09-01-2023

Talked to Charles, from ‘Choice – Gourmet’, who just closed shop the other day. I feel pretty bad for him. He explained to me that he had spent a lot of his seed money early on and had not started recovering it yet. His fixed expenses were way too high. One being energy which was wasted due to the landlord never fulfilling his duty of providing enough air conditioning. The other being rent, which the same landlord never accepted to adjust to the insufficient tenant’s income.

That is where I see so clearly how economic justice will remain unattainable until the notion of landlord-ship, property-ship – is universally upended! And this is not even touching on social justice yet!

—–

Back to studio!

The ‘Tale for Reparations’ project is so clearly forcing me to evaluate the symbolic content of each of my visual choices: form, color, technique, assemblage, 3D collage … each detail has meaning, is a referent… I am still attached to not using words at all in this work.

Thus the last trace of Morgan’s presence in the development of the ‘Tale’ is silence!

It makes for very slow progress but it also seems to stimulate both, Gwylène and l, in our power of collaboration. Every important  formal/visual choice is collaborative. Yet, of course, the result will be as unexpected as it is presently uncontrollable! A step by step process with no real predictability.

Show me an artist who seeks predictability.

 

09-07-2023

Tuesday we had our usual creative meeting (sync or sink … depending on the day!).

Centered on adding the last touch to an important grant from the Donnelley Foundation.

Although I had already read and offered to correct it a bit, I was surprised by how unconsciously self-censorship operates in this group. The use of wishy-washy words which reduce dreams into doubts. I proposed that we be more, much more ambitious, assertive and sure in our purpose. For one, we are not begging for funds. We are ready to prove that, with the financial support of Donnelley, we can give TINYisPOWERFUL a new lease on a long life. I also insisted that we be very assertive about the specificities of our IN/WITH community work. Donnelley, by funding us, would, in a way, give credibility to our approach, based on designing tools for the practice of art, in the spirit of the arts, IN/WITH a community of people who chose to work with us. This represents quite a rich ground for relational creativity. We are the (organic) social gatherers of tomorrow!

This (manmade) environment affords me, in the making of the ‘Tale’ for example , the freedom to work on imaginings even before having met or consulted with future partners, as long as I am ready to listen, adapt and modify when the time comes. And as long as, at the end, I give the work away: collective ownership or the anonymity of community art. In this I see a clear affirmation that the art we do is anthropologically mindful, knowledge-based and relevant.

Going back to the ‘Tale’, I know it represents such a long-term effort. I am not sure many  communities would be available to dedicate such an extended time to it. But, the intellectual in me, although I am constantly trying to tame my instincts, sees enough legitimacy in brainwork to feel free to pursue the work fully. After all, it will end up translated into a visually very stimulating installation. A great way to apply, once again, the knowledge Gwylene and I acquired when teaching our collaborative Beaux-Arts Nancy School course: Space and its Representations. In this case, I would say, from conceptual space to uncompromisingly visual space.

I proposed an addendum to the Donnelley Grant application. It had to do with acknowledging the now unavoidable reality of climate change as an element in all our art works. Therefore, we added to the requirements for TINYisPOWERFUL’s new assistant that (s)he be current with environmental matters.

This brings me straight back to the Tale!

Today’s Guardian opening article is about an urban farm in Brooklyn. Oko Farms. Where a Black woman started to combine agriculture with pisciculture. Right away, I remembered all my attempts to integrate just that: a fish/veggie urban farm, in the Tale. Immediately, an   image formed in my mind: that of a seesaw farm where, following the Brooklyn model, the same water goes from fish, at one end of the seesaw to lettuce at the other! When filled with nutrients from the fish tanks, the water is filtered towards the veggie farm … In other words, I would like to come up with a design where the enriched water is gravity-fed to the salads by way of a simple seesaw mechanism! Maybe so intriguing and suggestive that the purpose would be obvious, yet magic? Exactly what I am looking for.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/07/oko-farms-brooklyn-aquaponics-fish

and: https://www.okofarms.org/river-street-farm

 

09-11-2023

I consider the architectural drawing of the housing unit I designed for the Tale to be central to the unfolding of its story. Drawn on a 3/16″ sheet of white PVC, this 30-60  axonometric rendering is meant to be the exercise which will provide a smooth return to studio work, after a long but necessary medical downtime. A RECOVERY EXERCISE! Well, yesterday, I realized that this PVC surface was the first element, in the whole Tale so far, to NOT be ‘transparent’, permeable. I did not like this. I want to keep space flowing throughout the installation, unencumbered. So, I decided to cut out the 5 clerestory windows present in the drawing.

