Magdalena O! » PHOTOGRAPHY

Anywhere is

Magda O! — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:31:11 +0000

Standing by the living room window, staring at the giant billboard at the end of my street, but nothing at all. The smoke from the joint envelops me. Enya’s voice bellows from my speakers. Soon the first semester of my PhD will be done and then it will just continue. Everything will keep going and I can’t stop it from happening. My Saturn fully returned last week on the most ordinary day you can imagine. I am in the fold of the waves, and the only way to get out of the waves is through the folds, but the folds consume you one by one. As soon as I come to any resolve, even on the smallest scale, a new obscurity flows into my mind full of propensity to keep expanding the huge clear ocean, only to be in relation to a fucking black unknown infinite body water I don’t even know exists yet (every time I think I know its properties, it changes, like the angels in Evangelion).

In the last few days of summer 2009, j and I ended up in Brighton & I fell in love with miao & the miao & the miao & we listened to Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting on repeat & Red & I argued about music taste politics & then we ran around into town to get more miao. This went on for three days & I wore the same outfit from Brighton onto the train to Gatwick onto the plane back & then we arrived home in the afternoon & I was still high & everything was perfect & our bed was soft & we laid down smiling until we managed to fall asleep in the sun glow & then he left to work the next day & the best summer of my life was over.

I can’t seem to grasp the present as it’s happening at all. Being present in the moment is a notion that is completely lost on my perceptual and sensual ability. I imagine a life with so much less suffering if only I could engage in this act more often than once a year or less! All I can see in front of me is my past, choking me, penetrating me, manipulating me into a futurity, and I totally let it –repeatedly.

Since his visit last weekend, I feel more connected to my brother than ever before. I wonder if he feels it too? I feel that the connection I have with him is one I will never have with anyone else, in any way, in every way. I love him more than anyone I’ve ever loved, I love him more than my mom, more than my grandfather. All love is different, but not so completely different. Not all love makes you know you would sacrifice your life for someone.

I fantasize about having children so that they can feel the intensity of sibling love too.

Searching for Montréal’s Provost River

Magda O! — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 05:46:33 +0000

I am part of a long-term project focused on re-articulating/reviving the old river systems of Montréal. Today I started the walk to acquaint myself with the area of where the Provost used to be (and is now underground), or rather the first small part of where it splits off from the River St-Martin. I will try to document and map as much as possible before the snow fall.

Along the way starting at Parc Outremont:

first month in Montréal

Magda O! — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 03:49:44 +0000

Hi.

I am living in Montréal now, in the St-Henri neighbourhood in a beautiful pre-war rowhouse. The woman living below me was one of the women that influenced Gabrielle Roy’s Tin Flute. There’s only two of them left and everyone else is dead. My doctoral studies have commenced and I’m not sure what to make of it yet, other than the superficial, oh wow, it’s great, my supervisor is too-good-t0-be-true, the food is great & I’ve made fast friends with people in the Film Studies Department and not my own. I’ve been obsessively updating my Instagram and focusing on color and perception and immediacy.

I bike a lot everywhere and eat cheese and speak broken French in a terrible Anglophone accent.

Lately, I’ve started really missing my brother. A LOT. I wish he hadn’t been so stubborn. He wishes he hadn’t been so stubborn and applied to Concordia for Studio Art instead of just being focused on Illustration at OCAD. He’s 18 now and we listen to the same music and like the same things and generally have a similar outlook on life, although his is filtered through the angsty suburban teenage gaze and mine through a gone-through-too-much-school-too-fast ‘am I an adult or a kid still?’ PhD gaze. I fantasize about us going to shows together, and me showing him off to my friends and him fitting in here much more, and being able to live, because everything is so cheap in Montréal, and Concordia has so many initiatives that you can take advantage of if you’re willing. I have access to a free delicious vegan, and often wheat-free lunch when I’m at SWF campus.

I remember my first year in university. I was on sex and drugs, so self-absorbed that only bass moved me. No future. I need my hair done. I’ll feel better. Next week I’m coming back to Toronto for my Masters Convocation. I’m disproportionately excited for this institutionalized spectacle.

