The Toe Rag - Issue 6 Artefacts

Artefacts are objects drafted into service by our impulse to document, to remember, to weigh the present. They are collisions of intention and accident: things forgotten then remembered, dead things that won’t quite die. This issue dissects the corpus of artefacts. Behold its organs:

THE LUNGS: A burnt archive inhales Venetian smoke, exhales lost music.
THE HEART: St. Tabitha’s confetti orb pumps glitter through clinical pink veins.
THE SKIN: Photogrammetry flashes flay us into digital ghosts.
THE GUT: Shit-stained aprons digest wheaten bread and regret.
THE BONES: Syphilitic skulls scaffold our inner museums.

Circulating this system: haunted chocolate (sugar-coated souls), chastity-belt residue (purified lust), cough-syrup ink (chemical memory), a red-framed satsuma (secreted by doubt-secreting citrus gland).
        No metaphor survives this autopsy. These are relics of the real: gallery floor scuffs where art bled into dust, pleas to Oddo too heavy to send, ketchup-sachet reliquaries sweating in the hostel dark.
        We are what we exhume! Crack the ribcage.

FEATURING:

Rashed Aqrabawi, Rosa Appignanesi, Dimitris Athiridis, Sophie Barshall, Daria Blum, Ilana Blumberg, Hector Campbell, Madeline Cash, Sophie Calle, Rachel Dastgir, Udith Dematagoda, Oisín Davies, Susan Finlay, Sammi Gale, Isabella Greenwood, Alessia Gunawan, Sophie Howe, Cindy Ziyun Huang, Lara Sugar Hughes, Martha Irwin, Athen Kardashian, Anne Kimunguyi, Maya King-Dabbs, Kathryn Lloyd, Aled Maclean-Jones, Alexandra Metcalf, Matilda Munro, Marisa Müsing, Ben Pester, Ethan Price, Purity & Danger (Sylvie Makower & Dora Pruskin), Rat Section, Kathryn Scanlan, Suren Seneviratne, Varvara Shevtsova, Sarah Shin, Ebun Sodipo, Natasha Stagg, Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe, Frederika Tevebring, Temperance, Andrea Urbez & Jordan Wolfson.