10-02-2024 

Thinking hard about it, overstressed by the passive-submissive attitude of Biden vis-à-vis Netanyahu, I come to a very clear, very simple identification of the ultimate victim of this formidable violence: the world’s yearning for democracy. Meaning: the sense that democracy, as an ideal system of government, founded on the one man-one vote doctrine, has been terminally crushed. We know now that, as soon as it does not represent the people’s infinitely multiple voices, democracy is just a lure turned into a lie. A ‘Lurelie’! Attractive as Lorelei, and just as predatory!

where are the artists?

the world needs

a major injection of imaginings

the promotion of Art Research

Art as Research

a global campaign of Art Literacy

Art as Literacy

  otherwise –

as everything else

now –

  art may prove to be

– also –

A LURE TURNED INTO A LIE

No,

Not art!

As long as art will exist IN and WITH community, there will be hope!

That is Participatory democracy at work, folks.

Democracy? Or Barbarism?

The choice is ours.

 

10-05-2024

Thursday, I was invited to the TINYisPOWERFUL weekly podcast………….. —–

A concert of early 17th century chamber music. Period instruments? Inspired players? The appeasing voice of the she-singer? And a loving public?

What is the chemistry at work in this concert, to saturate my awakened-ness with as much nostalgia as hope? And such an optimistic vigor?

Yet, why can I but be haunted by the savage wars, civil, religious, feudal still, of such bitter and sweet times?

The crowd! An ovation ends the show. The crowd has just been served what the Arts have offered across centuries. All that good, all that hope, delivered, instilled, indelible – more potent yet than the blood of war.

 

10-06-2024

New Yorker Radio Hour: interview with Newt Gingrich. The man is shameless in his moral strabismus. His defense of Trump is proud and principled, an extreme example of adaptative pragmatism. It is shocking and deplorable that a smart guy – although he stutters when the journalist brings up the subject of principled consistency – feels free to turn coat when Trump turns coat, only because Trump, as an adaptative genius, cannot be wrong in this exercise.

And how to argue further, since Gingrich dares to utter, mezzo voce, that the man does what he says he will? Unlike the other guys, who lie over and over.

However, that is really where Gingrich’s argument collapses. Trump does what he says he will? Sort of. As he does on TV. On reality TV that is. Where he uses really abusive language, directed at really belittled, really despised participants. Everything else is fake!

 

10-09-2024

The other day, in a Monde Diplomatique article, I found this affirmation by a pro-Israel interviewee: No qualm: anti-zionism is anti-semitism. No qualm? No bull! One time too many. My mind responded immediately: the nation-state is not democratic.

I was jumping from an unacceptable blanket statement to what my mind thinks to be fundamental. I believe it is a fact that – once again, encouraged by no less a philosopher as Hannah Arendt, the nation-state as a political construct is a constant source of conflicts. It operates on premisses of selective exclusions, nationally or internationally. It lives off of its mythical mission of protector of its people against often manufactured dangers from internal or external enemies. Its authoritarian and totalitarian features are a constant irritant. Not a peace maker!

Many voices speak of the dangers of a two states solution for Israel and Palestine. Two nation-states that is. More and more voices ask about the possibility of one state which

would presuppose a reconciliation, a peace, a process of collective truth seeking. In other words, a Truth and Reconciliation civic space, similar to that in South Africa which may not have achieved many of its goals but was powerful enough for the present Pretoria government, twenty years later, to suggest Israel and Palestine consider it. A path to peace. A surge of hope, a respite from ultimate violence. Where antagonism transforms into agonism and bitter military enemies become parliamentary adversaries (see Chantal Mouffe).

And … Who will convene the Commission? Abdallah-al-Barghouti?

—–

Yesterday, at the Creative Sync, I asked Rayn how she could write that , at TINYisPOWERFUL, we were more concerned with process than product. It is clear to me that to reduce the development of an art project in two terms was actually to make a binary out of art, although it is the epitome of process and product constantly crossing the conscious of the artists, their unconscious as well, until there is a reckoning which I can only describe as ‘a piece’, visual or otherwise, content-full, intent-full and carrier of a vision. The vision itself often surpasses the limited expectations and reach of the artists themselves. That is where art is a tool for knowledge and neither a therapy nor a mode of self-expression (only).

