09-01-2025
Gorz is such a synthetic thinker and dedicated journalist. Reading his very detailed biography by Willy Gianinazzi situates him at the center of many of the intellectual streams crisscrossing France and the whole world between the nineteen fifties and the
early twenty first century, in a field which has defined most of the sociopolitical movements of the time: labour, the meaning of work, the energy it requires, the stresses it generates, all factors which take away from what living the full life of a citizen, a parent or a friend means.
Of course, younger generations have not been quite as brainwashed by ideologies from marxism to liberalism. But today, they are taking the full consequences of the Trump backlash in the face and they resent it! During the covid 19 epidemic, they have seen what virtual media can accomplish and may not quite yet believe that nothing can replace the in-person mode. But what can they do about it? They can either choose, if they have access to transportation, public or not, to get to a meeting point, or organize meetings in their vicinity, or co-transportation system or even service. Whatever is at all possible to rekindle our collective trust in each other. Because the biggest risk there is for human beings is to forget that there is nothing they can do by themselves but, also, that there is nothing they cannot do together. At this moment, I would not even mind partial and temporary atomization of society if I knew that it would bring more autonomy, as long as it is understood that this autonomy is sustainable only in a process of socialization and a context of reciprocity. Then, atomization would mean self-care, a need for solitude short of pathological loneliness, concentration, more reading time, mental rest … Expanding further it may also mean more time for family and/or friends.
I am trying to use a simple language. Much simpler than that of Gorz or his biographer, who would speak of autogenous activities, heterogenous circumstances, capitalistic productivity or marxist stakhanovism… But we are talking about the same thing: promoting the human in each of us instead of the laborer in us: the manufacturer of value, more value
09-09-2023
Yesterday, I went back to the 07-21-2025 page of the journal. I thought I could make a Zine from the content of its last segment, which displays the image of an Amazonian native caring for both a child and a monkey. At the time, I called this “Reciprocal Dependency”. As I was proceeding, I started editing the original text and kept changing words, the order of words, everything! So much so that there was no more return! Fine! It made me realize that this metamorphosis may bring me closer to the Neruda-like ‘Cante General’ format I dreamt of a long ago for this journal!
Below is what I ended up with. A dialogue between a master and his servant, inspired, I suppose, by Diderot’s final book: Jacques le Fataliste. I read it some 50 or 60 years ago and never forgot it.
. Sir, do you suppose this man is from the Amazon?
– Taking care of a child, isn’t he!
. And … what is that?
– Around his neck?
. Yes ….. A monkey?
– So – here is a man from the Amazon, domestic enough to share the babysitting AND what …?
. Say it – sir! And smart enough to also love and be loved by a primate, sir – the color of his hair, sir!
– You don’t believe this could be a fashion statement do you?
. Possibly, sir. And, may I say, an artistic statement!
– Also?
.Yes, but why has anthropology – you taught it to me, sir – been so slow to state that wisdom owes nothing to development – sir?
– Please man, where is this whole degrowth propaganda going to take us?
. Sir? …… But – where extractivism or the A bomb will, of course.
– You mean – the caves?
. I mean the caves.
—–
And then there was this ArchDaily entry of September 7:
The Subversive Design of Lina Bo Bardi & Aldo van Eyck.
The cover picture for the article, immediately, caught my attention. In spirit, it was very close to “a Tale for Reparations”. A large outdoor space. It is softly delineated on three sides by greenery, the forth side by a glass parallelepiped lifted off the ground as to liberate it further towards a wooded area. It is also sprinkled with what looks like play islands for children. I count eight or nine of them, with ample areas separating them. Also, as if escaped from the ensemble, a very formal diamond-shaped flowerbed hedged with low shrubbery, seems to float away!
A closer look and some quick research tells me that I am looking at a watercolor pencil drawing by Lea Bo Bardi: a preliminary study for what she calls ‘Practicable Sculptures for the Belvedere at Museu Arte Trianon, 1968’. I further discover that the building on the drawing is what became the Sao Paulo Museum of Art, minus the playground & garden unfortunately, smack in the middle of high rises and blacktop streets!
‘A Tale for Reparations’ will need an indoor space. However, I see its 13 or 14 stations as play islands for adults. Sculptures for thoughts. The space separating them – as ample as the show room will permit – is for the expansion of the mind. Because, in my wildest dream, every detail of every individual piece is a clue to what the silence of the work suggests. Adults will be like children on a playground, running from one station to the next, as their imagination rushes into adventurous discoveries, wild pursuits, perceived friends and foes, rallying cries, cavalcades and such … Like children, their mind will rush to unexpected conclusions, open up to unexplored conjunctions, I mean, more modestly, be puzzled by the juxtaposed pieces of a mental jungle … out of which … if anything, the anxiety of the times, the abuses of totalitarianism, the violence forced on us all … will for a second be soothed, first sip of a cooling drink, but not last. That is the secret. The same way children build their unlimited future on their playground, adults should see art as a source of unlimited dreams for their shrinking future.
