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2005

"Here is the tree of free men, the bread tree, the arrow tree, the fist tree, the fire tree,
Our times' tumultuous waters drawns it, but its mast balances the circle of its power."
Pablo Neruda, Canto General, 1950

This installation took place under a grand Kapokier, a mythical tropical tree often mentioned in the poetry of Étienne Goyémidé and Faustin Niamolo, which is to be found on the armorial bearings of Porto-Rico and Equatorial Guinea, and was sacred for the Mayas. History gave it many names: Cotton tree, Arbre de Dieu, Bonga, Ceiba de Lana, Kekabu, Fromager, Pochota, Sumauna, Toborochi, Yaxche,...

The tree was hosting every night hundreds of Little Egrets which after the crossing of the Sahara desert were flecking in white droppings on the ground under the tree. The installation then consisted of the sprinkling at the foot of the tree of a layer of those indigo pigments used by the aboriginals for tinting their loinclothes and the disposition on the top of this blue undercoat of cardboard letters recomposing a short quotation in Creol from the bilingual compilation of Gouadepoupean poet Sonny Rupaire (Soni Ripé, 1940-1991) : "Cette igname brisée qu'est ma terre natale"¹ or Grand parad ti kou baton krey porem an kreyol gwadloupeyen.


"La vi en nou sé fé, mizé, maladi, dévenn,
é lanmó karivè pou nou, kon lambeli apré movétan (...)"
(Our life is made, of misery, illness and misfortune,
and death comes to us as a rift after bad weather)
Sonny Rupaire, Lameca, in Cette igname brisée qu'est ma terre natale, 1971

The stencil results from the nocturnal droppings of an immigrant whiteness onto an autochthonous blue. The work of surface cross-references through its various contents the slave migrations, Caribbean poetry being one of its results and Senegal, its starting point.
The piece is also a direct allusion to the African ritual concept of the "Arbre à palabres" (tree of palavers - Mti mkubwa or Mbuyu in Swalihi, Penethje or Guouye in Wolof, Leki-Ndiaouté in Poular, Lohodiou-koro in Saussé, Bantaba in Bambara, etc...) where Kapokiers and Baobabs serve as gathering places for the elders once they need to discuss problems related to their community.

The tree under which the piece has been installed is to be found in the courtyard of the "Ministry of the Plan and Durable Development".
The curator of the project was Oussmane Dia.

1/ In english: "This broken Yam that is my native land."

Grown up in Cameroon -manioc, termites. I return to this land after seventeen years of abscence. The following works metaphorical and nearly theatrical, are reflections on the nudity of death in Africa and the quest for nativity -topological renaissance. Mortified triumph on the tightrope walking Equator, inbred lands and the glittering of the gem stones, occured within the confines of the steer slaughterhouse of Tambacounda.

They each start from the first book of Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, known in the world of letters as the progenitor of Negritude (the first diasporic "black pride" movement): "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" (notebook of a return to the native land).


1.- The installation was made on the ground of the zebu's enclosure using white chalk to write a five paged long quote from the book, starting near the entrance and ending in the slaughtering chamber. The work was prolonged by the forced entrance of the bovines in the perimeter. Later in the early morning, the cutting of their throats on the last chapter of the text.

"(...) Partir. Mon coeur bruissait de générosites emphatiques. Partir... j'arriverais lisse et jeune dans ce pays mien et je dirais à ce pays dont le limon entre dans la composition de ma chair : "J'ai longtemps érré et je reviens vers la hideur désertée de vos plaies". (...) "Ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n'ont point de bouche, ma voix, la liberté de celles qui s'affaissent au cachot du désespoir." (...) De nouveau cette vie clopinante devant moi. Non pas cette vie, cette mort, cette mort sans sens ni piété, cette mort où la grandeur piteusement échoue, l'éclatante petitesse de cette mort, cette mort qui clopine de petitesse en petitesse ; ces pelletées de petites avidités sur le conquistador ; ces pelletées de petits larbins sur le grand sauvage, ces pelletées de petites âmes sur le Caraïbe aux trois âmes, et toutes ces morts futiles. Absurdités sous l'éclaboussement de ma conscience ouverte, tragique futilités eclairées de cette noctiluque, et moi seul, brusque scène de ce petit matin où fait le beau l'apocalypse des monstres puis, chavirée, se tait. Chaude élection de cendres, de ruines et d'affaissements. (...) "


Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Présences Africaines, 1983, page 22-23.





