Just Living
It seems strange, as I write this, to have declared for the collection Politics & Life that living is political, and then title this collection Just Living. Just so. I am a man of contradictions. And, so far as you know, I've contradicted myself. Yet, of course, nothing we see here can be seen outside the guise of politics. Sicily is suffering brain drain, and there's always been a perception of a North South divide in Italy, and the inequality tends to fall along those lines. Rural Iowa has been a hotbed of political campaigning for decades, and even though it's no longer the first state to vote, it's still an early voting state. Our water quality is poor and getting poorer, our small towns are getting smaller, and our university towns are little outposts of culture clashes, both internally between cultural factions, but also relative to their contexts. You need only drive ten, fifteen minutes to end up in fields from every city in Iowa but Des Moines. So perhaps these projects are just as political as any that have an overt political symbolism. - JK 08/07/2023 London, UK