Now, they open up to so much unknown … that I assembled in no time a set of slender sawhorses to prop the drawing up to eye level and suddenly, what I discovered, in the wilderness of my imagination, was a wholehearted offering of fruit and fish, a cornucopia of colors – and smells –

Right here and now, everything is possible.

‘A Tale for Reparations’  is well on its way …

Thus did the transition from before to after my operation coincide with the urge to move the Tale from a memorialization of the endangered Charleston Soul culture, to ‘a Tale for Reparations’. A proposal for the future …

This transition itself happens to coincide with the unveiling of a plan for the development of the Union Pier acreage, downtown Charleston! As the city faces the dangers of rising waters and climate change, this plan is one of denial. Complete with luxury condos, hotels and shops, fit for the rich and the privileged only!  A typical gentrification scheme, with no specificity. Generic, ordinary appropriation. A real estate coup. Of course this revolts me, revulses me, so much so that it is causing me to question the very title of my project. For sure, I am going to change ‘a Tale of Charleston’ into A TALE FOR REPARATIONS. The dream is getting bigger and gives me even more freedom to propose a fuller vision of what Charleston could be. The Union Pier open space is still blank after all!

Let the voices of the people and the hands of the artists design a land of opportunities!

One opportunity will be to flesh out what the notion of COMMON evokes to/in Charlestonians. This notion that real estate does or does not necessarily belong to one private entity or person. The notion that real estate belongs to the people! That the people may have the choice to assign it community functions … Going back to the axonometric drawing of the Tale, the housing units are free-standing under a roof for sure, but with open spaces all around and above. In this vast built common, only doors guarantee the privacy of each unit. Front doors facing a green landscape, back doors opening on a large connecting corridor, also open ended but where hinged partitions can isolate each unit, at night for example … Of course this openness spells vulnerability, but what I offer is a tale. Isn’t a tale, also, a projection in a better future we are preparing for our children? ‘A Tale for Reparations’ is aspirational, utopian, therefore attainable. The changes necessary to make the city more resilient will force cooperation of all with all, the sharing of resources, a sense of the local and  one of belonging.

Above all, ‘a Tale for Reparations’ means the end of racial segregation, economic and educational disparity, it means equity and access.

The first image to appear in my mind’s eye when I opened up the clerestory windows was a horn of plenty, a basket full of fruits and vegetables.

A  CORNUCOPIA

The vision of an urban garden/urban farm. Serious business – like OKO Farms in Brooklyn.

… I could carve all sorts of fruit, vegetables and fishes

in polystyrene!

Would I ever have dreamt of carving animals or vegetals?

in styrofoam?

for the life of me?

Carrots, pears, tilapias, trouts!

Monkfishes?

Made-up veggies like blue-spotted potatoes

or strapples

or pruzzinis …

In paradise, Everything goes.

Or is it, Anything goes?

Such an endless unrolling of imaginings is not obsessive.

It is sustainful, liviable.

The intensitivity of creativity!

slowed down (only) by the fatigue of age …

or a fall in the tub – last night!

Can’t we ever have everything?

 

09-12-2023

It is 1:30 AM. I cannot sleep. I am reading the last few pages of this diary and making some corrections. My mind keeps skipping to the studio. I remain uncertain although what I am presently coming up with should carry an unquestionable enthusiasm. I am not kidding when I point to the fatigue of age!

The transparency afforded by the now open clerestory indeed has extended the field of possibilities. This symbolism in cutting open the white surface of an architectural drawing  is timely and dramatically real. So much so that I feel dizzy with liberating imaginings! It would take a third artist. Gwylène and I are not sufficient anymore! It could have been Morgan but she chose to cancel us! Too much extra creative energy would have been needed from her, I bet! But you know what? The real sadness I carry is due to the fact that she saw our collaboration just as extra work. Too bad. But I partly fault myself for this. I gave her – and the other young folks in the collective – Victoria and Rayn – so much credit and I was so blinded by the joy of our intergenerationality that I forgot precisely the importance of reciprocity in our relationships. They had been given credit. The return I expected never fully materialized. And I let go. Which, in itself, should be a good thing! But I should not have been so ‘colonial’ as to expect an inevitable return. Yet, isn’t the question whether there is still value in elders’ knowledge? Of course not. There is value, even in these times of absolute changes and cancel culture. History also works both ways. We bring to the new generations our good and our bad. The young are still in a digestive period. They will bear their good and their bad along with ours, sort them out and pass them on! What keeps us tied together through thick and thin though is the forever enzyme of responsibility, instant and unescapable.