2.- This scenography which involved women and childrens from the neighboring quarters aimed at initiating a symbolic mimetism with the animal: they walked to the area where the bones are dumped and each picked up a humped ox's scalp. Then the deambulation on the surrounding roads finally putting them back to their initial necropolis.




3.- I breath a warm steam of meat, "some choked mooing come to me as distant melodies", chryselephantine hecatombs: Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Jumhuriyat al-Sudan.
Installation using venereal offals (bowels, bull's penises and cow's foetuses) to write ahead of the Nubian vultures a word borrowed from the same text: BOUCHE. (French for "mouth")

Sandaga is Dakar's largest market. The vapours of dried fish, newly butchered meat, and rotting vegetable matter blend with the fragrance of soap and wood smoke.

Sort of succinct graffiti, the installation is a poetic and cathartic work of vulgarization consisting in the traversing of the public space with a single sentence of automatic writing. Abreaction, the intervention invite an exteriorisation of emotional tension, possible effect according to Aristotle of tragedy on the audience (Poetics, VI and VIII).

In Touba and Dakar, commerce is characterized not by consumers shopping for merchandise, but peddlers shopping for buyers. The majority of the sellers in Sandaga come from a region in Senegal called Baol. The people, most of whom are Wolofs, are thus called Baol-Baol, but are perhaps best known for belonging to the Mouridian Muslim brotherhood. These hardworking traders have managed to build up a worldwide trading network which heart is Sandaga.

The Islamic Mouride brotherhood was begun by Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba (also known as Ahmed Ben Mohammed Ben Abib Allah or Khadimou Rassoul). Senegalese Mourides today view him as almost Muhammad equal, and consider the Great Mosque of Touba, the Ground Zero of Mouridism and holy city where his tomb is located, as as important or more important than Mecca (thereby causing extreme consternation from other Muslims, who consider this blasphemy.)

The pictures are from the Senegalese painter Soly Cissé.

"In his preface to his work Cantos, Barnett Newman wrote how lithography is an
instrument to be played. It is like a piano... and as with an instrument, it interprets...
creation has to do with "playing." Artists (like pianists) deploy energy in playing,
that is, interpreting their creation. This energy (and its variations) in connection with
a certain work object was the main reason behind the choice of works and artists. Then comes
the object of this energy. Something incomprehensible that leaves us gasping faced with the
elusive force of what needs no justification. A compulsion that finds its purpose only in the work.
A compulsion to the work."
Michel Assenmaker, December 17th 2004


Artists : Nobuyoshi Araki, Olivier Foulon, Pierre Klossowski, John Murphy, Willem Oorebeek, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Eric Van Hove.

The exhibited work is a mural installation in blue chalk and a series of 19 "corrected" calligraphies, mounted on traditional silk scrolls with varying motifs by Japanese master Yuji Hasegawa. Written in black ink on washi, the works depict the 71 characters that make up Hiragana (a script first developed for use by women), one of two Japanese syllabaries. Each piece in the series has been "corrected" with red ink by Japanese master Yuji Kato, still a common practice in some parts of Asia, generating a work in two directions, with two levels of meaning. Taken from its original context, the Nippon master-pupil "exercise" transforms into an aesthetic collaboration.

Framing such "exercises" on scrolls is in itself an incongruous act from the point of view of tradition, and calligraphies that would normally be considered pedagogical drills slip into abstraction depending on if one speaks Japanese, is familiar with the techniques and aesthetic of calligraphy etc...

The mural installation was made using four texts of Pablo Neruda and some fragments of Sappho.

The curator of the exhibit was Michel Assenmaker. (read the press release - pdf)

"Le language étant le fait de la civilisation, la violence même est silencieuse."
Georges Bataille, l'Érotisme, Éditions de Minuit, 1957.


Silence, as one of the main constituents of any music or architectonic, is in a way the ultimate intonation: a sensitive one. Aiming to reach terseness and succinctness of style, the installation consisted in the construction of an utterly "loud silence" as of a way to make it a sensual mental impression and a perceptible vacuum. In this particular case, by "silence" I hear a "deep absence of source input".

