03-01-2026

Before we left Paris, for some reason, I entered the text below. It is a copy-and-paste from an earlier excerpt in the Journal. I have not taken the time to verify the original entry date but chose to make one or two edits. For sure a sign that I am pressed by time and concerned by the upcoming presentation of the Tale at Avery!

A Tale of Charleston – for Reparations

How an in/with community, intergenerational/interracial, grassroots art collective transformed a sculptor’s vision from minimalist to descriptive, memorial, archetypal, engaged. A bewildered transformation backed by a 1,400 page Journal, part timeline, part research, partially accessible to all on YouCominToo.org .

This 1,500sf installation of 12  3D stations, each representing actual tableaux or tale-like visual interpretations deals with the development of Charleston’s still segregating dominant culture.

Mixed media – mostly recycled materials.

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I am not looking for intellectual consistency. I am, on the contrary, seeking a way to introduce a visual vocabulary liberated from cultural mores and biases imposed by centuries of male domination in the arts and everywhere else.

I believe that my latest readings of Emilie Hache on Generation and Pinar Selek around her “forbidden research on the Kurdish resistance”, have given me pointers to further anchor the Tale in a direction that attempts to reconcile male and female humanity.

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As we were taking our first walk since returning from Paris, I asked Gwylène if she would accept my description of the Tale as an anti-masculinist piece of art. She did not object. Of course, she has been following the work from the start and does not feel like unexpectedly hit with such a heavy hammer! This has been a constant fight of mine for ever! As a matter of fact, this afternoon, Celeste visited us and, as our conversation was about child raising, she reminded me of something I threw at her when she was 12: “You are not getting your education to become someone else’s maid”. She is now 53 years old! She understands the implications. She is passing them on to her son.

Hache and Selek are two more bricks on the wall of resistance against

malehood.

Hache with her extremely deep and complex (too complex for me) research of Greek antiquity and its differentiation between creativism and (re)generation, where males are from the earth and females made of earth. Which makes all the difference in Greek mythology, as far as who is to order the world. Males of course, gods or not … Until, that is, Demeter and the Thermophoria, official rituals executed by women only, to celebrate publicly and overtly …”the importance of women, their irreplaceability concerning the power to give life … This festivity resulted in and affirmed their value within Greek society and, more generally within the world of the living. The identification of Earth with womanhood is at the heart of this ritual.” (John Winkler in ‘Laughter of the Oppressed’).

Unfortunately, Emilie Hache explains, it it precisely this identification of women with fertility which is a problem! Women are celebrated for being fertile but males reduce them to their fertility.

  Women

Celebrated – Trapped – Indispensable

          This has been and still is a quandary for the ages.

I believe!

Selek’s latest book, in French, is ‘Lever la Tête’. A hardly translatable French expression, an injunction for women to keep their head up.

She is a Turkey-born sociologist who took up the Kurdish struggles for autonomy and payed a price for it (1998): two and a half years in Erdogan’s cruel jails. She was exiled from her country and now lives in France. In her book, she explains how the Kurdish people, a more than forty million strong minority dispersed between Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and worldwide, has kept its powerful culture throughout. She talks about the treasure that the Kurdish culture is and how it has been saved from erasure by successive centralizing, authoritarian regimes thanks to powerful “… mechanisms of cultural and political reproduction, imbedded in the community …” not based on state schooling but on … the daily participation of children in the life of adults. Passing along of trades, daily commitments, language, history, literature, rituals : transmission of the treasure.” (Selek adds music to this list).

This organic structuring very much depends on the dedication of women, in such post-agricultural societies. They learn to resist State oppression to the point where they also resist their own authoritarian, male oriented inner politics!

They even resist marriage and push for the equality of the sexes.

           

Isn’t this their way to affirm their inevitability?

03-06-2026

For the last few days, Gwylène has shown her superb talent for organizing – mostly made of knowledge, persistence and courage.

