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2007

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind (installation view - red chalk)

Production of 3 pieces made of Shanghaiese manufactured copper sheets, using the three main versions of American president Bush's name in Chinese daily newspapers. Indeed, the use of Chinese characters to represent phonetically the president's name allow or force Chinese journalists to attach a hidden meaning to it (meaning is inherent to Kanji).

The first piece, Buu-She, broke down to Buu and She. Buu is "cloth" and is neutral in meaning. The main character in this name that draws attention is the second character, She. She is "hope". This name is completely positive because She, or hope, is a high frequency and high emotion word. This name can be associated with the "spreading of hope" or "give hope," pronounced and appearing in exactly the same ways.

The second name, Buu-Suu, is the least used among the three. The character, Suu, meant "special." However, there is another word that sounded similar to Suu but it meant, "to lose." Since Buu could be a different word that meant "no," Buu-Suu can be "not lose."

The last one, Buu-Shr, drew more negative associations than positive ones. The character, Shr, meant "assorted" (often used in things like Shr-Jeen, "combination fried rice") or "what." By itself it is a neutral word. However, there is a commonly used term, pronounced exactly the same way like Buu-Shr, meaning "dishonest", "unrealistic," or "fraudulent." So, when people hear "American President, Bush" on the television or radio it sound like "American President, flashy and without substance." *.

"How can a reality be understood through another? This question is aimed at the artistic
approach of applying a subjective way of seeing to existing aspects of reality and concomitantly, to
develop a unique system, which will perforce follow a different set of rules to the norm.
It identifies a process of appropriation and translation, which comprises moments of discontinuity,
semantic shifts, productive misunderstandings, dislocations and omissions, all of which are inherent
in the production and appropriation of images. It is an interpretation of found and, to an extent,
recalled images, which in turn generate new ideas, new imaginings."
Astrid Wege, curator of the Resonances group show.

Name of the exhibit: Resonances (or How one reality could be understood by another).
The intervention is a collaboration with Dutch artist Marjolijn Dijkman.

It all started with a graffiti found during a walk near the museum (i.e. "Bevrijd de waanzin" Liberate the madness in Flemish - see picture on the right). Probably there since the 60's and named after a local movement influenced by Antonin Artaud's ideas (cf. Theater of Cruelty), it seemed to express the axium of Anti-Psychiatry: a revendication for not seeking to heal the patient. It later turned out that one of the founders of Anti-psychiatry, Ronald Laing, came to Leuven around that period for a conference. He was precisely defending madness as a demand made to a system itself alienated.

Echoing these facts, the proposed action can be regarded in its subversion, as a demand made to a system itself unauthorized: sort of succinct graffiti, the intervention 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 invites an exteriorization of emotional tension, possible effect according to Aristotle of tragedy on the audience (Poetics, VI and VIII). Through an artificial linguistic conflict, the work call for interpretation and let the viewer speculate on what the "real" intentions of the artist might be, revealing his own secret desires (désirs refoulés).

Whereas the language chosen for similar "Abreaction" works performed in different parts of Africa and Asia (i.e. Shanghai, Dakar, Alexandria, Tehran,... ) was English for it symbolizes Globalization, the choice was here French, in an effort to put in perspective the long-lasting conflict between the French-speaking Walloon community and the Dutch-speaking Flemish community (causing the splitting of a university here in the 70', including the division of the library in two: just an idea of how idiotic and pitiful it can get). It is clear to me, I insists, that having been born in Algeria and raised in Cameroon, I feel as foreign to this highly miserable regional conflict as I am towards this opposing Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, or Arabs and Israelis in Galilee. (I guess what I want to say is that if I get involved in those conflicts (and I feel I must) it is in an equal way, for they concerns me equally: I am probably an artist but not a Belgian artist to that extend. I should be considered a transnational artist at work in a evermore oecumenical world).
Furthermore, it occurred to me that the wish expressed in a publication (Impasse, het psychopathologisch syndroom van de normale mens, Antwerpen, 1975) first published on the year of my birth by one of the founders of Anti-Psychiatry in Belgium, Prof. Steven De Batselier (University of Leuven), namely a call for the therapist to leave the institution and analyze the "normal" people outside, is in fact very similar to what lead artists since many years now to leave the museums to work in the street.