Ultimately, silence is where music rejoins language.

It may be hard to believe that a word as Asian as Zen is ultimately an Indo-European word. Zen, which has been in English since 1727, is the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese chán, "quietude, to worship heaven, to ponder silently in concentration (Shuowen Jiezi)." Chán comes from Sanskrit dhynam "meditation," from the Sanskrit root dhy-, dh-, "to see, observe." The Indo-European root behind the Sanskrit is dhei-, dhy-, "to see, look at." This root also shows up in Greek, where dhy- developed into s-, as in Common Greek sma, "sign, distinguishing mark." This became sma in Attic Greek, the source of English semantic.

Forbearance from speech, bringing silence back to its semantic etymology, this work attempt was to support a space for meditation, self-contemplation and intuition, by creating a tangible volume of muteness.

The pictures are from the French photographer Philippe Pelletier.

Linn loudspeakers have been used, considering their technical specificities.

"I didn't hesitate, I went,
went into the fluorescent night,
to satisfactions sometimes real
at times icons of inspiration.
I drank deep, as only connoisseurs
of concupiscence drink."
Constantine P. Cavafy, I went, June 1905.


Transcription of texts by the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Peter Cavafy on the dunes of the Great Sand Sea, near the border with Libya, that stretches over 800km south to Gilf Kebir.

Having a natural inborn prika, what the Greeks call that rare indefinable quality the Spaniards know as duende and for which the English have no word but translate as "gift", Cavafy was born in 1863 a singular person in a singular place at the dawn of that singular manifestation we call Western Modernism. As Desmond O'Grady put it, Cavafy created a modern persona for himself who in turn deliberately created, often from his mundane daily life, a corpus of poetry that was simultaneously naturalistically, symbolically, metaphorically, historically and mythically epiphanic.

Despite its very remote location 305km south of Marsa Matruh (Paraetonium) at the edge of the caravan route known on the maps as "Marsrab al-Istabl" but named Darb al-Mahashas by the Bedouin, the oasis of Siwa was famous since antiquity as the location of the Oracle of the temple of Amun, to which Alexander the Great, making a perilous desert crossing, journeyed to in 331BC and where he received confirmation he was the son of Zeus.

The Oracle of Siwa was one of the seven Oracles of Antiquity, along with Delphi, Abae in Phocia, Dodona, the oracles of Amphiaraus and Trophonius, and Branchidae in Milesia.
The famous Athenian general Cimon, the great Greek lyric poet Pindar, the athlete Eubotas or Pausanias came to the place.

1.- Alexandria borders on the mythological. The ancient city lies buried 6 meters down while the rest is mostly filled with the invisible remains of the people and their stories, which I spent time listening to. The work echoes these observations.

The circulation of bank notes in any city, moving from hand to hand, can be seen as a diffuse network of invisible, genuine and fast moving message boards in the public space. I remembered the use the inhabitants of the ghetto of Warsaw had for them in 1943.

The intervention, entitled "Bill Boards", consisted of the transcription in different languages of poems, suggestions, and reflections on banknotes, before using them to buy tea and smoke sheesha (the traditional Egyptian water pipe) at many different Ahwas or coffeehouses in the souq districts of the city, where they must still be in circulation as you read these lines to buy bread and vegetables. The work mainly took place in coffeehouses along Sharia Nokrashi, Sharia Faransa and Zinqat as-Sittat ("the women's squeeze"), including Sheikh Aly Bar and Togaria Café.

The work is inspired by local custom, as writing love messages on bank notes appears to be a tradition in the city, many of them baring inscriptions. Seemingly in order to show that someone is valuable to them, Alexandrians will inscribe a declaration on a bank note before giving it to that person.
Of course, I believe that the one who loves writes, while the one who is loved merely spends it.

2.- Action : Abreaction. Sort of succinct graffiti proposed in different cities around the globe, the installation is a poetic and cathartic work of vulgarization consisting in the traversing of the public space with a single sentence of automatic writing. Abreaction, the intervention invite an exteriorisation of emotional tension, possible effect according to Aristotle of tragedy on the audience (Poetics, VI and VIII).

The performance took place in the surroundings of Mancheya district, around the Faransa street (street of France) in the old Ottoman neighborhood of Alexandria.

