A slow letter for those who still believe in looking twice.
There is a plant called Digitalis that has been used for centuries to stop the heart and to restart it. The same compound. The same dose, almost. This is not a metaphor so much as a fact that functions like one.
This journal begins from the belief that art, thought and form are not separate territories but a single country with disputed borders. That a painting and a philosophical problem and a designed object can all be asking the same question, just in different grammars. The work of paying attention is to hear those grammars together.
What interests us is liminality: the space between categories where meaning becomes unstable and therefore alive. Between the historical and the contemporary. Between the intellectual and the felt. Between what an image shows and what it withholds. We are not interested in resolution. We are interested in what happens when you agree to remain in the difficulty of a thing long enough for it to open.
Each week: one essay, written from a particular angle of attention. And alongside it, a small gathering of objects, exhibitions, texts, images, selected not for comprehensiveness but for resonance. The difference between a list and a selection is the difference between inventory and thought.
Digitalis is not a survey of culture. It is a sustained act of looking. Dark and sweet, unsettling and consoling, it proposes that uncertainty is not a deficit but a condition of serious engagement. A space where imagination, rigour, and the fragile beauty of becoming quietly converge.
The Editor
Digitalis is written by Carmen.
A curator and a person who has spent a life looking carefully at things.
She grew up moving: five countries, countless unpacked boxes, a particular literacy in the art of beginning again. This kind of childhood teaches you, if you let it, that identity is not a fixed address but something you carry; and that what you choose to carry reveals more about you than where you happen to be standing.
She is a curator at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, where she works with contemporary art and the questions it refuses to answer tidily. Her practice is built around the conviction that an exhibition, like an essay, is a form of thought. That the way works are placed in relation to one another is itself an argument, and that the most honest arguments are the ones that hold their contradictions rather than resolve them.
Digitalis is where the thinking happens between the thinking. It is, she hopes, the niche and mysterious samples of an obscure collector. Assembled not for comprehensiveness, but for the particular pleasure of things that belong together without quite knowing why.