What Lina Bo Bardi’s rendering really does for me is to reopen the pandora box that youth is. From reading Tintin at age 10 to decyphering la Carte du Tendre at age 16.
The fascination for Fairy Tales, their function in youth, middle age and old age. Different
for each but always relieving the mind from daily fatigue and kindling ever new fires of the soul.
la carte du tendre et le pastoralisme dans le brutalisme! ou le minimalisme …
09-15-2025
Back from a trip to Atlanta for passport renewal matters, which required that I be in person at the French consulate.
We had the opportunity to visit the Warehouse (museum), a rather new place in Atlanta, which shows more than 400 pieces, all within the art/architecture/home paradigm. Gwylène had requested an appointment with the director to present the lot of artworks we have done around it. She had not received any answer yet. We decided we might as well go visit the place when in town. Good thing! The collection is spectacular. All pieces are of quality and some are unique. There is a typical Armajani, an Acconci and some other favorites. The best piece to me, though, lies across the street from the museum: an immense old-fashioned cemetery. Vast, green field on the side of a steep hill sprinkled with a few tombstones barely visible in the grass and two small fruit trees right in the center. I had not remarked it on the way in. But now, here it was, framed between two huge oak trees in the foreground! When the man at the door thanked me for coming I laughed: ” … the best show I have seen in a long time. But exhausting for an old man’, I said. And, pointing to the cemetery: “I feel closer to that house there, than to any inside”. “So do I”, responded an older woman standing there. We all chuckled. I left, crossed the street and took some pictures. In fact this landscape was so close, in feeling, to an English 18th century painting Gwylène had given me a postcard of, long, so long ago! I still remember asking her to analyze it formally, for it was both so natural and so staged. So intriguingly, innocently academic, (forgetting how staged, fantasized, nature was then. So nicely tamed)! I had laughed then and was laughing now, faced with its twin! Again in my mind, an episode relating so very much with ‘a Tale” and the way I have chosen to approach representation this time. A blend of innocence and intrigue. A translation from a 2-D, rather literary, linear concept, to a non-verbal 3-D installation.
—–
As soon as we got home we ate a quick news-watching dinner and found a rich Mediapart conversation between Edwy Plenel and anthropologist/historian/medical doctor Didier Fassin, professor at the Collège de France, teaching on ‘Moral and political issues in contemporary societies’. Also professor at Princetown U, he just wrote a new book about homicide, genocide, feminicide and rape, from imperial to civil wars and from state crimes to domestic violence. Name of the book; Leçons de Ténèbres, which I translate to: Lessons in Darkness. No fun for sure but the man is so soft spoken and thoughtful. To give even more solemnity to the event, the interview was taking place at the ‘Musée du Monde Arabe’ (Museum of the Arab World), at the occasion of its present show: Treasures saved from Gaza.
I took some notes but, more importantly, when the time came, I went to bed thinking and woke up this morning with a clearer understanding of how colonizers always justify their violence by the retarded humanity of the colonized: primitive, savage, often cannibal, godless, always ignorant … and how, again today, they claim: ‘the others’ are barbarians, so let’s ourselves be barbaric against them, to save our civilization!
An other thought had already been noted in this very journal, concerning the October 7 tragedy. The quote below is from 8the 03-31-2024 entry. It was coming from Jean Améry, a French philosopher, who writes:
“The violence of the oppressed is a call for dignity. It opens the way to a historic and humane future …“
“The violence of the oppressed was not the same as the violence of the oppressor because it was a violence which attempted to create something different, an opening to a liberated world.”
‘Liberated’, the word recurs like a poignant leitmotiv.
And remember …
Liberation is the ultimate goal of any collective resistance to oppression.
09-16-025
This county is in turmoil.
As every Tuesday morning, there is a Creative Sync.
But today, something unexpected happened.
Rayn asked that, as of now, one of the Tuesday syncs be
IN PERSON once a month. And she added:
This is only to start the process …
Our goal should be to have three
IN PERSON meetings per month.
Well Rayn, on your way to Damascus, you must have fallen off your horse, Rayn!
And then we went on …
To something else!
I call this a revelation, a moment of enlightenment.
TINY’s got to be POWERFUL, no?
‘Makes me wonder: is it in such times [of turmoil] that everything is possible?
Like finding a space for the coming Community Lab!
9-17-2025
We will not give up.
At this moment, Gwylène, Victoria, Pam are meeting with the Donnelly Foundation in the hope for extended funding next year. We cannot expect to be able to pay even a part-time salary but any incoming money is necessary and welcome.