A collection from my iPhone from my first month here.

ps. several of you asked me when I would update this! OK! I’ve not had much to say, words, taking up space, when I am writing and talking, it’s about issues of perception and symbolism and #occupywallstreet & everything else that subsumes me. Maybe more like drowning in the ineffable. Is it possible to have a relationship with the ineffable? Activate a correspondence with it? With a yet-t0-become/yet-t0-be-signified? – the activating of the molecular level of radical empiricism.

pps. I am working on a large several-year project reviving the lost rivers of Montréal.

When John Maus played this at Il Motore last week, tears came down all over me and then I started screaming until I lost my voice and was full of cramps from thrashing my body – the abject becoming the sublime.

Composer Series: Bérangère Maximin

Magda O! — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 02:43:18 +0000

Bérangère Maximin is a French electro-acoustic composer. She is a student of Denis Dufour’s (a member of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM)). She is one of the women featured in my upcoming documentary, microfemininewarfare. Please buy her album Tant Que Les heures Passent (As Long As The Hours Go By). It was released on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records label in 2008. I discovered her while staying at my friend’s house in Paris last year while working on the project’s proposal (serendipity yo!) while he was on the typical gone-south, Parisian vacation with his wife and daughters. I think music really defines a person (many people consider this childish of me) and I went through his music collection and this album caught my eye. I liked the name of it, and put it on to listen on his stereo system not too loud because it was a small residential building in Saint-Cloud.

I like when an artist can sweep me up into their world, and she was able to immediately. It is a strange vibration of musique concrete and an aesthetic of a woman filled with darkness. I can’t really say – I don’t appreciate the ‘music critic’ language so I will stop, but maybe you can be surprised by her melodic arrangements too!

It was obvious I would ask her to participate in my project because I was so fascinated by the narrative in her music. Bérangère and I spoke a lot about the music creation process and how difficult and painful it is, but I will leave that for later. One thing that surprised me was her attitude of wishing to bring together groups of electronic and electro-acoustic and jazz musicians together; something she is having difficulty with in Paris, because some people part of these groups are vocally exclusive and dogmatic. It is not surprising after meeting her, and that most of the women in my documentary discussed their desire to merge communities, and to create communities and collaborations of support networks that aren’t based on stylistic aesthetics. I hear many people mention this, but I don’t think as many people go through with it. Music politics; they are overbearing sometimes! OK, I will leave you with some out-takes from the photo shoot. Bérangère was quite generous, and I hope I served her well. The documentary, photos and interviews will be available sometime this year. They have to be.

Some out-takes:

summoning the muse to a new house

Magda O! — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 02:44:24 +0000

…

i’ve been silent online trying to finish my MA thesis project & documentary / the defense is on august 24 & i move to montreal six days later to start my PhD

Photographs exist to make the past seem more memorable (than it is when it is happening)

Magda O! — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 01:12:11 +0000

One of my oldest dearest friends Tobias scanned some old photos of me which I had never seen before. Unearthing memories. We spent the day in High Park. It was 2002 and I didn’t even have a digital camera then. I used a Nikon F60 and he used something much better than me. Our friendship was largely based on mutual photographs and writing poetry together (holy teenage!) Now, he runs a photography studio and co-owns a delicious waffle-only place called Starving Artist in Blandsdowne, that serves every sort of waffle you could imagine – including bacon and/or gluten-free waffles.

On the West Coast.

Magda O! — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:27:27 +0000

I came back from shooting (for my documentary) in LA and Del Mar, California, a few days ago. There’s a spirit on the West Coast I thought I would hate and putting the East Coast screwface on to protect myself dissipated at every turn. Everyone is so unpretentiously chatty and such a storyteller you can’t help but to listen and exchange ideas – at Jimbo’s, at the train station, or on the plane – unlike Toronto. I’m not suggesting it’s somehow superior, because as a staunch loner, it did overwhelm me, but as a novelty, I welcomed it with a smile (!)

California moved something inside me, I’m not sure what yet, but something was planted. It’s like I had a sneak peak at joy.

These are some photos I took in Del Mar along the Pacific Ocean. On the way from the train station in Solana Beach, Christine surprised me by driving very slowly down the road to show me the street sign that donned my name.