ELLIPSIS

The 25th of May, 2007, I found a handwritten note on a bus ticket Stansted Airport-Liverpool Street Station saying: the dead transform the living into partners in struggle.

I made it into a post on my blog not knowing where I had found the words.

Today, the 16th of July, 2008, I’m reading an article about The Black Audio Film Collective written by Jean Fisher. Here, I read a quotation from the most famous films of BAFC Handsworth Songs: “For those who have known the cruelties of becoming … let them bear witness to the process by which the living transform the dead into partners in struggle.”

Sometime during spring 2007 I went to Liverpool to see an exhibition on BAFC and most probably
I have heard the sentence and written it down on the piece of paper closest to me. I must have written it in a hurry, as I can hear now that I confused dead with living and thereby let the past work on the present. By reading todays quotation I understand that it’s the other way around, it’s the present that works on the past.

By now I know again that the 28th of March 2007 I travelled from Denmark to London to wake up early in the morning to go to Liverpool to watch the exhibition on BAFC on the 29th. I therefore had a bus ticket from Stansted to Liverpool Street Station in London in within reach when sitting in a dark room watching Handsworth Songs

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BAFC is an artists/intellectuals collective from the 1980’s and 1990’s England. They partake in my dissertation at The University of Copenhagen. Their film Handsworth Songs from 1986 can be seen here:
Handsworth Songs