At the Sync, there was also a great conversation, initiated by Pam, around the budget-making exercise  Morenga urges TinyisPOWERFUL to master. Actually, the occasion was, Rayn’s response to the MOU inspired by Morenga. To a question about what she would have to expect from TINYisPOWERFUL to consider living off the work assigned to her, she candidly answered between $1.200 and $2.200 a month, I believe. Pam jumped on the occasion to ask each of us to do the same. To me, this became a revelation! All of a sudden, the collective was in the process of writing a real budget, with real numbers, for the purpose of getting real grant money from a real funder, although unspecified! TINTisPOWERFUL was acting as a TINY BUSINESS – for the first time, as far as I was concerned! TiP was a TB!

Then, I thought aloud further, remarking that, in their autonomous way, every member of the collective had  found their own source of income, besides grants. Arianne, I offered, was sort of lucky to have a practice which was generating a sellable product. On the other hand, Morgan, for example, was a gallery artist. Gwylène and I had chosen a parallel (art inspired) way to make our money … altogether, I concluded, art and the spirit of the arts are a fully liberated and liberating, an exemplary way to do business. It should be an inspiration for our crumbling societies in their ever-ongoing effort to design a new world!

 

10-10-2024

Easy transition to  the concept of ‘Baugruppe’, the German word for a system of collective architectural design where the future users of a building are, from the get go,

the designers of the project. My reflex would have been to send a link to Henrietta right away. But I must confess my disillusion, not with Henrietta, but with my dream of the building industry graduating to an appreciative grasp of its clients/users, to the point of asking them what would suit them best! Presently, the sole beneficiaries of the industry are its wealthier clients who pay to get what they wish from architects and builders. As for the lower classes, those in real need, they are at the mercy of the market, although they would be the best people to express the depth of their distress, to explicitly state their urgent needs and, then, to benefit most from a cooperative way of designing socially meaningful built environments. This quandary is so clearly stuck into the structure of the economic system that, for it to work, there would have to be a full evaluation of the housing sector, the key, I would say, being the instruction of architects, urbanists and planners. Presently, in the books and magazines I frequent, there are so many references, explicit or not, to the anthropology of habitation, from collective design to the passing along of traditional building uses and skills; to the essentially social nature of architecture; to novels which end in urban dereliction (or revival) … So many innovative resources applicable to architecture … So much stuff to refer to … How is it, then, that, in Charleston, the Union Pier saga – possibly the last opportunity for civic-minded urban development at the heart of the peninsula – seems to have been all but snuffed away from the public eye? Shame – Shame.

Here are two of my latest sites of interest

– Baugruppen

https://www.larchlab.com/baugruppen/

– Anne Lacaton & Jean-Phillipe Vassal

https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/anne-lacaton-and-jean-philippe-vassal

… and hundred more, for our education!

Politically, the recognition of this subject as essential for social satisfaction is key for the future. It articulates with climate adaptation, transportation, education, affordability, public affairs …. the arts, yes, the arts, and their unique ability to form private imaginaries, stimulate collective imaginaries, to visualize them, elaborate on them, grow them into realities.

Come and work with us, at TINYisPOWERFUL

 

10-14-2024

JEMAGWGA has been at Azule for a day.

From Charleston, we went through Asheville and saw some of the devastation. Had dinner at Olivier and Kim’s. Then we drove to Bluff.

How to make sense of the difference between the lucky ones who, one mile away from the French Broad river, were spared most of the harm, and those who lost every bit of what they had accumulated and built … Gone, transformed into rolling muck  and carried away to further thicken the flow and eradicate even more thoroughly the next downstream victims. How to internalize this new state of vulnerability? How not to empathize with whoever, wherever, is living in sheer devastation, in war, in agony …

and do something about it?

—–

Then there is Victoria and her coming interview with Nikki Giovanni, on ‘I Like My Tea Sweet’! She did not believe she would be given this unique opportunity when she met her at a public gathering and simply asked her: would you like to spend an hour with TINYisPOWERFUL?

