03-03-2024
This Diary is being neglected?
No, I am slowly realizing that I cannot do three, or even two things at the same time! With the same heart.
After accepting to build Bill’s kitchen, I wondered if could still manage large sheets of plywood alone. I was not sure. I called Saleha to see if she would like to work with me. She had proposed to help before. She said yes. This will be a new experience in collaboration, this time with a friend. Gwylène and I have known her and Bashar, for quite a few years. She is originally from Algeria. We share a culture: the French culture which she lived on the colonized side. It was so instructive to realize together that the colonial experience, clearly, carried an almost zero level of reciprocity! Meaning that although there is French in her, there is no Algerian in me, except my own instinctive empathy – not shared much, in France, these days – made of humanity and guilt. Not a passive guilt bringing about condescendence but an active one calling for reciprocity and reparations. This is actually my usual stance with people I feel in solidarity with, in our present times of violent discrimination and apartheid. Makes me cry.
Whatever! Saleha and I are learning to work together and together we are getting there.
—–
I am not forgetting TINYisPOWERFUL in the shuffle though. Just silently moving the work forward, but at a slower pace than, say, a month ago …
And anxiously following developments in the world. They are loud and dangerous and they remind me that it is, in such contexts, one must attend to one’s values, visions and ART; produce work which speaks of hope, strength, solidarity, care.
—–
This project for Bill gives me the opportunity to revisit my sense of nature as well. Everything vegetal! Plant motifs reappear in my furniture work! Right now, when it comes to door design and opening devises, I cannot but come up with almost sensual lines, curves, leaf-shaped cutouts which, clearly, speak of natural rest and peace! Funny how design, even applied to kitchen design, can and must promote the artist’s deepest imaginaries … which go so much further than superficial gimmicks or trendy choices.
03-04-2024
This morning, on an early edition of the Guardian, I read how the CEO of Exxon blames the pubic for the destruction of the planet: the PUBLIC is not willing to pay the price for a livable planet, he denounced! How the assassin blames the victim!
This incredibly abusive, yet very common, declaration by a powerful corporate CEO brought the word DECENCY to mind. At the breakfast table, I kept very silent. Gwylène was sitting across from me. Usually we organize our day, we talk about last night’s reading, we start the day on an hopefully energized mode. Today, in my head though, I was wandering why such lies keep me stunned, about to be sucked in an abyss of doubt, if I don’t quickly inhale a strong dose of reality. I take a long walk or stay in the studio all day. I could have embarked on a rant that only aggravates the tension. Today, I decided to add DECENCY to the TINYisPOWERFUL Lexicon and then, to our daily vocabulary!
I know, it is an old-fashioned word. One Biden would use, I believe. But so what? It is not the word DECENCY that cheats, it is the cheater. It is a matter of framing it differently, giving it a renewed relevance. Let the younger generations run with it and see how they carry it, practice it, push it into the public. It fits very well with social justice, equity and access, reciprocity … and with the vocabulary suggestive of civic behavior, honest practices …
Biden? Who said Biden? His present INDECENCY is total. His gifts to Israel. The 2000 pounds bombs. The pulverization of Palestine. How the super-charged power of lobbies, their money, their perversion, corruption, total and in plain sight, intoxicate ordinary speech. The individual and collective responsibilities of most elected officials, is acted! Those who should stand for the universal rights of their people, of all people, for universal equity and access are actively guilty. No excuse, no exception, as Biden would say! Who, again?
03-09-2024
And when it rains it pours!
From last night on:
– a phone call from Yves, in France, telling us about an assault Heloïse was victim of, by the best friend of her boss, a French LFI congressman. When she reported to him what had happened, he chose sides immediately. At the first occasion, he denigrated her in front of a group of visitors she was guiding a tour for. Heloïse had so far been considered a model apprentice, dedicated to the work she loved. She had been betrayed. Obviously, now, she is devastated and has already decided to change direction in her studies. From civic engagement to … orthophony. Her choice, the world’s loss. An other young woman deterred from joining the cohorts of smart and dedicated activists France needs very badly.
– the early morning interview, on Terry Gross’ program, of a trans person who wrote a book about their transition, described in such deeply humane, real, approachable words. Their intense, constant, step by step, affirmation of self, they said. ‘A liberation which keeps giving’.