Intervention documented by Flemish writers/journalists Marleen Wynants (Janus Art Magazine) and Sabine Hillen.

Participation curated by Astrid Wege and Marjolijn Dijkman.
Artists: Pavel Braila, Anke Brüchner, Peggy Buth, Mariana Castillo Deball, Marjolijn Dijkman & Eric Van Hove, Olivier Foulon, Nikolaus Gansterer, Hatice Güleryüz, Doris Lasch & Ursula Ponn, Achim Lengerer, Lene Markusen, Gyan Panchal, Falke Pisano, Romana Schmalisch, Megan Sullivan, Inga Zimprich.

"Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are
engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our
mental constructs a mean for greater understanding, even while intuitivelly we know that we shall
never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life".
Winfried Georg Sebald, The Rings of Saturn: an English pilgrimage, New Directions Books, UK, 1944, page 182.

"Fenenin el-Rahhal (or "Caravan of Artist-Nomads") was a working artists' summit whose mission was more entrenched on process than outcome. It was conceived as a journey that invited twenty artists, writers, journalists, activists and professionals from around the world to trek across the Western Egyptian desert for the length of seven days. They then discovered one another's work, reflected, discussed, and engaged in collaborative works on the notion of "territory". At the conclusion of their journey in the desert, they spent four days in Cairo to take part in a roundtable discussion, open to the public, at the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art. Their discussions coincided with the 2006 Cairo Biennial of Art, and a number of cultural events planned in the city during the same period."
Extract from the Fenenin el-Rahhal website.

Among other things an intervention consisted, upon entering the Western Desert, in carving the bottom of my shoes with the French words "pas" (step/not) and "pied" (foot). The reoccurrence of my footprints while wandering among the dunes would then print in the sand -loose grains of disintegrated rock- the redundant tautology, the needless repetition of a metaphoric periphrase that the winds of the Khamaseen would soon erase. To all the desert sediments, rounded grains or particles smaller than granules and larger than silt, loose grains of worn or coral or quartz or mineral, to limestone fragments, those shoe-printed words given.
A letter to Michel, also, can be read here.

Participants: Joël Andrianomearisoa, Michel Assenmaker, Lara Baladi, Joseph Badtke-Berkow, Bili Bidjocka, Veronique Caye, Joy Episalla, Patrice Félix-Tchicaya, Ingrid Mwangi, Ahmad Nadalian, Wael Shawky, Nida Sinnokrot, Patrice Sour, Eric Van Hove, Carrie Yamaoka. (for details see here).


. . .

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Ouahiba Adjali (Arts en Liberté gallery).
Thank you to Ammar Bouras, Randa Shaath, Karim Sergoua and Tarek Abou El Fetouh.

"(...)But these waves scare me -
I am going to die
in full despair -
wake up where?
On second breath in life
the atmosphere is dearer
maybe closer to heaven
- o paradise -
is the sea really so bad?
Have you sent men
here for this cold clown
& monstrous eater at the
world? whose sound
I mock? (...)"
Jack Kerouac, excerpt of SEA, in Big Sur, Penguin books, USA, 1962, page 233.

I came to the Timbac burial caves of the Ibaloi in Northern Luzon, one of the nine cultures that have practiced mummification worldwide, because I wanted to establish a relationship between the moon-like tattooed body of an Ibaloi mummy -mummification being about eternity- with this of an Ibaloi woman. But I was 6 months too late: tourism and disrespect from the local government helped the elders decide not to let the mummies out of their hollowed out log and caves anymore. Rather than the alabaster flesh of the dead, it is the green slope of the cliff where most of the burial caves are situated that became the backdrop for the image.

The ideal of blackness is, as Adorno remarked in his Ästhetische Theorie, one of the deepest impulse of abstraction. "(...) reaching a place where no star, no light is visible, where there is nothing, where nothing is forgotten because nothing is remembered, where it is night, where it is nothing, nothing, void", says the narrator of Wolfgang Hildesheimer's novel, Tynset while exploring the spaces between the stars with his telescope. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Tynset, Frankfort, 1965, page 186.