When she told us about it, my first reaction was to think: James Baldwin next on the list! If you ask him as you asked Nikki Giovanny, he might come, I mused! I could only smile, appreciate her good work and, of course, measure my ignorance! Although I suspected they knew each other – same period, same causes – I had never watched their famous interview together? I was still in France at the time, with other preoccupations.

 

10-17-2024

Today is Podcast day. It is Nikki Giovanni’s day!

To get myself warmed up, yesteday, I Iistened to that new-to-me 1960 or so conversation with James Baldwin. Unfortunately it very hard to understand. The sound was pretty bad and, besides, I was in the studio doing something else at the same time. But I appreciated how she resisted some of Baldwin’s propositions, with her very quiet but affirmed voice. An unfortunate contrast with the present where she, as matter of fact, had to apologize a few times for her coughing, due, she explained, to a lung condition. Yet, for sure, no ailment would have prevented her from passing on her message about the folks who, 3 weeks before the elections, are camping on the UNDECIDED side of the political spectrum. Her highly clear, recurring question during the whole session was: UNDECIDED ABOUT WHAT?

For example, calling on John Lewis’s example, nearly killed in Selma, on the Edmond Pettus bridge, she asked: What was John Lewis undecided about when he got his skull fractured? Then insisting: WHAT IS THERE TO BE UNDECIDED ABOUT? When the time came for Victoria to ask Nikki Giovanni to come up with a ‘closing question’ to the show – which would then be the opening question for the next podcast – Nikki did not hesitate one second! “UNDECIDED ABOUT WHAT?” she afiirmed. This was militancy at its most stubborn, its best! So simple.

As a matter of fact, early this morning, during my walk, I thought of asking Victoria to get  our group together – whoever wants to debate on whether to vote democrat or not because of Biden’s stand on arm shipments to Tel Aviv – and help me, yes, help me, to decide whether to vote Harris of abstain. Now – Thank You Nikki – I am UNDECIDED no more. I’ll vote Harris.

—–

From thread to needle … in my mind, how, as an artist, can my art keep me undecided?

I am not for sale. My art is not for sale. Art is my mother’s milk, my mother really!

Would I ever put my mother up for sale? For a handful of shekels?

UNDECIDED? NO! INCORRUPTIBLY DECIDED!

Thank you Nikki Giovanni. And Marcus McDonald, for asking!

10-19-2024

As soon as I read the title of an article showing how Israel is determined to bar the United Nations from any presence in Gaza for sure, but also in Lebanon and the West Bank, I screamed: NO WAY Israel or whoever else will prevent the UN from carrying  its missions of Justice and Peace, however clumsy it often is. And so powerless, despite the constance of Antonio Guterrez. Let’s make sure the bullies do not perpetuate terror as their mode of supremacy. It is so disheartening to observe Democrats in the US and other like-minded politicians worldwide … sidestep their responsibilities, bend to violence, survive from denial to denial, in a monstrous show of cowardice, blind to their own pusillanimity! I am ever closer to the end of tolerance. Sick and tired. Exhausted. What is Kamala Harris waiting for to show her holly anger, the same way schtroumpf shows his infernal bullshit.

 

10-22-2024

Need to write an MOU that TiP and Victoria have asked  everyone to send, that everyone has sent … except me. Too many demands on the ‘Tale/Reparations’ side.

Memorandum Of Understanding

How do you describe TiP?

A small collective of artists, activists and educators whose goal is to promote the arts and the spirit of the arts as an active principle of social life. Not a therapeutic activity against possible disintegration.

I would like to see TiP defined as a federator of artistic endeavors by individuals, groups or collectives, using art as a tool and artists as agents, in a constant search for social and political equity and access.

What do I bring to TiP?

– My age, my hopes, a vision of what art in/with community can do if practiced notfor self-promotion but for that of the people we work with.

– An approach to the arts as tools for knowledge, socialization and the development of collective intelligence. Not a series of skills to embellish our dailylife and our dreams.

What do I expect to receive from TiP?

The challenge that a collective can brings to each of its members, in order to clarify views, achieve goals, practice art, evaluate outcomes … and everything art that an individual cannot achieve alone.

How do I define my role/commitment to TiP?