A gender-swapping photo app helped Lucy Sante to come out as trans at age 67. In 2021, Sante, who was declared a male at birth, was playing around with a face- altering app when she had a breakthrough. Her new memoir is I Heard Her Call My Name. I should buy this book, since I really believe that, just as in the case of Heloïse, it is the male domination which is put into question, challenged, accused. To be defeated.
– Yesterday, with Saleha, our friend who assists me in building a kitchen, we hit a wall! During a rare break I asked her if she had listened to Biden’s State of the Nation speech. She had not. I ventured to say that I was shocked by the total polarization of Congress which, in this case, meant that Republicans had not applauded one single line in the speech! What could have Biden been applauded for, she asked? He has not done anything he had promised he would do and he supports Israel’s killing of Palestinians. Then she added: at least, Trump does what he says he will!
I was flabbergasted! How could Saleha condemn Biden for tolerating Israeli’s violence and accept Trump’s constant bullying, threatening, denigrating, insulting arabs, Islam, and defending Israeli violence as well? Saleha, please. And … what to make of the denial of his 2020 electoral defeat and all its implications? Doesn’t this represent major violence, symbolic and real?
03-13-2024
Monde Diplomatique, February 2024. An article surveys the status of foreign-educated doctors in France, in a period of very acute medical personnel shortage. One quote illustrates how protecting the interests and privileges of one class, in this case the French medical corps, prevails over the need for more doctors to provide the general population of France with good medical care.
The shortage of doctors, in France is an old problem. Since 1968 the government has loosened its quotas, made medical studies more and more accessible. It has also opened its borders to foreign doctors and accepted returning French medical students with a foreign diploma, provided that they all be tested and certified by French authorities. However equal in knowledge, foreign docs may not be equal in matters of location, salary, leave ! These are privileges not rights, in the land of the 1789 Revolution.
To me, this is ordinary class discrimination. Because the medical profession is a class which believes that privilege shared is privilege lost. One of my favorite litanies!
03-19-2024
Omari is here tonight. The three of us are having a conversation about ROOTS and the departure of Michelle Ramos as executive director. Not that the politics and the organizational part of ROOTS interest me particularly, but, as we are talking, I realize that, at ROOTS Camp for example, most of the interactions between members and staff revolve around management and internal politics. On the other hand, in contrast, I also realize that most of the Charleston Rhizome’s activities have always revolved and gelled around art projects. Of course these also require a lot of organizing, management, internal politics (?), but we always instinctually sense the danger of losing the art for the sake of the administrating. I believe that is why we have never had membership drives and never been tempted to become a membership group. We are still a loose collective of whoever participates at the moment. In fact, this informal, organic mode has generated forever-ties between people who, otherwise, had no particular social attractions.
—–
My thinking, now, brings me to a quasi-humoresque proposition which, instead of saying: let’s be intentional about this or that, infers: let’s be artistic about this or that!
And see what difference it makes. Then report back to Aimée, ROOTS membership coordinator, and consider the difference it makes to be more artistic and less intentional. Because, this is what I was trying to tell her (Aimée) the last time she came here to witness the Charleston Rhizome of Alternate Roots in action!
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…. Now it is 1:18 AM. I have relieved my mind with some reading and writing! I am going to go back to bed, not worriless but less worried …. because yet an other question arises: doesn’t the legal status most art organizations choose to operate under, namely not-for-profit, force them into intentionality instead of creativity? I can only hope that their administrative skills will be challenged and transformed under the spell of art and the spirit of the arts.
Good night.
03-20-2024
Yesterday, at the Creative Sync, I asked Victoria when the next NewsLetter was coming out. How many weeks did I have to write the paper I had promised? I chose a topic now: a deeper investigation of the questions raised by yesterday’s last entry.
This morning again, these questions recur as if I had been cogitating all night: difference between the intentional and the autonomic? – relationship between behaviorism and intentionality? Of course I am not a philosopher. Of course I throw around words I do not master. But here I am more like a dog shaking flees off its fleece than a thinker demonstrating brain power! My purpose is the liberation of the mind (as in ‘free at last’), not an other contrivance (as in gimmick).
As a tool for knowledge, art, very specifically art in/with community, [the practice of the arts, the spirit of the arts, the spreading of the spirit of the arts] … aught not to promote self-importance, individualism, competition, profitability, exploitation, dissociation, can I say … violence … or comfort!
Nor does this diary.
Art and this diary, both, rather propose a way to co-write what Mahmoud Darwich would have called ‘the Journal of an ordinary joy’ !