 

09-14-2023

Now I indulge daily in generating fruit, veggies and fishes from a huge styrofoam parallelepiped given to me twenty years ago by our friend Hugh DesMarais! It has collected dust, forever untouched, and now, because I can see across time and space through the newly opened clerestories of my social habitat rendering, it is being cut up and carved into suggestive symbols of a much more nature-friendly, greener Charleston! I am fast limping past the path of ‘a Tale of Charleston’, towards its next iteration: ‘A Tale of Reparations’.

 

09-16-2023

My plan is, through the clerestory, to discover a world of plenty. A basket full of fruit and vegetables – carrots, pears, lemons, radishes … and a tray of dead fish with maybe shrimp and crab. The basket of fruit will be very colorful and explosive compared to the tray of seafood, which I see in more pastel grays, off-whites and light greens. Somehow this contrast will permit a logical jump to the next set of visuals: a fish farm and a greenhouse organized around a third building, reminiscent of a grain elevator, with a set of flying pipelines connecting its core to both the greenhouse and the fish farm. This highly engineered architectural ensemble is supposed to express the way, in some dreamed up urban farms, all waters are recycled so as to feed the vegetables with the rich waters of the fishtanks. Almost an effort in literality which may be acceptable if rendered with poetics and humor!

I still regret the seesaw though. But I don’t seem to be able to tackle it. It would have to move up and down. But I have never been able to get our friend Olivier to work with us on the design of simple movement mechanisms.

After all, I started as a stone carver. Weighty immobility was a condition.

No excuse!

Tinguely will for ever be an enfant terrible!

And now I carve styrofoam!

 

09-18-2023

For the last two days, in the studio, I have been carving mostly carrots and catfishes – out of styrofoam! And now, I paint them. To get to the worktable I walk around the elevated social housing piece. I keep it standing for inspiration. There is a disproportionately thick jute rope that hangs from the protruding tip of a narrow diving board-but-no-pool. When the rope touches the ground, it coil up. I imagine it could uncoil and snake across the space, as a path. It may be marked, at regular intervals, with stations – Tschumi Follies-like – each representing a function all public spaces should offer: bio break, rest, water, play, food … in a spirit of Reparations.

If I cover the next six or so stages I am projecting for the ‘Tale’,  (a horn of plenty – a ‘fruit of the sea’ basket – an urban greenhouse – a fish farm – and three not-yet-defined stations), successfully … then I may declare an end to this installation! It has to have an end so that I can come back to the diary in earnest. Daily entries, editing of earlier pages and the attached research will be a full-time art job for quite a long time. Even more so since I intend to build one or two kitchens in parallel to the writing! Then, I may consider resting … possibly in peace.

 

09-20-2023

And now I am learning about the essential role of the menhaden fish in the ecology of our oceans, their coastal landscapes principally. They are small fish(es) living in estuaries and along coasts, depending on age, season and reproductive cycle. Their most important feature is that they are filter feeders, whose main sources of  food are either phytoplankton (plant) and zooplankton (animal). For example, as plant eaters, they can control the destructive algae blooms developing as waters get warmer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menhaden#References

Menhaden’s feeding modes actually inspired the development of fish farms, if I understand. They exemplify the virtuous cycles developing between fish and plants as fish waters are enriched by the fish droppings plants feed on … or something like this. Just enough understanding of the symbiotic relationships between all livings creatures, slowly established throughout evolution … millions of years of interdependency   … apprenticeship … all this, fundamentally threatened by the way humans abuse and poison the environment.

I find this quick exploration of the menhaden truly fascinating. I wonder whether there are children books I could send Lexington to get him interested. It must be rewarding to get so close to the basic tenets of ocean life and know that a wise practice of them could make the difference for humanity!

—–

Next week Linda Parris-Bailey, a ROOTER is coming to Charleston with a play she wrote, sponsored by the Moja Festival. I have already been asked by Victoria to get in touch with her about some carpentry support work! Here goes my fish and vegetable styro-sculpting! But it is clear that ROOTERS practice solidarity, isn’t it? And I am a ROOTER!