For the sake of transparency, I do not see my commitment in time and efforts grow, compared to this year. It may actually decrease as my physical strength

may go down! As for my role, it is so closely inspired by daily experiences that it will all depend on surrounding events! I am not really an agent at TiP. More like a filter for ideas and analysis.

Let me say though that lately, I sense a new enthusiasm in the collective. The more enthusiasm from TiP, the more response from me. This -also- is reciprocity!

+ I am positive about residencies. Will take part if still relevant!

What are my needs?

Lots of collective enthusiasm. Not necessarily art production-wise but much reliance on clarity of purpose and strength of imaginaries from members of the group. I see my relevance and contribution as an active artist being partly a reflection of the people I work with. I believe less and less in individual power.

This is in praise of community and collective intelligence – at least this is what is needed today.

What are my hopes for TINYisPOWERFUL?

They are what the mission and vision spell out.

They may need serious adjustments after the elections.

Solidarity and patience.

 

10-24-2024

Two days ago, Gwylène had breakfast early, before her visiting brother came down to the kitchen. I remember vividly telling her that, after all, if Trump were to win the elections, there would be a simple explanation: it is a fact that most Americans feel the pinch of inflation – ongoing despite themjkuuu politically-motivated pitches to the contrary. Should this rationally explain a vote for Trump is a different story though. It is a total intellectual lie to call Trump an alternative to Harris or vise-versa. This point – the intellectual lie – is the real subject I want to get to. Here, I mean that, whoever affirms they will vote for one because they reject the other, has reached the absurd limit of what binarism offers. It is not a dilemma to have to choose between such opposites. It is a denial of the basics of political intelligence and social dialogue. In a working democracy, opponents are not enemies, they are adversaries. This is why democrats are partly right to translate it into a democracy versus dictatorship situation, provided that, in the  democracy in question, the voice of the people rules. This is also why republicans have an ounce of legitimacy when they claim that more than 60% of citizens are ill served by the economy. Both parties are lying though, when they refuse to stress or unpack the systemic side of the problem. Both benefit from capitalism as it stands right now: indecently favoring the 1%, although the political language circles around ” the middle-class”, a deadly myth in a system with no middle of any sort.

—–

Then come the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics!

I heard one of the three winners this morning on NPR. James Robinson and the other two were awarded the Prize  “… for their research on the institutional roots of national wealth and poverty …”. Never too late to acknowledge what so many folks have known for so many years! Ask Joseph Stiglitz. I know him for consistently warning about the consequences of socio-economic inequality. The time has come for terminal reckoning hasn’t it? And nobody will tell me that Trump is a possible solution towards equity and access for all! Bulimic for money, elitist fiend, womanizer, kleptomaniac, power crazy ? Is it what it takes to be anointed by christian conservatives and catholic organizations alike? This person has been instrumental in widening an already giant black hole of moral and  political corruption in America. Calling it ‘a giant black hole of moral and political corruption’ does not do either, does not suffice. It is the word ‘POLITICAL’ which needs universal defining/refining. Totally devalued, misappropriated, hollowed out.

In a Monde Diplomatique review of books (Oct 2024), I found a snippet about Elsa Deck Marsault for her “Faire Justice” (to Render Justice), at ‘la Fabrique’, Paris 2023. I cannot help but borrow some sentences from Marsault and the author of the review, Alexandre Leguen. They state that the atomization of the social fabric is eroding the collective forces for change, as they individualize the whole spectrum of social behavior, including progressive activism. This general tendency pushes the political and revolutionary fields to concentrate and defend individual struggles around morals and identity, at the expense of collective thinking. It also obscures the structural mechanisms responsible for societal oppressions. The article ends with a cautionnary “To take down one person is simpler than to take down the system which supports her(him) …”. Next, not having read her book, I imagine Marsault getting into the scapegoating mechanisms which have become key to segmenting, dividing societies into binaries which freeze all dialogic dynamics. Does she also have creative approaches to explore this minefield of  problems? I know TINYisPOWERFUL proposes a tool to partially overcome frozen or over-polarized dialogues: the Question/Relay process. Regardless of context, to place participants in a listening mode intense enough that they will absorb the essence of a stranger’s statement, facilitates relevant answers and, eventually, brings about a level of empathy. Listening is an entry point into respect; an exercise in humanization.