03-21-2024
This is really why I am writing this diary! A diary of ordinary joy, relating the events of very ordinary days filled with extraordinarily unexpected events where the inventiveness from art supersedes the ordinary puritanism of intentionality.
Of course, again, who says that
Intentionality is puritanical?
I do
When I observe how
It implies controlled choices towards controlled outcomes,
Efficacy.
I am not sure how
A technology of progress,
In a productivist system,
Can generate
Secure
Breezing room for ordinary joy.
03-22-2024
Days come and go.
So do moods ebb and flow.
When I watched the PBS NewsHour, last evening, the daily segment on the Netanyahu slaughter of Palestinians exposed me to unacceptable hospital scenes, total urban pulverization and a commentary clearly unable to match the bluntness of the images. That night was punctuated with dreams of Gwylène and I foraging a wide open space, in what could be a very sparsely built city, somewhere in a flat, dusty landscape, with very few passers-by or cars … Could this have been ebullient Gaza, pre first Nakba? Or could it be Gaza in twenty years? A low-density strip of dry land, carved with wide and pot-holed dirt roads in a grid pattern, and hardly any vegetation. A landscape between a South Sudan refugee camp and a settlement in the Kolima.
However the gloom, in the dream, we both were like happy children chasing butterflies . Gwylène on some kind of an electric two-wheeler and I on my two-of-four limbs, having the fun of our life. What could excuse this disconnect but my present fixation on a daily slice of ordinary joy, to be had and kept, anywhere, at any cost, even if it means denial?
Presently, it surely means survival.
Here we are then, worried but not distraught, still hopeful.
03-23-2024
And this morning, serendipitously, who appears on the computer screen? Michelle Alexander and her Revolutionary Love, in a conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. I do not know her as well as I do an other remarkable woman: bell hooks. But … when Alexander quotes hooks … that’s all it takes to enable me to clearly draw the full profile of the TINYisPOWERFUL effort, from education (hooks) to equity (Alexander). Why my reluctance to use the word love? For fear of it being abused? No! Follow its meaning when, from a cultural notion, it becomes a universal tool for liberation and transformation. Is it possible that love, soon, be traded as a commodity, a renewable commodity, on an open market of goodwill and peace?
When Amy Goodman, during her interview of Michelle Alexander, showed part of Martin Luther King’s last Viet-Nam speech, I remember Marcus preferring MLK to John Lewis as the carrier of TINYisPOWERFUL’s message of public awareness, civic participation, and voting. Speaking of which, voting could become the basis for a common project with …….. a potential partnering group we met at our latest Question/Relay session, dedicated to election participation.
03-26-2024
With Saleha, we are making great progress in the construction of my latest furniture commission: a small but very dense, intense kitchen! The choice by Bill, the client, of a “plant motif” throughout the project reminded me that, it takes applying all one’s talent, knowledge, efforts and time for an art and/or design project to become meaningful beyond conventions. Almost anecdotally, after I reported the “plant motif” phrase to Gwylène, I added that now, it is beyond being a plain plant motif, it is also an ode to nature, in a kitchen! And indeed, when I went back to the studio later on, to check on the work of the day, it was an ode to nature! I believe I had reached beyond form and content, and was closer to an aesthetic statement. I had chosen, instead of door or drawer knobs, to cut out gingko leave-shaped apertures and to connect them with long, vine-like shoots, both carved directly in the wood surface or defining the silhouette of doors.
This choice was bringing a poetic dimension to the project. And the visual analogy was an affirmation of the urgency to save nature, reaching all the way into Bill’s kitchen! I am sure it is actually what he intended it to mean.
I believe that, in the age of inevitable, multi-layered interconnections, whoever does not coordinate their values, their intents and their actions with the production of their work, participates in the disintegration of this world on the verge of self-destruction.
This is a statement of “moral engagement”! What else is there beyond the necessity, the individual responsibility to participate in our collective survival?
03-27-2024
Franz Fanon is the subject of a new biography by American writer Adam Shatz. I saw a long interview of him yesterday and I appreciated his quiet self-assurance. The question of colonial violence and of indigenous counter-violence as counter-poison is a central topic in this unresolved conflict, he says.
This gets me spinning … Of course I better be careful with my desire to advocate for non-violence before being able to articulate what it fully entails. I know, though, that Fanon saw and warned against the consequences of violence on the perpetrators of violence. His views apply to all perpetrators and their enablers, passive, or not so passive. Given the time history affords for all parties to make amend (or not), to repair (or not), to promote change (or not), what will permit long term transformation and, ultimately, liberation? Because,
Liberation is the ultimate goal of any collective resistance to oppression.