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 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 "write" 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.

Cristina Flores is 79 years old. When I reached her village, a "resettlement" called Barangay Sindol in San Felipe, she was quickly surrounded by her whole family. Negligently relocated on this unfertile rocky wasteland by an opportunistic government after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in 1991, I understood that they were holding on to each other so as to spurn their state of uprootedness, family members having become the last props preventing collapse. As the various images of previous works were passing from hand to hand, I explained that I had come to ink the womb of an Aeta woman, to which I added a reason: "for writing stays." It was quickly agreed that the old woman would do it, so as to counteract the whiteness of my skin and the specter of sexual tourism. Then she had a quick look at the picture involving my mother, and said: "I want to be surrounded by my children and grandchildren. Since the wrath of Pinatubo, they are my house".
They say the Aeta number less than 30.000 today.

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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.

Manila. The Japanese withdrawal from the city in 1945, a massacre of 100000 people: The Manila massacre. Children and women and men all alike, trampled and ruined, destroyed, as quickly as when one forgot something at home; I suppose. I recall that Werner Tübke use to say that "today, it seemed important (to him) to possess the capacity for utopia, including the capacity for utopia backwards."

"Filipino mestizos are Filipinos of part-Austronesian and part-foreign ancestry, though originally the term referred specifically to people of part-Austronesian and Spanish ancestry" (Wikipedia).

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Norberto Nowlan and Donna Miranda.
Thank you to Yason Banal, MM Yu, Katja Guerrero.

"He who knows the surface of the earth and the topography of a country
only through the examination of maps... is like a man who learns the opera of Meyerbeer
or Rossini by reading only reviews in the newspapers. The brush of landscape artists Lorrain,
Ruysdael, or Calame can reproduce on canvas the sun's ray, the coolness of the heavens,
the green of the fields, the majesty of the mountains... but what can never be stolen from
Nature is that vivid impression that she alone can and knows how to impart --the music of
the birds, the movement of the trees, the aroma peculiar to the place-- the inexplicable
something the traveler feels that cannot be defined and which seems to awaken in him
distant memories of happy days, sorrows and joys gone by, never to return.--"
José Rizal, On Travel (Los Viajes), 1888.

On January 28th I went to meet Isabela Suarez on the slopes of the sacred dormant volcano of Mt. Banahaw. "Ambassadora Suprema", she is the spiritual motherly guide of the religious sect of the Rizalistas who consider Philippino legend José Rizal to be a Messiah. I wanted to introduced her the metragram series, hoping to discuss her conceptions of mysticism and receive some insightful comments.

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

"Nous voici devant l'abîme. Il est vide de tous les songes dont l'avaient peuplé
nos pères. Ils croyaient savoir ce qui s'y trouve ; nous savons seulement ce qui ne s'y trouve
point. Il s'est étendu de tout ce que nous avons appris à ignorer. En attendant qu'une
certitude scientifique y interrompe les ténèbres - car l'homme à le droit d'espérer
ce qu'il ne conçoit pas encore,- le seul point qui nous intéresse, parce qu'il se trouve
dans le petit cercle que trace au plus noir de la nuit notre intelligence actuelle, est de savoir
si l'inconnu où nous allons nous sera oui ou non redoutable."
Maurice Maeterlinck, L'anéantissement, in La Mort, Bibliothèque Charpentier, Fasquelle Éd., Paris, 1953, page 33.

The only surviving female nude by Velázquez is known to be La Venus del Espejo, also known as "The Rokeby Venus", and it is supposed to be a commentary on the vanity of beauty. If the face reflected in the dimmed mirror appears to be that of an older woman, some think it may has been over-painted by another artist at a later time. Some also thinks that the mirror is angled such that, in reality, it would reflect a different part of the goddess's body. (wikipedia)

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Kazue Kobata.

"No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience
of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident; just as no Apollonian
poet can perform his proper function unless he lives under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy.
A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse...
But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess
as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual
woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument. The Goddess abides; and perhaps he will
again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman..."
Robert Graves, The White Goddess, A historical grammar of poetic myth, 1948.

In the backdrop is shown Chan Aye's painting Homage to Manet's Olympia, which combines his philosophical conceptions on Buddhism and Western art.

