Inflated Intimacies: Audio Monograph on Debt, the Inside and the Outside

Errant Journal Issue #6

In this audio monograph commissioned by Errant Journal, Levi Masuli remoulds sounds and ideas into a bizarre dialogue on utang na loob (‘debt of the inside’) and the notions of the Inside and the Outside in the Filipino language. Two voices, named 1 and 0, explore the notion of debt as a viscous and creative force that connects beings with one another, contrary to its popular transactional and moral definitions. However, debt eventually loses its generative power upon the introduction of numeracy and currency. The topological categories of the Inside and Outside thus emerge to rescue the primal viscosity of debt and other social relations, in order to segregate the intimate from the non-intimate. Masuli thus imagines a world animated by ‘bubbles of intimacy’, and wonders of ways to keep these bubbles afloat amid the apocalypse of ‘the Number’.

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