Julien’s Library
Paul Virilio — Bunker Archéologie
A study of the Atlantic Wall bunkers as the relics of a war already receded into the ground — military architecture read as archaeology rather than strategy. Cited in Bunker Archeology (2023)
Junichiro Tanizaki — In Praise of Shadows
The essay on the aesthetics of shadow in Japanese culture, taken up to treat darkness as material rather than as the absence of light. Cited in In Praise of Shadows (2022)
Georges Perec — Species of Spaces
Perec’s text on the spaces we inhabit, the starting point for a suite of charcoal drawings moving from the scale of the page to that of the city. Cited in Fields and Tunnels (2018)
Roland Barthes — on trees as alphabets
“Trees are alphabets, said the Greeks.” The palm as sign and surface, emblem of extractive economies. Cited in The Barge (2025)
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing — The Mushroom at the End of the World
Tsing’s account of collaborative survival in damaged landscapes, taken up as a way of reading a territory reconstructed from memory at a distance — arriving mixed with everywhere that came after it, and treated as collaboration rather than loss. Cited in Dancing at the Edge of Memory (2025)
Juhani Pallasmaa — The Eyes of the Skin
The essay on the primacy of touch in a culture organized around the eye — the idea that we see with the whole body. Cited in Eyes of the Skin (2023)
Italo Calvino — Invisible Cities
Architecture as a fragile, provisional forest — cities that stand only as long as the water allows. Cited in Invisible Cities (2016)
Charles Baudelaire — Elevation
A possible starting point, per the exhibition text, for a “peripatetic” quest. Cited in Anywhere but Here (2015)
Giacomo Balla — Fallimento (1902)
The Futurist study of a bankrupt shopfront covered in graffiti, taken up and multiplied to the scale of an entire economy. Cited in Falimente (2012)
Édouard Glissant — Poetics of Relation
Glissant’s 1990 poetics of relation and creolization, and — most resonant here — the “right to opacity”: a refusal of the demand that the other be transparent, legible, fully known. Written as fragments that mime the movement of thought.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Sens et non-sens
The 1948 collection — and within it “Cézanne’s Doubt,” which reads Cézanne as a phenomenologist of perception, painting a way of seeing the world that precedes and founds all concept. Meaning caught at the edge of sense and non-sense.
Georges Perec — Lieux
The project Perec kept from 1969 to 1975: twelve Paris places, each described twice a year — once on the spot, once from memory — the pages sealed in envelopes and left unopened. He abandoned it before the twelve years were up; it was published only in 2022. Description as a discipline, and memory tested against the place itself.
Peter Handke — The Weight of the World
A journal kept in Paris in the mid-1970s, recording whatever crossed his attention as it arrived — unsorted, unshaped, refused the tidiness of narrative. Notation as a way of staying in contact with the world rather than accounting for it.
Michael Taussig — Palma Africana
Taussig on the oil palm in Colombia — the plantation as a landscape of extraction, and a prose that takes on the restlessness of what it describes rather than standing outside it. The reference behind the barge essay, which is subtitled after him. Cited in The Barge (2025)
Michael Taussig — I Swear I Saw This
On his own fieldwork notebooks, and on a drawing made in the street in Medellín — what the hand registers that the camera does not, and why the notebook stays closer to the event than the record of it.
Antonin Artaud — Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu
Artaud’s radio play, recorded in 1947 and banned before it could be broadcast — an incantatory revolt against the body as ordered by God and society, and against the act of judgment itself.