I do not participate in these meetings. I always feel that the old white man in a room full of women is only too clear a reminder of the historical ills of male domination!
—–
Looking at my notes, from Atlanta a few days ago till right now. I realize how traveling stimulates the mind. As if, liberated from its routine, it was free to cast a net in the short memory pool, to catch disparate bits and attach them to former inquiries, for enlightenment!
. From listening to Didier Fassin:
… the absence of violence from Palestinian people (people) against their torturer, their own dignity thus preserved, tells us that (here he quotes German historian Reinhart Koselleck) where the victor brings violence to history, it is the defeated who supplies it with a wealth of knowledge.
. Here I took down a quote from Simone Weil, (my translation, as usual):
– do not admire force
– do not hate your enemy
– do not hold the poor in contempt
and she adds: … I doubt this will happen very soon …
09-19-2025
Yesterday afternoon, after a morning without Kela, who usually comes to the studio on Thursday to work with me on her projects, I gathered the notes scribled earlier for an article in the coming TINYisPOWERFUL NewsLetter. I had no idea it would come to the text below, which might as well be a revised mission statement for the collective! Of course, it would have to be revised and approved. I believe, however, that, since it is time to update mission as well as vision, I have found a way to ram most of our thinking in a short enough text.
I can see the influence my latest readings of Simone Weil and André Gorz are having, not necessarily on the content but in the wording of ideas. Words I would not have used before but that gained meaning, and with whom I am now familiar, like heteronomy, productivism, the rationalization of time, even dissociation. I have used dissociation many times before. Now, thanks to Weil’s militancy around what factory work does to the mind or Gorz’s life dedication to the quality of life of laborers, to their quest for more free time, more autonomous activities and the preservation of the (their) environment, I can better articulate how, together, these demands partake in the coherence of humane living. Neglecting either one does trigger a psychological dissociation and all its negative consequences.
Indeed, today, the global struggle between castes shows how the billionaire caste is intent on controlling all aspects of future life: work, leisure and the environment. The infinite diversity of civil society, of world youth in particular, is a tool – an art tool – sharp enough to resist the global formatting going on, from mass media to AI. That is where it is one thing to be TINY. It is another to be an infinity of diverse TINYs!
My next business card!
__________________________________________________________________
TINYisPOWERFUL
TINY + TINY + TINY + TINY + TINY + TINY + TINY …… is ……. POWERFUL
TINYisPOWERFUL.org
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Now, here is the text I was referring to earlier:
Why is TINY POWERFUL?
Because, in the age of financial gigantism, praising the virtues of TINY-ness means defending 80% of the people in America against formatting. This is POWERFUL.
Workers – Very few of us object to having to work for a living. Actually work is also a mode of self-accomplishment. What is needed, though is that work remain a form of accomplishment.
Under the present regime of productivism, factory work is still a matter of cadence, rhythm, sustained output. So is office work. This translates into physical fatigue and mental dissociation. Work is not a rewarding activity although it is the only way to receive a salary.
Educators – They constantly need to stimulate the interest of their students for learning. For that, they need to innovate in the classroom but, they face the impossible task of putting their creativity in check. Many are now giving up.
Creatives -Today, you have to be a successful creative to hope to make your own American dream possible. But also at a cost called ‘concessions to the system’. If you desire to share in the privileges of good money, there is a level of conformity you must achieve, which may partly snuff out some of your dream.
Artists – Whoever makes their labor creative or manages to save free time to be creative is an artist. Those who make it a goal to live off their art is a professional artist and may encounter the self-inflicted necessity of producing enough art to become an art worker! They may have to submit to minimum outputs to satisfy their market. Some consider this to be a concession to their freedom to imagine.
As for creative artists/educators, what is at stakes? This is where TINYisPOWERFUL makes its difference. We claim to be IN/WITH COMMUNITY ARTISTS. Knowing about the heteronomy of rationalized work, we have chosen to be beacons of autonomy. Meaning, in our case, that, in our work, we thrive to understand, to reflect on and propose alternative ways – for the communities we do art in and with and their individual members – to resist productivism, affirm their autonomy within the collective and develop their holistic way to respect the humanity in themselves and others, organize a culture of care, defend the environment and develop the level of wisdom necessary to counter the violence of today.
Yes, TINYisPOWERFUL!
__________________________________________________________________
TINYisPOWERFUL
TINY + TINY + TINY + TINY + TINY + TINY + TINY …… is ……. POWERFUL TINYisPOWERFUL.org
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09-24-2025
I just cancelled yesterday’s entry.
However, as I read it over after last night’s illuminations, it all makes sense.
Yes, last night, reading Christina Wiener’s Undiscovered, a 2022 novel, I had an illumination.