 

09-28-2023

For sure! I got a call from Linda and ever since … I have put all my energy into building a set of 6, 8X8 screens/scrims for her play in Charleston,Yankee Bajan, invited for two showings at the MOJA Festival. Exactly the kind of carpentry work which seems so easy on plan and on drawing but proves to be a challenge when you don’t understand set-design terminology. My luck is that we know Tom, a professional movie sets builder! He came by to give me a quick explanation of what meant what.

Now, after a week of commitment, it is done. The screens have been delivered. And I exhausted myself! It’s time to recover.

—–

This morning Gwylène and I had an argument about the way she was signing a quick note to the members of her TINYisPOWERFUL work group, ‘Tiny Investigations’.

The note was an invitation to come to the Dock Street Theater for Yankee Bajan!

I insisted that the signing for this kind of notes, so obviously fitting the mission of TINYisPOWERFUL should bear its signature, one way or an other. It could be as discrete as  ‘Gwylène, a member of TINYisPOWERFUL’, or ‘Gwylène, for TINYisPOWERFUL’ … whatever, as long as the word TINYisPOWERFUL appears at some strategic place in the note!

More importantly, this incident, reminded me of what happened at the Creative Sync of Tuesday morning (my only break from the Yankee Bajan set construction this week!). Rayn (they) had decided not to come in person to a public Rhizome organized by ROOTS at the occasion of the play at Moja. It was taking place at the same time they (Rayn) had a virtual meeting with one of the three young men who came here the other day, and who could well become an important addition to the present TINYisPOWERFUL group. I expressed my surprise that Rayn, as assistant of Victoria, would see a conflict there. In my mind, there was no question whether Rayn would invite him to come along to the ROOTS meeting, in sync with their own meeting with him. Pam got a bit mad, I think, that I was barging in Rayn’s personal life choices!

So, today, after the heated conversation with Gwylène, and after a quick but deep thinking bout, I came up with this resolution, important I think:

As a member of TINYisPOWERFUL, dedicated to its mission and values, I am not here to weigh in on the autonomy of any member of the collective. It is the Mission and values of the collective that weigh in on my autonomy and prompt me to speak my mind. And I add that this defines my understanding of what is referred to as ACCOUNTABILITY.

Accountability has always been, for me, a difficult notion to understand and to handle  because, too often, it is thrown around as a way to distance oneself from a responsibility, as in “(S)He is accountable …this is not my problem.” For Pam though, it is not a notion. Based on reciprocity, it is a contract to be honored. Maybe an unwritten contract but, in a collective like TINYisPOWERFUL, its unwritten quality gives it the weight of reciprocity and the credibility of autonomy.

My feeling obligated to elaborate on accountability is proof of both, my unease and my determination. I strongly sense that all questions around accountability – that is social responsibility, reciprocity and (personal) autonomy – are pivotal at a time when our post-colonial hopes are threatened by a new wave of domestic neocolonialism! The same way colonialism is characterized by the permanent ‘control mode’ of an authoritarian minority, post-colonialism means the liberation of individuals into autonomous, politically and socially responsible citizens. The transformative force behind such a change will root accountability!

—–

Democratic socialism may be the regime we are looking for! Thank you Sanders, AOC and – in France – Ruffin or Rousseau … since, apparently, Mélenchon is now ‘old school’, too authoritarian for the moment. But it is true that, if democratic socialism there will be, it will require mega accountability! A blast of transparency, for citizens to know where they are, where they are going, who they are dealing with.

—–

Yesterday, there was a ‘I Like my Tea Sweet’ OhmRadio podcast with Victoria, Rayn and a guest,  Daniel Green, the young Charleston video artist involve with the work at Montessori Elementary. Interesting dialogue all the way through but I believe the last three minutes were a highlight. Victoria asked Daniel to come up with ‘an opening question’ for the new guest next week. He did not have to think too long. His question came out like this: I like to take an Adam and Eve perspective on things sometimes. Well, in an Adam an Eve perspective, before colonialism, what would have been the definition of ‘success’?

My own immediate answer was: the conquest of accountability! And, within the perspective of TINYisPOWERFUL’s values and mission … this makes a lot of sense!

PS: accountability does not necessarily mean punishment in case of failure. Punishment is recessive. And likely violent. Shame?