The pictures are from South-African artist Sue Williamson and Swedish photographer Aia Jüdes.
The curator of the exhibit was Mohamed Abouelnaga.

"Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise."
Fitz-Green Halleck, On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake, 1820.


The work is a cenotaph to American satirist and poet Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820). It was installed on a green settee opposite to the statue of Fitz-Green Halleck made in 1876 by James Wilson Alexander MacDonald. It is in Central Park, north of the 65th St. Traverse, on the Literary Walk.

Some says there are 8500 benches in the park, and during my walks I noticed that much of them bear little plaques with carved inscriptions such as "Loris, with love of course, what else...", or "S.I's seat". Many recall the memory of a departed, transforming these benches into some sort of poetic memento, a memorial on which one can sit.
Actually, I've always believed that there is no better grave than a vacant bench.

The work simply consisted in the installation of an additional plaque bearing the inscription "Joseph Rodman Drake's vis-à-vis, please keep this seat vacant" on the bench that faces the statue of Halleck.

"Events of the time are a bit like Impressionist paintings which combine
into a recognizable whole only when observed from a distance."
Gertrud Kolmar in a letter to her sister, October 22, 1939.


1.- Vestiges of Arcadia, antique ziggurat, toppled citadels, maisons brûlées, Hiroshima's shadows, New-York's towers. Or maybe Nelly Sachs, Rose Ausländer, Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Ingeborg Bachmann.

As Walter Benjamin remarked, it is by bearing the mark of the implication of art in the world that ruins become "the building forces of humanity."
Language itself is but a mountain of debris; "Earthwords" as Robert Smithson puts it.
The work, implicit homage to Gertrud Kolmar, consists in an inaccessible writing installation of her poetries, traced by hand in the accumulation of dust covering the floor of the abandoned palace of late Ottoman Prince Said Halim Pasha, grandson of Mohammed Ali. The building, adjacent to the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo's Sheikh al-Maarouf district, was built in the 19th century by architect Antonio Lasciac, Italian by persuasion and Austro-Hungarian citizen by accident of birth.

The installation's attempt is to emphasize the correlation between the palace's transmogrification through time and Kolmar's writings, which bear the marks of the beginning of the 20th century: abundance of images, elegiac lyricism, metaphors, and symbols.




2.- If Egyptians uses gilded plaques to designate the function of things in the public space, they also often momentarily redeem part of that space for private use: café terraces, shop stalls, parking garages, etc...
By similar means, the inaccessible installation of the palace is being suggested to passerby through a series of nine gilded plaques placed in the surrounding streets bearing a cyclical narrative in Arabic that partly mimics Kolmar's poetry.

The annotations refer to the myth of Sisyphus, whose metaphorical compulsion Albert Camus used to address the absurdity of life, which is ours until death.
Each plaque bears in red the name of a nearby street where another plaque can be found, therefore inviting a circumvolution in the neighborhood with no beginning or end, recalling the zoetrope of passing days.

Curated by William Wells for the Townhouse gallery.
Made through the support of the Belgian embassy in Cairo.
Special thanks to Lara Baladi, Ingeborg Steenbeke, Aleya Hamza, Osama Dawod and Ayman.

' Tis not too late to seek a newer world
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Tennyson, Ulysses


Antonio Andrade, an early 17th century Jesuit missionary to the court of Akbhar, the Mogul emperor, and also to the Tibetan kingdom of Guge, seems to have been the first European to record a view of Mt. Kailash, the navel of the world.

A great pyramidal mass of black rock soaring to over 22,028 feet in the remote region of Ngari in South-Western Tibet, Kailash -the Axis Mundi- has been a supremely sacred site for thousands of years. The mountain was already legendary before the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were written.
Hindus believe it to be the mythical Mount Meru, the abode of Lord Shiva -the ultimate renunciate ascetic-, while the Jains call the mountain Astapada and believe it to be the place where Rishaba, the first of the twenty-four Tirthankaras attained enlightment. Followers of Bön, Tibet's pre-Buddhist shamanistic religion, call the mountain Tise and believe it to be the seat of the Sky Goddess Sipaimen, sight of a legendary 12th century battle of sorcery between the Buddhist sage Milarepa and the Bön shaman Naro Bon-chung. Finally, Tibetan Buddhists call the mountain Kang Rimpoche, the "Precious One of Glacial Snow", and regard it as the dwelling place of Demchog (also known as Chakrasamvara) and his consort, Dorje Phagmo.

