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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Growing up in an evangelical church I took communion most weeks To a child’s mind it seemed an excitingly gruesome process: the bread, broken, shared and eaten to represent Christ’s body; the wine drunk to represent his blood This morbid, albeit normalised, ingestion is intensified in Roman Catholic orthodoxy’s concept of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine are not mere representations, but in the moment of consumption are believed to be Christ’s flesh and blood incarnate   This theological nuance might be described as the difference between simile and metaphor, or being like and being the thing itself In relation to her new work, ECZEMA!, artist and writer Maria Fusco described transubstantiation as ‘the biggest metaphor you can get’ An experimental musical score and script written for one voice, it attempts not so much a visual or aural representation of the skin disease as its embodiment in sound, words and performance Commissioned as part of a festival celebrating the NHS’s 70th birthday, ECZEMA! premiered – importantly, given the NHS’s Welsh origins – at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, where it was also recorded for future release as a vinyl EP with Matthew Herbert’s label Accidental Records   In the windowless Hoddinott Hall, a big fat metaphor sat front and centre: a pipe organ ‘The skin is an organ An organ is the skin’, read the text in the lime green handouts distributed among the audience, indicating how Fusco intended the instrument to be understood Despite this primer, it was a shock when a churning sound started up from the large pipes mounted on the far wall of the hall The restless, animalistic rhythm formed the sonic and conceptual backbone of the piece, and a direct channelling of eczema’s definitive gesture: the scratch Fusco is a lifelong eczema sufferer, and working with prototyper Yann Seznec, she wore a ‘scratch glove’ fitted with sensors and accelerometers in order to record the movement of her scratching as data The particular scratch that comprises the score of ECZEMA! lasted 30 seconds It was then stretched out to a duration of 30 minutes and ‘fed’ through the organ by the

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Art

March 2015

The Mask

Roger Caillois

TR. Jeffrey Stuker

Art

March 2015

Here I offer some reflections and several facts potentially useful for a phenomenology of the mask. Needless to say,...

poetry

December 2016

Of all those pasts

Will Harris

poetry

December 2016

  In Derrida’s Memoires: For Paul de Man he quotes from ‘Mnemosyne’, a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin which he...

Feature

Issue No. 19

Ill Feelings

Alice Hattrick

Feature

Issue No. 19

My mother recently found some loose diary pages I wrote in my first year of boarding school, aged eleven,...

 

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