01-06-2026

We flew, we landed, it snowed yesterday, Paris was taken by surprise and froze in place and now Gwylène is traveling by train to Frasnes where Delphine will pick her up for a new season of ice drawings! As for me, I am trying to stay warm at the studio. Temperature, today around 32º F. I am jumping into the Journal for new entries as well as editing of early ones, from the start of conNECKtedTOO.

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Yesterday, I discovered a remarkable Senegalese thinker: FELWINE SARR. He has developed a very clear and precise language to expose everything Africa has and still does offer to the world: its history, its wisdom, its contributions to approaching racism, identity, belonging, the archipelagic v the continental and more complex subjects which makes him a powerful, second generation  member of the Glissant school of thought. One of his titles particularly inspired me: “Habiter le monde”, “To inhabit the world”.

Among other words he defines in a very personal way, there is “la mutualité”, “Mutuality”, a state of sharing the world in a spirit of solidarity and reciprocity. Gwylène, in this word, also finds almost an injunction to see ourselves in others. A  systemic mode of socialization …in a world different from the present (I add).

As a matter of fact, Sarr is confident in the future, its new generations of eager young Africans.

If I noted it correctly, Sarr also wrote “Méditations africaines” and “Afrotopia”, his latest. Here is a quasi-quote of his: “To go across the world without yet believing that one is an incarnation of the good”. Tip-towing between wisdom, irony and the dream of a better tomorrow. I really appreciate this sharpness of mind. By the way, Sarr also teaches in the US. His English must be perfect and my trying to translate him could look presumptuous! But he impressed me so that I sent a note to Abriel and Ron about him and compared their traveling to his vision of inhabiting he world. I ended my message to them with: How is Alba nia? Because to stay in Albania is a way to inhabit the world!

Those two are on an initiation journey which may well change the course of their lives. It started with six months in Mexico. Then, after a short stop back in Charleston, they found Albania, looking for an affordable country where to spend the next six months! Abriel writes that what impresses her most is how “tranquil” it is there. Tranquility is a precious word, rarely used. She did. A serious family emergency is taking them back to Charleston, but they intend to go back as soon as possible.

01-07-2026

I must continue on editing Diary 22. Its name will change to Journal and make one with the more recent entries from July 2023 on. I think I have made a decision to trim 22 from its unnecessary content. From page 1 to 82 I spared it too much. I indulged in rewriting extraneously full passages, to make them a better read but also to strengthen their content. Because I believe that such micro-history needs to be kept, only if it projects an ever clearer sense of purpose and persistence. The pressure of events is on now to gather around values powerful enough to resist today’s universal State violence and the deliquescence of political elites everywhere.

The legitimacy of calling this work a Journal? I have already brought it up somewhere in earlier pages. But this here is a work of art belonging fully in the more multi-media Tale of Charleston/for Reparations. The final structure of the whole Tale is getting ever clearer in my mind as it loses the systematic binarity of visual v conceptual, sculpture v writing. Of course, this also is proof of my trust in the indivisibility of art practices as tools of knowledge, essential to constantly push away the abuses of cultural conservatism.

The pressure is on also with the upcoming Community Lab. My physical difficulties alone would be enough to wipe out of me any urge to put back together the pieces of sculpture stored away in the studio. I would find it too difficult! But within the conceptual scope of wholeness developed between sculpture, Journal and the growth of TINYisPOWERFUL, the effort becomes inevitable.

01-09-2026

Yesterday, Yves Gaudin came to visit. We had not seen each other last year.

Meaning that we had spent at least three or four years as long-distance friends.

And this was relatively successful! We had kept in touch via WhatsApp, a lifeline for impecunious poets like him. Well, yesterday, Yves offered me a copy of his Odes, written in the Island of “la Réunion”, East of Madagascar and that France still claims as its own.

Reading these poems made me discover a side of Yves’ work that I did not yet know. The way he integrates Creole and French words opens to a world of sound, color and savor which, itself, stimulated my imaginary, transported me in a hybrid land/human scape of peace and humor, where the local characters he evokes have embraced him as a friend, not an invader. They, with their language, have modeled his perceptions to a level of complicity, of cultural reciprocity. That, Art can accomplish!. Nothing short of a miracle in our times of ferocious discrimination. With his odes, Yves has made the global urge for human/land love an intimate reality. From there, everything may be possible.