03-29-2024
Marcus has brought a new activist streak to TINYisPOWERFUL. I wonder whether he should, on a regular basis, bring the group up to date on the state of activism locally, nationally and … his choice. More than a calendar though. How about digging deeper, presenting the causes, their history and their political or social scene. Imagining an eventual space for the arts in the process?
Furthermore, I was wondering what it would mean for me to ask Marcus to hold me or others accountable for supporting Biden and the Democratic Party, when the president’s position on Palestine should make him a pariah to us … ‘Genocide Joe’, after all, is what Marcus and many others call him! That is not a phrase to use lightly.
Then I realized that, to ask a member of my own group, to hold me accountable for something reaching beyond the collective engagement of the group, represents a deliberate loss of members’ autonomy which borders on the cultic. Wouldn’t this mean the beginning of the end, for the TINYisPOWERFUL democracy, as it would open the doors to levels of dependency, (self)censorship, totalitarian-like auto-critique and, ultimately, tyranny?
Accountability is a deeper concept than that! Highly susceptible to the degree, the quality of engagement and autonomy of members, in a collective. I am asking myself these questions, not because I see any risk of the sort at TINYisPOWERFUL but I have always been bewildered by the power preachers, for example, or dictators, or manipulators of all sorts, can exercise over subjugated followers.
Actually, Marcus is the most understated activist I know! It is refreshing.
03-31-2024
Group meeting with Abriel, yesterday, for more than two hours. She makes so much sense. Yet, at the end of our long meeting, when it was time to leave, Victoria asked Gwylène and Pam, who had organized and facilitated the process, why we had not yet seen the work in progress our new artist resident was supposed to bring and open to questions. Then … surprise? Abriel had brought the beginnings of a small, unfinished painting! What an eye opener though! How far could this hesitant painting be from her deliberate speech! Here was the representation of a female character in her bathroom, checking herself in a mirror which returned the image of a faceless, anonymous spook. Such common imagery? An expression of self-doubt and vulnerability? Too early to tell but for sure nothing matching her verbal assertiveness.
Since, earlier on, she had named Salvador Dali as one of her favorite artists, a question immediately formed in my mind. I felt compelled to grab the circle’s attention and ask: What is it that Salvador Dali has shown you, about yourself, that you did not already know? No idea where from and how that question came out so quickly and so clearly! But I am still surprised with the way it compacted, in one sentence, my understanding of why art is not a therapy! An art piece, to be liberated from the clinical aspects of self-scrutiny, or self-representation should shine an unexpected light on the artist’s own vision of the world. If art and artists are explorers of the unconscious, the unimagined, the unimaginable, how can they be satisfied with clichés?
This morning, the experience with Abriel’s painting suggested this phrase to me:
“Les artistes n’arrêtent jamais de remettre en cause les visions que le monde a de lui-même”. In English: Artists never stop questioning the visions the world has of itself.
Of course, here, dubiously, ‘the world’ means the individuals it is made of!
—–
I see the news from Israel. In Jerusalem, massive opposition to the war :
Who will agonize through the death of representative democracy?
The people of Israel will, collectively.
This does not mean unanimously.
It means that – when facing the asymmetry of the war-like* assault on Palestine and the Israeli government’s indifference to its people’s dissent, since there is no representativity left in Israel,
an other mode of government is unavoidable …
short of collapse or revolution!
But both, the Israeli and the American people are so divided, their politics so polarized, that, stunned and paralyzed as they are, they can be manipulated ad nauseam.
And the Palestinian people?
Their Liberation is the ultimate goal of their collective resistance to oppression.
* I write ‘war-like’ because I do not believe that the present assault is a war, however asymmetrical. Maybe the murderous ride of Huns over the people of Palestine. Maybe a revenge mass killing. Or, if it is in fact a war, doesn’t it also require further qualifiers like ‘of extermination’,or ‘final’ (Netanyahu has used this one already, I believe). Impossible to nibble at the edges when naming such a relentless fury against an already oppressed civilian population. I leave it to more knowledgable writers to make yet an other undeniable, explicit difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, among other tropes. I also remember Hannah Arendt writing about the dangers inherent to the nation-state.
In his biography of Franz Fanon – ‘the Rebel’s Clinic’ – Shatz quotes French philosopher Jean Améry 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.
I remember …
Liberation is the ultimate goal of any collective resistance to oppression.