The pot does make itself. I mean, you are the maker, but you’re also not.

there will still be a conversation that will help it to reach that form. Or, it will be made and then discussed, and then remade or trashed, or whatever it might be. // Things need a conversation to take form

It is also interesting sometimes to look back at something and to see it both as an entity and as part of a flow. Because it is also kind of a way of looking, not at yourself, but at how one looks at a historical formulation. How does it stand both as itself, for that moment of time, as well as reflecting what that moment in time was. It is also how it leeches in, and percolates, into the present. And yet how it stays elastic, over time. // Books are both entity and flow, like light, particle and wave

I remember this one moment when we were talking about the question of lighting a shot: Raqs had asked, “How do you know when to stop lighting?” One cinematographer told us that he kept an assistant who was quite expensive as assistants go, and one producer got really upset with him and said, “What is this? Why are you hiring this young man who doesn’t do anything, he just sits around and then talks to you for five minutes?” And he said, “Because he tells me when he sees where I have reached with what I’m doing, and that’s the only reason he’s there.”

I think it’s great to be in a collective because of some of those conversations, because sometimes you need someone else to tell you that perhaps you’re going too far or that you haven’t gone far enough. And sometimes your body just knows, right? You just know it because you have been practicing. The word “practice” is such a wonderful word because it has time built into it: You only can practice if you practice.

there is a distinction between resource and source; the latter’s function is of transmuting. You use a resource to make something else. But a source, as with a river, is a point of departure. It is a beginning, a starting point, and you do not know, necessarily, where it is going to take you. // What is the source of your books? Of each book?

When you acknowledge to yourself that there are multiple sources to your process, what this does is, it expands the genealogies of the sources. You can have, I wouldn’t say global, but multidirectional genealogies. It doesn’t always have to come from the direct path that you think you know, and where you can draw a clean arc. And you can pull, and you don’t have to be so afraid of taking a detour or an unconventional path, and because it’s only a source, you can say, it’s a source for me, I can push myself, I can engage with this idea. You can expand the world that you bring your sources from. And also: time. You can produce a non-hierarchical and non-rivalrous relationship between different moments, subjectivities, histories, and terrains—from today, from yesterday, from 500 years ago.

We have found the idea of the source to be a very productive one. Especially when you say to yourself, what is it that I wish to do? Partly that is, quite obviously, a question of what one wants to do in what one is doing. But also: what is it that my practice is doing in being in the world?

The process has to take its form, the process has to be given its own kind of flow. Work emerges from that. I would say that is the artistic process: This flow is the artistic process. The question of the ego is irrelevant, because no one can make a work of any kind if it is the ego making the work, and you know that, you’ve seen shit work made by really famous artists. If the ego enters into the work, whether you are singular or a collective, it’s going to lead to crap.