When it comes to human/land love, I am pretty sure that our present ‘elites’, disastrous as they are, very well know what is happening. Their caste, also, knows the urge for human/land love but it believes that, like everything else, it can be bought and, therefore, belong to them only!

Thank you, Yves.

01-21-2026

Gwylène and I have been victims of a flu attack! Incapacitated for the last week or so. Yesterday was our first serious outing. We went shopping for warm clothes and walking shoes! This was the best opportunity possible to observe the unbelievable difference of attitude between French workers in large chainstores and in TINY Businesses. Day and night. Shockingly so.

Of course, this reenforces our understanding that the treatment of workers, in any enterprise, in any branch of industry or service, in any country possibly, reveals how severe the dissociation is, which pits labor and management, women and men, immigrants and nationals, poor and rich. This binary dichotomy is not an effect of weak analytical methodology. It is the universal consequence of the incredibly violent and negative impact of the abandonment of all moral sense by the political classes, entirely corrupted by greed and desperately power hungry.

01-23-2026

Last night, I found an other quote of Felwine Sarr, in his essay “Habiter le monde”. Again, translated by me, “To inhabit the world”:

An other way to inhabit the world would be to base it on the production of quality relationships … Our process of humanization remains unfinished. To pursue it in a perspective of increasing the quality of our humanity requires the renewal of all our relational imaginaries (private, interpersonal, political, social, economic).

The imaginary is a central function of the human psyche. It reveals the capacity of a group or an individual to represent the world, through image  associations which give it meaning. Human cultures create symbolic languages which let meaning sip into networks of images … We do not   have an immediate connection with the world. The imaginary, then, is a space for creativity in which humans envision the world around themselves and make contact with it … the way we elaborate a representation of the world is therefore crucial. This world will be different if we modify the representation we have of it.

A rather long quote. But which is worth a heap of circumvolutions. Felwine Sarr is a specialist of this, the articulation of creativity with human humanity. So much so that I am going to use his language, his words, to introduce the process I went through with ‘a Tale”, as a longterm 3-D art project as much as an inter-personal journey. As far as the inter-personal journey is concerned, I am not sure it is the small size of the collective, its intergenerational and inter-racial make up, or the fact that we had known each other and worked together before – with the difference that, at TINYs POWERFUL, Gwylène nor I claimed a leadership role – my mode of interference transformed me and, not the other way around. I did not attempt to transform, train or otherwise impose my ways of art making or thinking. I developed a live-sense of autonomy and reciprocity, giving the word I always hesitated to use my art in-with community – love that is – a full sense within the daily life of the collective. It mostly mean respect, trust, patience, spontaneity, association as opposed to dissociation (the discriminatory belief in white male superiority which invented slavery, the submission of women, supremacy, extractivism, the colonial order …), dissociation from the inter-dependency of man and nature.

One of the most maddening aspect of the authoritarian trend is its unchecked ARBITRARINESS.

01-25-2026

SAPERE AUDE. That is what I am waking up with this day.

I was reminded of this Latin quote Mr Burnouf, the Latin teacher, taught me in 1950 and some!

DARE TO THINK. Meaning, really, that when you think, it is not in a vacuum. You think along with others, whether you sense it or not, in a particular situation, which your thinking cannot ignore, and for a purpose larger than your own self!

Then it takes consciousness to think and share the thinking. Beware, it takes accountability as well.

That is where thinking meets arbitrariness.

Arbitrariness occurs when you think for others. Not with others. Acontextually.

By the way, Mr. Burnouf also taught etymology. The roots of words, which some philosophers justify lots of their work on, for good or muddy reasons! In the case of Burnouf, he would show students how the latin verb ‘sapere’ can be found in the French verb ‘savoir’ – in English words like ‘savvy’, ! Same demonstration for ‘aude’, In French, ‘oser’. In English, ‘audacious’ …. This little intro into etymology to say that this science has helped me understand that about half of the English vocabulary can be guessed or deducted from Latin … or French! So much for cultural insularism or language purity! Exceptionalism?

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For the last 2 hours, I have been listening to Wagner’s Walküren! As a matter of fact, at this moment, there is a break. I am going out to buy some Phô for dinner!

Gwylene too is taking a little family break with her sister. After all, it is Sunday, and both of us are feeling much better than a few days ago, in the middle of a bad flu attack.

When I come back, I will get into some editing of the 2018 diary!