Econo Lodge
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      • Flood 1
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    • Santa house
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    • Ronald
    • Ronald 2
  • i robber to you tonight
  • The black cube
  • White cubes
    • White cubes
    • Mathieu's cube
  • union
  • The stream of jewels
  • blue ronald
  • Home
  • The trailer
  • Gilberton
    • The lot
    • The police chief
    • Police chief update
    • Voice to skull technology or Word of God
    • Candy man
    • The purloined letters of Gilberton
    • The descent
    • Real estate performances
    • Spaghetti and meatballs
    • Burning Love
    • Shen'doh fire
    • My Friend, Muhammad ALi
    • Haloing
    • The second haunting
    • the pit
    • Floods >
      • Flood 1
      • Flood 2
    • disappearing act
  • nepa
    • Sahara inn
    • Null murder
    • Sheepdog massacre
    • Spy bovine
    • taxidermy
    • The bow hunter (poetics of structured chance)
    • bananas
  • Santa
    • Mall santa
    • invisibility of santa
    • santa house
    • Santa house
    • real estate santa
    • mall santa
    • deconstructing santa
    • Atlantic City
  • Ronald
    • Ronald
    • Ronald 2
  • i robber to you tonight
  • The black cube
  • White cubes
    • White cubes
    • Mathieu's cube
  • union
  • The stream of jewels
  • blue ronald
  Econo Lodge

The purloined letters of Gilberton

Picture

​In September 2014 I read a book called Vita by anthropologist, Joåo Biehl.  Vita was a commune in Brazil referred to as a "zone of social abandonment." Most of its population had no form of identification; its inhabitants were discharged from psychiatric institutions without paperwork, were previously living on the streets, addicted to drugs, or were dropped off at Vita by family members who were unwilling to take care of them. Vita was a self-contained world and most of its workers were volunteers.  

Aside from examining mental illness and politics in Vita, Biehl explored modes through which this kind of social space was constructed.  His theory-based research included other anthropologists like Clifford Geertz, author of "Common Sense as a Cultural System." Biehl quoted Geertz's essay: 

"Common sense represents the world as a familiar world, one everyone can, and should, recognize, and within which everyone stands, or should, on his own feet.. There is something of the purloined-letter effect in common sense; it lies so artlessly before our eyes it is almost impossible to see."

Just as the stolen document in Poe's "The Purloined Letter" is finally discovered hiding in plain sight, common sense has the same always-already there capacity, prone to evading our perceptions.

I knew I needed to develop my own version of "hiding in plain sight" in Gilberton.  I went through old notes and found this selection:

Delivering the self into a public hiddenness 
(where are you)


I bought a white outfit and decided that I would only wear it during designated activities.  My first activity would be to descend the hill leading into Gilberton, on foot and at night.

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