Wiener is a citizen of Peru living in Spain, like many South-American artists who have chosen to live in Spain and better confront, confound and crush the remnants of the historic colonial culture their people still face across the Ocean. Beside their aggressive, unrestricted and often over-the-top language, I highly appreciate the way their discourse develops in the books I have read by them. The realism and the contemporaneity of their narratives clashes brilliantly with the humus of respectability spread over colonial history and contrasts, not only with their own aspirations but, very directly, with their way of life. It is civilized contrivance versus unapologetic liberation!
This is where I understand EcoFeminism to bloom.
The illumination, then? It comes from Wiener, encouraging her readers to get better informed and go look up other artists. Like Lucrecia Masson, Yos Pina, Francisco Godoy or Daniela Ortiz.
Ortiz is the only one I could see enough work by. And she is the one who blew my mind! One 3D piece of hers is so very close in spirit to the Sedan Chair I built for “a Tale for Reparations”! So many details identical! Instantly the whole narrative unrolled before my mind’s eyes. Indeed, in the piece I saw, Ortiz’s visual vocabulary evolves around the same imagery, the same archetypes. I am an old student of Carl Jung. The making of the installation had been a search for archetypes. By that I mean that every gesture or detail chosen in the installation is the manifestation of a universal idea, usually silent in the collective unconscious, and that surfaces, culturally interpreted, in dreams, stories, tales, legends, art pieces and such, and is symbolic of a disposition, a thought, a belief … In turn, symbols are the form said disposition, thought or belief come out as representation. Representations, for me, are the actualized, contextualized, updated manifestations of archetypes. This would explain the slow development of ‘a Tale’ and the change of name it went through regularly, as if responding to the psychology, the circumstances , the dynamics of the moment. From “a Tale of Charleston” to “a Tale for Reparations” the work was a reflexion of my early enthusiasm for making art with Morgan, then Morgan and Arianne. When it became obvious that we would not, together and with ease, walk the common grounds of depth psychology, I decided to go it alone. For sure the work went on, but ever more slowly, as every new choice of a forward step was faced with a growing number of variables, formal choices and circumstances it had to stay congruent with. I learned a lot. My creative spirit kept its autonomy through research and the writing of the Journal. Critical distance is also an element of subjective reality. I call this ‘grounding’.
However difficult and contradictory the process, I consider it to be one of the archetypal modes of in/with community art creation. As far as my own experience, it has gotten me to write a Journal, which, in turn, has forced me to do more research, in more directions and has put me in the shoes of an author who has to know his/her subject before writing about it! The great virtue of this being to debunk the myth around the role of unfettered freedom in artistic creation. Artists, like scientists, woodworkers or cooks, are accountable to objective and subjective realities which keep them …sane and dependable? Creativity is not folly.
09-25-2025
I just brushed over the French word ‘post-cartesianisme’. In English, my wild guess is: post-cartesianism! The flyover was quick by necessity: Kela, with whom I work in the studio on Thursdays, was on her way here. So quick that I cannot locate the quote anymore, but not quick enough that it would have escaped my attention. For it reminded me of Gabriela Wiener’s sense of the body, exasperated so that it behaves as a transponder between skin and mind. Her understanding of body, racialized, sexualized, exploited by men as it is, shunts off all the cognitive heritage of cartesianism. It is post-cartesian!
I am afraid post-cartesianism has become enemy #1 of Christian America. Or is it of American Christianity, depending on the entry point of the violence it activates? On whether you have been hit over the skull with a cross or a bludgeon.
By the way, post-cartesianism has nothing to do with the irrational. It is said that cartesianism is rational and that rationalism is the domain of men. What I believe is that the irrational is a ( post-cartesian) mental muscle, developed through the evolution of the human sort, as a defensive tool against male relentless exploitiveness, greed that is!
In the meantime … women ‘generate’ … lots and lots more!
09-25-2025
Today, I stand ready to admit that the whole constellation that ecofeminism is – from say … Vandana Shiva to Emilie Hache, (noted here on 4-10-2024) and all the Gabriela Wiener(s) around – my most extended inspirer these days. Such a great equalizer is the discrete but real inspirer for “a Tale of Charleston”, that became “a Tale for Reparations”. The former was very tame before it shed all its skins of formal expectability and relied so much on the deep unconscious for meaning and integrity. The latter built on these acquisitions. It has also been greatly enriched by the way my consciousness fully embraces the fundamentally political nature of my relationship with the in/with community art work produced by each ever-changing incarnation of the collective Gwylène and I have partly initiated and belonged to, from the “Future is on the Table” till TINYisPOWERFUL.
—–
A timely note: the other Gabriela, Gabriela Cabezon Camara just wrote a new book:
original Spanish title: Las niñas del narangel
in French: Les griffes de la fôret
in English: We are Green and Trembling