alba amicorum

Before social media, the Rolodex and the little black book, mobile medieval scholars would collect mementos of their encounters in “friendship books,” as Hyperallergic informs, whose entries were regaled with anecdotes and personal emblems to denote both private and academic connections.
A really engrossing discussion ensues on the human drive to document the ephemeral and specificity is the soul of narrative insofar as these encounters often, absent the means of taking a selfie, contained a wealth of detail that surpassed the attention of chroniclers—a sort of metadata—illustrating that there’s little new under the sun, at least not without its historic antecedents.

patchwork

Colossal curates a rather poignant and personal autobiographical artefact in the form of the embroidered jacket of seamstress Agnes Richter, who was institutionalised at the behest of her father and brothers in the University of Heidelberg’s (previously) psychiatric clinic in 1893 after suffering a series of delusional episodes.
Life in asylums at the time being highly regimented and patients were expected to produce apparel and accessories as well as other daily chores, Richter used her talents to piece together a linen jacket and embellished it with a colourful and tangled palimpsest of reflections that have only been in part deciphered. “I wish to read.” “I plunge headlong into disaster…” Richter’s jacket, an outlet and a testimony, became part of the endowment of outsider art (Art brut oder rohe Kunst) of the University with the acquisition of the Prinzhorn Sammelung—hidden in the attics of the university buildings for safe-keeping during the Nazi regime so that the collection was not confiscated and destroyed as degenerate art. Today the jacket is on display with many other pieces in the University’s main Assembly Hall (Aula).

askance and apogee

Though we know the motivation behind this rather fantastic and arresting gallery of satellite images shot at an angle rather than the customary flat projection is not a purely aesthetic one as these swarms of satellites that may be able to produce a complete, daily snap-shot of the surface of the Earth soon are gathering telemetry to both mitigate human and environmental crises and at a premium trends on freight movement and industry activity so investors can hedge their bets appropriately—the insight economy, they are nonetheless incredible and a real privileged vantage point to help us appreciate the size of our footprint and the majesty of the natural world, which might be diminished on a leveler atlas. Be sure to visit the links above for more landscapes and urban environments.

santa maria della pietà

Somehow we’ve overlooked this tiny chapel in the historic centre of Naples on prior visits but learning about Cappella Sansevero gives us a very good justification to make a return trip and seek it out.
Commissioned in 1590 by a grateful Giovanni Francesco di Sangro after recovering from a serious illness, the private chapel was dedicated to the Virgin Mary (La Pietà) and including an array of Masonic symbolism and became a late-Baroque to Rococo sculpture gallery in the mid-eighteenth century, showcasing incredible marble-working skills that turn the medium into delicate veils and the warp and weave of a fishing net, reputed to be transformations achieved through alchemy (of which the then head of household was an avid practitioner) rather than the talent of the sculptor. Possibly building on the legend of the supernaturally hypertrophic effort, the chapel also hosts an exhibit on early embalming techniques and features skeletons and viscera hermetically preserved.

pharmacopea

We enjoyed learning of the provenance and prompting of this detailed 1932 medicinal plant map of the United States—bordered by pharmacologically significant plants from around the world—and the ensuing discussion of the evolution and repackaging of the apothecary’s skill and experience as Big Pharma.
As appears in the map’s call-out box, the public lose sight of the contributions of a trained corps of professional to supplement medical science, whose advances cannot be discounted to be sure, at their peril and it was unwise to place too much faith in synthetic chemistry whose mechanisms can sometimes elicit more guesswork and side-effects than we bargain for.  What do you think?  Moreover, and perhaps the graver concern, we do ourselves and the profession by conflating traditional wisdom and folk-remedies with snake-oil and superstition—which stakes a claim to legitimacy because of the challenge in knowing where to draw the line. 

forge and foundry

Brilliantly, as Spoon & Tamago reports, typographer Kosuke Takahashi has created a universal font family that can be read both visually and tactilely whose braille pattern dots correspond to both printed Latin and Japanese hiragana script. The impetus for this invention was the Tokyo’s upcoming hosting of the Olympic and the Paralympic Games in 2020 but the underlying message of inclusivity is an unqualifiedly positive one.

food court

Though the history and geopolitical situation that frames Iran’s relationship to the US and the broader Western-world (and its neighbours in the region) if rather fraught and complex and believe that the profusion of convenience food is a real blight on society and the environment, we rather enjoyed this summary presentation through the lens of bootleg fast food franchises from Atlas Obscura that neither shied away from the uncomfortable truths nor trivialised the state of affairs.
Kentucky House, Mash Donald’s, Pizza Hot and others occupy an entrepreneurial and experiential space that’s otherwise absent in daily life. We also gained an appreciation for the nuance of the Persian pejorative gharbzadeghi (غرب‌زدگی) for being besotted (struck) with Western models and standards in education, business, arts and culture but also critically as it launches a discourse on imitation and authenticity and how one as a nation is can be played proxy as consumers of the products or the politics that the West is selling. Do give the whole article a read at the link up top and discover more with the help of their team of intrepid adventurers.