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

"The Buddhist technical term Shunyata, like its Taoist counterpart Non-Being, has long given rise to misunderstanding among Westerners, who erroneously construe such negative words to mean nothingness, the absence, deprivation, or extinction of Being. This produces a righteous repugnance to what is wrongly believed to be a nihilist doctrine, despite the Buddha's express warning to the contrary, for he condemned both extremes of absolutism and nihilism as contrary to his Middle Way. Emptiness, the Void, Non-Being are negative only in verbal form, and since they negate all negations actually affirm the most positive though ineffable Reality. One should constantly be on guard, therefore, against misinterpreting Shunyata either as the emptiness of absence or the emptiness of annihilation. It should be envisaged not as mere vacuity but as the Emptiness of Emptiness, that is to say the non-conceptual reinstatement of every minute particular in its permanent actuality. So this Void is simultaneously a Plenum. But of what, it may reasonably be asked, can a Void be full? The only answer is: of infinite possibilities, manifest and unmanifest, in a coincidentia oppositorum." (Harold Stewart)

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Alicia Thouy (Alliance Française) and Aung Myint (The Inya gallery of Art).
Thank you to Wah Nu, Prof. Maung Maung (Yangon University of Culture) and Phyu Mon.

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk commissionned by Dominique Nahas & John Tomlinson.

"The American deserts denote the emptiness, the radical nudity
that is the backgrounds to every human institution. At the same time, they designate
human institutions as a metaphor of that emptiness and the work of man as the
continuity of the desert, culture as a mirage and as the perpetuity of the simulacrum."
Jean Baudrillard, America, 1986, page 63.

Referring to Three Dialogues, a text originally published in Transition 49 magazine in 1949 which represents a short transcription of a conversation between Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit about the nature of contemporary art, the piece partly ponders on Bloomberg's statement as found in the catalogue of the exhibit "We believe that communication is our most powerful tool". While Beckett's Three Dialogues were refereeing to the work of Pierre Tal-Coat, André Masson and Bram van Velde, this specific intervention refers to the work of Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, Samuel Beckett and Eric Van Hove; it simultaneously examines the Conference room as a metaphor of the uninhabited.

"(...) The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express." -- Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, Calder and Boyars Press, 1965.

Communication as a named and unified discipline has a history of contestation that goes back to the Socratic dialogues, in many ways making it the first and most contestatory of all early sciences and philosophies. Upon entering Bloomberg's New York offices, a mix of Georges Orwell's 1984 and Star Trek's Enterprise, I quickly saw these proleptical glass meeting rooms as the poignant architectural expression of both the impossibility and the willingness for exchange. I therefore decided to hosts meetings where a number of people would come together for the purpose of discussing a (loosely) predetermined topic. While in the corporate world the aim of a meeting seems definite and the conversation focused on a precise point, in Three Dialogues I let my guests wander about until that point emerge, and vanish.

Three Dialogues is made available through cell phone-based interactive voice response (IVR) technology: using a cell phone or even Skype, anyone in the world can call a specific number (1-212-617-4040) and listen to one of the three audio recordings. The fact that the piece can be accessed from anywhere in the world is ironical since the exhibit was originally aimed at the 3000 employees of Bloomberg: while western mass communication tends to monitor the whole world from that office in order to help barometer the Western economy and raise capital for the richs, any other person outside could eavesdrop back on recordings made inside the secrecy of the building's meeting rooms. Furthermore, considering how difficult it is to enter the building because of security, the work is designed to be easily accessible from outside.

The titles of each of the three dialogues are:

• 1 - Dialogue expressing what is to be expressed and with what (dial extension #2)
  
• 2 - Dialogue expressing the power to express and from where (dial extension #3)
  
• 3 - Dialogue expressing no desire to express along with the obligation to do so (dial extension #4)
  
  Guest participants for Three Dialogues included: Lex Fenwick (Bloomberg CEO), Koan Jeff Baysa, Ahmad Nadalian, Michel Assenmaker, Jan Van Woensel, Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, Jean-Christophe Lanquetin, Sue Williamson, David Gensler, Joy Episalla and Adam Nankervis.
  Curated by Jan Van Woensel for Art in General. Funded by Bloomberg.
  