She has put together, with Victoria and Rayn, a team of movers to get the Tale from my studio to Avery. Unfortunately, I can hardly lift any weight and surely not go up the two long flights of stairs it takes to reach the gallery rooms. It is the first time I have not fully participated in the moving of my own work! It is like a miracle! I appreciate not being indispensable!

This coming Monday though, I will be the one putting the work back together. It was long decided that ‘a Tale’, at Avery, would be integrated with other works by members of the collective. However, in my mind, in the near future, I would like to see this installation of mine in full, alone! In full because this time, some of the more abstract elements have not found the space they would need.

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I need to take up the topic of women again, their inevitability, their indispensability, in these times of blind brutality and vile inhumanity, imposed by blind, vile and inhuman brutes in the entire world. The fact is that they are mostly men and seem to target women and children as their favorite victims.

This makes sense only in a male-only environment turned fascistically scared of women.

Ecofeminists are, in my mind, at the forefront of the anti-fascist struggle. Their consistency in integrating the environment, climate change, the greening of cities (and country, at this point), social and economic justice …  to their political stands is also changing the world. To the point where one cannot dissociate feminist from anti-fascist causes. It is a fact and now, the trumps of this world are forced to also fight women. This will prove to be their downfall.

03-07-2026

Here is a picture I just saw, used as the headpiece for a March 3rd article by Eric Toussaint, titled: “The occidental hemisphere: a history of the United States,     shaped by war”.

There are hundreds of such images. This is the latest one to have appeared on my screen. An engraving from the early 19th century, so illustrative of what the slave trade was then, that I read it as a storyboard, almost a cartoon in its literal naivety, its literally transparent content, its shockingly unapologetic meaning.

Why do I show this obscene image then?               

          Because I wish

Walking through ‘a Tale of Charleston/for Reparations’

To be as illustrative as a storyboard.

To have the naivety of a cartoon,

Transparent in its literal content,

As genuinely restorative as

This here engraving is shockingly unapologetic.

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Besides, of course, I appreciate the serendipitous opportunity to join – in a moral clash – this picture of America’s historic reliance on violence with the benevolence of a French-born American, towards a people which – it is undeniable – made the fortune of slave traders and ‘the Occidental Hemisphere’ altogether.

***

Here I want to reiterate what I consider as the honor of a lifetime: to be invited with Gwylène, by Charleston’s AVERY RESEARCH CENTER FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, to present the IN/WITH COMMUNITY Art work we do within and with the collective we belong to: TINYisPOWERFUL.

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Why doesn’t the president celebrate the 250th every minute of this 2026 year?

I am afraid to know.

It may be that he does not intend for America to survive 2026.

—–

My thoughts go to Habermas, his death and questions about participative  democracy.

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Why wouldn’t art be what ‘the Irrational’ feeds on to strengthen the resistance to norms, to refuse heteronomy and – in these times of social atomization – to posit the centrality of socialization?

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Remembering my Political Science days and Grotius, who wondered whether international peace could be assured through diplomacy, the application of natural law or what he called just wars.

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Reading, in ‘le Monde Diplomatique’, an article by Lahouari Addi, about what Immanuel Kant foresaw as perpetual peace. As long, that is, as an international body like the UN has the perpetual authority to tame down the predatory nature of humans and to impose a modicum of morality!

Wouldn’t this combat between greed and moderation make Kant’s analysis yet an other binary?

It may be anathema to demean him so. How could I demean the work of a world luminary whose work I don’t know much about? For me, it is just an opportunity to bring up the directly related subject of representative democracy vs participative democracy. Both seek social peace and means to get there. Also, the topic is very much in the air since Habermas just died. He was a philosopher of democracy, participative democracy.

Participative democracy explodes the binary anyway, as it does not rely on individual representatives, with their individual flaws, but faces head-on the complexities of diversity, of the multitude of participants who, unlike representatives, are more apt to resist the formatting pressures of the State, of Capitalism and crowd behavior. Of corruption as well.

Habermas insists on the dangers of disenfranchisement of citizens and the overwhelming power of interest groups. Both have contributed to the present irrelevance of representative democracy.