It Is All Here

Absence is a thing that touches us all. This work (pages 45–47), and the cover of this issue, are excerpted from an artist book, part of a series of works made in collaboration with Muhammad Qays, a student at the University of Baghdad. We begin conversations, sharing our lives and experiences with each other, searched out the proper words with which the other could feel our lived experiences...tried to locate these experiences in the body of the other. How could I understand the meaning of his words beyond the words themselves, and he mine? This was our only task and method. The resulting project was a transcript of those conversations, translated into some language, some cartology of emotion, residue, and the lingering reverberations of an after thought. What does it mean when language is not enough? How do we talk about war?