—–

This harvesting of ideas on my part seems to be typical of the ways I build up a composite knowledge and approach an understanding of issues. What is fascinating is to see how, at times, different readings or audios, from totally different and/or unexpected sources, tend to zero in on the subject at hand! Or, is it that my attention, as l investigate an issue, tends to retain only what refers to it?

      +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Excerpt from diary to appear in TINYisPOWERFUL next NewsLetter

This writing is one of the latest entries in the diary I have kept since October 2017. A diary centered on the life of conNECKted, conNECKtedTOO and TINYisPOWERFUL.

Process & Product

Isn’t dissociation a terminal state of individualism?

 

10-26-2024

Now, Victoria has chosen a subject for the next TINYisPOWERFUL NewsLetter. It suits me fine. Since that exchange with Rayn, where she wrote that, as a collective, we were more concerned with process than product … process and product are constantly in my mind! I just do not see how it is possible, as artists, to separate one from the other. The choice of words is crucial here, though. Wouldn’t it be better to talk about a multiform, non-linear relationship among processes, products and their corollaries?  This may prevent artists from routine, keep them at the cusp of change, save art practice from predictability. For example, Gwylène and I turned the expected process-product cycle on its head, when, for example, “the Future is on the Table #3” started with a product, an at product, i.e. an introductory present to potential artist partners. Their accepting it initiated imaginings, different for each, and which we had no control over. The experiment culminated when we invited all participants, from all over the world, to Charleston for a one month in/with community art work and reflection.

Either way, we are talking about the human experience of learning, absorbing and practicing. From this open-ended adventure our sense of oneness and belonging grows. Cynically, it is one of productivist capitalism unique talents to hyper-specialize workers into niches of production and call ‘assembly lines’ the places where multiple niches become one product! But here is the irony: those who produced the product may never have a chance to enjoy its wholeness and/or to purchase it, thus experiencing a major accumulation of  frustrations. A dissociation really: made of the realization that, although ‘I’ possibly was the product maker here, ‘others’ will enjoy the fruit of this labor, and, in parallel, opening to the deep and gagged understanding of an unredeemable denial of freedom. It is not marxist or ‘communist’, anti-American, woke, to deplore this mental and material reality and gauge its injustice.

—–

Also, higher education is responsible for directing students into narrow disciplines where they can contribute short term to the economy of the times. Higher education, however, frustrates the  students who may never have an  opportunity to exercise all their talents, seek the frontiers of their abilities. This systematic parsing of knowledge into specialties, this niche education, is no education at all. More precisely it is an instrumentalized education which turns future workers into tools of production. Where the experience of a continuum from process to product should affirm agency, its instrumentalization is a dissociation, material and psychological, individual and collective. As a matter of fact, it has become a banal argument to stress that individualism is the fruit born from the parsing of all life experiences imposed by systemic capitalism. On the other hand, if, as I believe, collective intelligence is the force that may make the difference in these times of possibly terminal turmoil, dissociation is its nemesis.

—–

At TINYisPOWERFUL, we are not ‘artists’ or ‘activists’ or ‘educators’. No! We are in/with

community artists/activists/educators. The choice we have made to partner with others – to practice art and/or the spirit of the arts – is a political choice: we belong together and look forward to destinies tied by our common dedication to social causes of equity and access. We have chosen not to be ‘studio artists’, whose dedication is mostly to self-expression and whose production is based on repetition. We open our studios to others for collaborative work and our pieces usually go back to our partners or are auctioned off to their benefit. This is an other aspect of the process-product integrity and indivisibility. The parsing of one from the other can only be for analytical purposes. But, to practice parsing in the socio-economic realm is as severe as, for example, separating a mother from her child at birth as a form of punishment. Prisons do this. But aren’t prisons a prime tool for dissociation? And to be sure, the punishment of separating mother from child affects the collective as much as the individual, although with less visibility.

—–

In fact, I am using the opportunity offered by the process-product topic to bring back the notion of dissociation into this diary. I wrote a piece about it for the TINYisPOWERFUL Reservoir of our webapp, some three years ago. At the time I had just encountered the work of Roswitha Scholz.