  
  

"What human beings need is not utopia (no place) but entopia (in place): a real
city which they can build, a place which satisfies the dreamer and is acceptable to
the scientist, a place where the projections of the artist and the builder merge."
Constantinos A. Doxiadis, The man and his work, 1974.

Ecumenopolis is a word invented in 1967 by the Greek city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to represent the idea that in the future urban areas and megalopolises would eventually fuse, leaving a single continuous world-wide city as a progression from the current urbanization and population growth trends.

In the writings of Yanagita Kunio, appears the figure of a palimpsestic imaginary where the earlier and essential layers of national life -- in the form of custom, practice, and belief -- were still able to filter through the modern overlays and provide a map for the present. Yanagita appealed the trope of a nonlinear history of custom by employing the vivid imagery of a stalactitic formation that grows unobserved into the shape of a large icicle. This brings to mind Freud's text "Civilization and its discontents," and the dual archaeological model of Rome as the visible city of ruins and Pompeii as the lost city, buried whole.
Perhaps as the Freudian concept of screen memory, or Benjamin's concept of auratic memory drawn from Proust's mémoire involontaire "l'action flotte dans la situation, plus qu'elle ne l'achève ou ne la resserre" (L'Image-temps, Deleuze).

Ecumenopolis follows a three years process of collection: shot through a pocket digital camera, the piece is an MJPG nonlinear digital film experimenting with cinema as an apparatus of memory, and recomposing a fictive city out of footages made in 45 cities worldwide. About 2000 short video sequences of 5 to 20 seconds are randomly selected and played from a database, generating a narrative ultimately bound to déjà vu.
A "video still life" of a sort, it relates to some other films' attempt to envision a city's soul, as "A propos de Nice" of Jean Vigo or "Berlin, symphony of a great city" of Walther Ruttmann.

Curated by Nathalie Anglés for Location One. Artists: Jeanette Doyle, Cliff Evans, Krist Gruijthuijsen, JueiHsien Hsu, SoYoun Jeong, Miguel Palma, Bundith Phunsombatlert, Jani Ruscica, and Eric Van Hove.
Residency supported by the CGRI, Service culturel, Commissariat général aux Relations internationales de la Communauté Française de Belgique.

Taken from the PILOT:3 website: "Eighty six established and emerging curators have each nominated an artist to take part in PILOT:3. The only criteria asked to the nominators is that they love the work of the artist that they choose, and that the artist does not have representation by a commercial gallery at the time of nomination."
A 400 pages colour illustrated publication was presented, as well as a physical archive for each artists. A virtual archive is also available: visit this link.

In this framework, an interview with Jan Van Woensel concerning the relationship my practice entertain with nomadism has been made available: to read it visit this link (pdf).

Funded by Arts Council England, and The British Council.

I like to think of this image as an Allegory of Globalization in Equivocacy, in a tradition that goes back for example to these allegories of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, to Filippino Lippi's Allegory of Music, or Jan Vermeer's Allegory of Painting.
"It would seem, then, that it is through their "immensity" that these two kinds of space --the space of intimacy and world space-- blend. When human solitude deepens, then the two immensities touch and become identical. In one of Rilke's letters, we see him straining toward "the unlimited solitude that makes a lifetime of each day, toward communion with the universe, in a word, space, the invisible space that man can live in nevertheless, and which surrounds him with countless presences." Liebnitz's theme of space as a place inhabited by coexistents has found its poet in Rilke. In this coexistentialism every object invested with intimate space becomes the center of all space. For each object, distance is the present, the horizon exists as much as the center." Gaston Bachelard, intimate immensity, in The poetics of space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969, page 203.

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

"About this room, which was plunged in utter darkness,
I knew everything, I had entered into it, I bore it within me,
I made it live, with a life that is not life, but which is stronger
than life, and which no force in the world vanquish."
Maurice Blanchot, L'arrêt de mort, Gallimard, Coll. L'Imaginaire, 1948, page 124.

