Saliou Traore

Obstruction or Traffic Jam

extract by Patrick Healy from the publication

When it flows and when it does not

Tour de France / 2005/04/ drawings

…Unlike spaces of fish, or flow of birds, human gatherings and movements, get jammed. The morphic resonance that keeps shoals and flocks or shoals of dolphins from such collision is broken in the movement of traffic, probably because of the loss of contact with communicative fluency. In intense consumer cultures such jamming is an inevitable clash between desire and the material world, add to this the areas of commodity requirement, and the loss of the habitat of things, ecological cost of transport, or the collapse of intellectual property rights and one has, as in the case of China, a capitalist phantasmagoria which will become its own main obstruction.

Like the relation of photography-to-photography movement the paradox of the `still’ inactivates. Muybridge according to Solnit was busy photographing time as passage, throughout his work, and responding to what phrase referred to as the `annihilation of time and space’ in capitalism with its need for abstraction and globalization. The paradox being that the movement of water became the frozen moment in the abstraction and homogenization of the team down of spatial fames. The world became experienced more and more as information and images and