital to the anthropological imaginary). But beyond this anthropological enquiry, the postcards are also dispatches from a grandfather to a little girl that both open up the impossible world beyond her Brooklyn brownstone, and remind her that somewhere in the world, he is thinking of her. As Taussig writes, consciousness can be linked through imagination even when separated by vast distance: “The two imaginations are co-dependent. They constitute one another.”Nell Whittaker
In the cemetery young people bury a dead gangster friend. They play loud dance music while other gangsters stand on the cemetery wall. This makes the priest mad.
The underground trains come every three minutes. They make no noise because they have rubber wheels. My friend Alex had to pay a huge fine because he had his foot on the seat at 2 in the morning coming home from his job in a bar in Pigalle.
I never saw anyone go in. Maybe the red doors put them off?
There are no streets and no cars in Venice. I sit by the canals and drink wine worried about the water getting higher.