The three days circumambulation of the sacred peak by the pilgrims (clockwise for the Buddhists, counter-clockwise for Bön adherents) known as Kora(Tibetan), or Parikrama(Sanskrit), is thought to absolve sins for a lifetime. It symbolise the travel from death to rebirth, and is followed by a bath in the icy sapphire water of Lake Manosaravar, "lake of Consciousness and Enlightenment" called Mapam Yumso in Tibetan. In India, when speaking of death one says "leaving for Kailash".
The highest point on the circumambulation of Kailash is the Drolma-La pass at 18,600 feet. Tara (Star) or simply Drol-ma in Tibetan, goddess of protection and compassion, is one of the widest worshipped deity in Tibet. She is the bodhisattva representing the miraculous activities of all buddhas. In myth she is born from Chenrezig's tears of compassion to be enlightened and stay a woman.

Lake Manasarovar is called "Mother of the world's rivers" in Bouddhist classics, for here can also be found the sources of the Brahmaputra, the Sutlej, the Indus and the Ganges, the four mighty rivers of Asia each leaving towards each cardinal directions. They are named after the four divine animals in heaven: the peacock, elephant, lion and horse.

1.- Based on the Drolma-La pass' altitude and its relation to feminity and compassion, the work consisted in a monologue to seven women including my mother, written on each sides of a series of prayer-flags during the long travel through the Himalayas, followed by the ascension of the steep pass during the Kora in a misty morning to attach them atop.
Of five colors, Prayer-flags' function is to carry payers to the summits, to worship the Wind-Horse and bring protection to the land.




2.- In a second time, transposition of a stone collected on Mt. Sinaï in Egypt, at the feet of St-Catherine monastery, to the Sky burial of Tarchen, near the Chukku monastery.
Similar to the Towers of Silence of the Zoroastrians, one of the oldest surviving monotheistic religion, Tibetan Sky burial are places where bodies of the dead -merely an empty vessel- are chop to pieces before being offered to the vultures which, summoned by incense, cast their droppings on the high peaks. If Zoroastrians leave the body three days to cross the Hinvar bridge into paradise, Tibetans believe that after three days the consciousness, or namshe, exits through the crown of the head and makes its way through the Bardo -intermediate states that precede rebirth.

To interpret a text is not to give it a meaning (more or less a free version),
on the contrary it is to appreciate the plurality of its making."
Roland Barthes, S/Z, 1970.


A golden spire crowning a conical wooded hill inhabited by numerous anthropoid primates, Swayambhunath Stupa is the most ancient of all the holy shrines in Kathmandu Valley.
What's more, as announced in a postscript by Gérard Genette, "Brecht suggested with irony that exile constitutes the best school for learning: it is true that a body crossing many historical spaces, many languages, many codes, will generate a serious dosage of contradictions. I do not know if it works well in this text because of the stupidity, the vomit, the mockery, the biographic legend, the graffiti, the brainwashing of advertisements, the neurotic unloading, the bullshit heard on the radio, the parodies, the puns, the echo, the tropes, the stammerings, the semantic skids, the ruptures of language, the derision of punctuation or spelling...in a word it is not for me to append "directions for use" as if the text were coming from another voice." G. Genette, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Paris, Seuil, 1982, page 451.

The installation consisted of a sentence written with bananas and waiting for the monkeys.
It is part of a series of similar interventions, including:
• Writing with venereal offals and waiting for the Nubian vultures in Tambacounda (Senegal/2005)
• Writing with seeds and waiting for the pigeons in Ueno Park (Tokyo/2002).

"Origin here means that from and by which something is what it is and as it is. What something is, as it is,
we call its essence or nature. The origin of something is the source of its nature. The question concerning the
origin of the work of art asks about the source of its nature. On the usual view, the work arises out of and by
means of the activity of the artist. But by what and whence is the artist what he is? By the work; for to say that
the work does credit to the master means that it is the work that first lets the artist emerge as a master of his art.
The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless,
neither is the sole support of the other. In themselves and in their interrelations artist and work are each of them
by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely that which also gives artist and work of art their names -- art."
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art", in Basic Writings, Harper, San Francisco, 1977, page 149.


In Asian calligraphy, if one abundantly inks the brush before writing a character, all of the drawn lines will combine into a single form. While appearing indecipherable, it remains "readable" to the initiate who is able to identify the character embedded in its apparent shapelessness.
Similarly, Bachelard observed that "poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity", and that "in poetry, non-knowing is a primal condition." Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969, page 33.

Thus this calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labeled a Metragram (or Matrigraphy) and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. Amphigory reflecting on the paradox of writing, a Metragram tends to relate to a particular geographical and ethnological area through a symbolic inking of the origin of that world.

I wish to add that I find that the mythological, or oniric, paintings that Courbet recriminated by painting the genitals and belly of Joanna Hiffernan in 1866 might be similar in spirit and impulse to the current practice of disseminating innumerable archives and complaisant printed materials.

The setting of this particular documentary picture has been inspired by the Skogsrå tradition of Swedish forest fairytales.

For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

"Là où ça parle, ça jouit, et ça sait rien."
Jacques Lacan, Encore, Éd du Seuil, Paris, 1975, page 133.


A large landscape garden in the naturalistic English manner, the park of the Villa Borghese was built on the site of a vineyard owned by the patron of baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini, cardinal Scipione Borghese. Bernini is the sculptor of the Ecstasy of St Theresa in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria, which Lacan used as the starting point for his text Encore (Seminar XX: "On Feminine Sexuality", The Limits of Love and Knowledge).
Calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labeled a Metragram (or Matrigraphy). It consists of inscribing on the womb of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. Amphigory reflecting on the paradox of writing, a Metragram tends to relate to a particular geographical and ethnological area through a symbolic inking of the origin of that world.

For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

Just a few blocks northeast of Shinjuku station lies the district of Kabukicho --what city planners and social scientists call "an epitome district", a wasteland of nightlife leftovers. It is seen by some as an escape from life's problems, and by others as the source of those problems.
Moreover, Shinjuku itself has a long history of meeting the sexual needs of long distance commuters. The little district of Shinjuku came into being as a means of providing travelers a place of rest (Shinjuku can be translated as "new lodgings"), but it wasn't long before the taverns and hotels began serving more than rice and sake. As early as 1779 there were more than fifty inns featuring "rice servers", or "spring saleswomen." Shonben Yokocho, "the little pee passage" is one of its antechambers.

Calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labeled a Metragram (or Matrigraphy). It consists of inscribing on the womb of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. Amphigory reflecting on the paradox of writing, a Metragram tends to relate to a particular geographical and ethnological area through a symbolic inking of the origin of that world.

For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

"In informal writing both if and whether are standard in their use to introduce
a clause indicating uncertainty after a verb such as ask, doubt, know, learn, or see.
In such contexts, however, the use of if can sometimes create ambiguities."
[if: usage note] Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.


The Internationales Künstler Gremium(IKG) is an International Artist Committee founded by Joseph Beuys and some others in 1976 in Cologne/Germany. Basic idea was to establish a voice of the visual arts comparable to the Pen-Club. Its aim is to promote exchange of thoughts between Eastern and Western Europe.

My intervention consisted in the plantation of an "if" (French homonym for Yew), in front of the museum, among the mushrooms and the dandelions.

Work curated by Dorothée Bauerle-Willert and Jårg Geismar.

"The year 2005 sees a number of important thresholds and anniversaries: among others, sixty years since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations. At the time, both events announced significant changes in the world: the end of World War II brought the hope that conflicts of such dimensions would never happen again; and the founding of the UN was meant to assure (with the Declaration on Human Rights) that human rights would become important and would see a real chance of being realised. However, never before has the world been so torn with conflicts and clashes, intolerance has become omnipresent, ecological problems appear unsolvable. Therefore we face the basic existential dilemma of whether we will be able to survive for long in such a world. What is it that preserves life and humanity, so that we might live our lives, our little daily stories?
The exhibition theme is meant to be as wide as possible. We would like the artists of different generations to point to the social, ecological, economic and humanitarian dilemmas of man, to picture man as an individual and a social being, whose basic right is to live (...)"

List of artists and website of the exhibition: http://www.glu-sg.si/exhibitions/2Live/index.htm

Work curated by Jårg Geismar and Jernej Kozar.

Interior of Belgian architect Genevieve de Vriendt: my mother.

Calligraphic intervention related to the Anthropometries of Yves Klein, the Logograms of Christian Dotremont and the Dactylograms of Piero Manzoni, which I have labeled a Metragram (or Matrigraphy). It consists of inscribing on the womb of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. Amphigory reflecting on the paradox of writing, a Metragram tends to relate to a particular geographical and ethnological area through a symbolic inking of the origin of that world.

For a glimpse at other images from the Metragram series, visit this webpage.

Wanakio is a trans-disciplinary project that deals with the topic of the transformation of society and urban environments triggered by globalization and the ubiquitous process of modernization.

1.- The first aspect of the proposed intervention consisted in setting up in the Noren vegetable market -- one of the poorest in Naha -- a worm farm designed to recycle bio-waste into valuable fertilizer. The aim of this ecological recycling mechanism is simply to allow the old hard-working women vendors of the market to recycle their vegetable surplus (which until then was burned) into compost they can sell for additional profit. Workshops with nearby schools were proposed.
The project was completed in collaboration with Australian artist Richard Thomas.




2.- The second part of the work consisted of a tactical worm autodafé: namely, feeding these simple ancient invertebrates photocopies of the Japanese Constitution, written after the war by US lawyers in the occupation authority (omitting Article 9). The sound of the worms' digestion of the disputable pages (which oddly resembled the popping sound of a fire) was recorded and broadcasted live on local radio frequencies using a basic PC transmitter, not unlike the way Hirohito's spectral voice emerged from radios across Japan on August 15, 1945.

On that occasion, some individuals are said to have written down their thoughts related to the event and thrown them to the worms, adding a cathartic dimension to the action. In fact, Japanese Shinto priests perform on different occasions a kind of autodafé which is called お焚き上げ (otakiage), literally "offering to the fire".

The history of such burnings is rich. In ancient Greece the books of the sophist Protagoras were burned in the marketplace of Athens, Roman emperors were fond of autodafés, as well as Pope Gregory IX, who in 1242 threw a full wagon-load of volumes of the Jewish Talmud into the fire in Paris. In the 14th century European penance preachers organized the Bonfires of the Vanities in which immoral literature was destroyed (Sandro Botticelli placed some of his paintings in the bonfire himself), not to mention the conflagrations frequently arranged by the Nazi regime. The best known autodafé in the East seems to be the 焚書坑儒 (where Chinese classics were burned and Confucian scholars buried alive) ordered by the First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huan (秦始皇 / Shin-no-Shikoutei in Japanese) in 213-212 BC.

To interpret a text is not to give it a meaning (more or less a free version),
on the contrary it is to appreciate the plurality of its making."
Roland Barthes, S/Z, 1970.


Alluvial valleys, tropical estuaries, bayou, inter-tidal peripheries.
"The same ruin swallows both the animated and the unanimated buried in the same unremembered; and in a renewed world, subsists no trace of what was abhorred or divinized in an erased world" wrote Etienne Pivert de Sénancour in his Rêveries. And so is the terrestrial ecosystem of certain lagoon and swampy littorals: the limits of high and low tides in my head.
Second reserve of the biosphere in the archipelago of the Lesser Antilles, the Caribbean mangrove swamps of the Grand Cul de Sac Marin bury in the same unremembered a forest of jagged, gnarled trees protruding from the surface of the sea, roots anchored in deep, black, foul-smelling cornucopian mud. Renewed world in this sluggish stream that meanders through lowlands and marshes: monitor lizards, flying foxes, lesser adjutant stork, collared kingfisher, whimbrel and amphibious mudskippers.
The hermit crabs pullulate -- trample my sentence.

The installation consisted of a sentence written with fishes and waiting for the hermit crabs.
It is part of a series of similar interventions, including:
• Writing with venereal offals and waiting for the Nubian vultures in Tambacounda (Senegal/2005)
• Writing with seeds and waiting for the pigeons in Ueno Park (Tokyo/2002)
• Writing with bananas and waiting for the rhesus monkeys on Swayambhunath Stupa in Kathmandu (Nepal/2005)