Dedicated April 28th 1962, a granite ceremonial gateway with a peaked roof adorned by pigeons, the Kimlau War Memorial honours in both English and Chinese the Chinese-Americans who died while serving during World War II. The monument and post are named after Second Lieutenant Benjamin Ralph Kimlau (1918-1944), a Chinese-American bomber pilot who died while attacking Japanese installations near New Guinea.

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Laura Srouji Khoury & Suha Shoman (Darat al Funun).
Thank you to William Wells (Townhouse Gallery/Cairo), Tarek Abou el Fetouh (Young Arab Theater Fund/Brussels) & Simon Njami.

Let's leave - Directed a mobility workshop aimed at young artists and curators, focused on giving tips and knowledge on how to find art oriented funding opportunities and relevant global cultural residencies through the Internet. This two days workshop took place in an internet cafe in Amman.
Key notions that were approached: What is an artistic or curatorial residency? Where to go and why? With what funding and where to find it? How to apply to it? How can internet help and why is it false to think that one's passport forbid from leaving for a purpose? etc.

"(...) knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget
knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence
of knowledge. This is the price that must be paid for an oeuvre to be, at all
times, a sort of pure beginning, which makes its creation an exercise of freedom."
Jean Lescure, Lapicque, Galanis, Paris, page 78.


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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

"How many daydreams we should have to analyze under the simple heading
of Doors! For the door is an entire cosmos of the Half-open. In fact, it is one of its
primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations:
the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent
beings. The door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of
daydream. At times, it is closed, bottled, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say, wide open.
But then come the hours of greater imagining sensibility. On May nights, when so many doors
are closed, there is one that is just barely ajar. We have only to give it a very slight push! The hinges
have been well oiled. And our fate becomes visible. And how many doors were doors of hesitation!"
Gaston Bachelard, the dialectics of outside and inside, in The poetics of space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969, page 223.

On the shelves of the library of her father, among his books, is an icon of Armenian Saint Mesrob, the inventor of alphabet, as well as a small painting of Mount Ararat. On the ground on the left is a picture of the Tatev Monastery located in the region of Goris in the Syunik' province in Armenia, while on the right is a picture of an Armenian Khatchkar.
Her mother died of ovarian cancer one month before this image was taken.

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

"Go up to Mount Nebo in Moab, across from Jericho, and view Canaan,
the land I am giving the Israelites as their own possession.
There on the mountain that you have climbed you will die".
Deuteronomy 32:49-50.

The grand-daughter of Sa'id Pasha Al-Mufti, of the Habjoqa, Sheikh of the Circassian of Jordan.

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

"As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest: It is reasonable
enough to assume that words alone don't change reality.
But changes in our conceptual system do change what is real
for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those
perceptions. Metaphors establish mappings according to which future
interventions are shaped in potent acts of self-fulfilling prophecy."
Geoff King, Mapping the void, St. Martin Press, 1996, page 59.

Egolessness is a textual digital interactive installation designed to be indebted (nearly disappear) within a public library or a religious architecture. Based on actual open-source technology and researches on artificial intelligence the piece allows an individual to enter a "chat" with a seemly ubiquitous female entity (what Gilles Deleuze called a "becoming-other"). A Borgesian Self per excellence, being allegedly unsubordinated to time it is apolitical, ironical, and nearly speaks about religion as an art-related topic without ever being too openly opinionated. Ultimately, the piece aims to be a reflection on the attribution of identity, projection in communication and the danger of self-awareness: as Beckett pointed out in his writings, if communication is not possible, it is also inevitable.
Key aspects: handling of the past, construction of historiography, attribution of identity, submission to authority, etc.

Curated by André Werner and Joachim Seinfeld for Directors Lounge.

"Tandis que se dispersent les troupeaux stellaires,
puis rentrent dans leur parcage inconnu (...)"
Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Mesures du temps, in Presque-songes, Antananarivo, 1960, page 47.


Mesures du temps (installation view - 30 parrots, bird droppings, black paint, manufactured steel, bamboo - 3,66m x 3,66m x 5,66m)

1.- Installation composed of a bird cage of 3,66 cubic meters, assembled by a poor craftsman family in the slum of Antananarivo, inside which thirty green parrots endemic to the island of Madagascar were placed. The accumulation of their droppings over a month (the duration of the exhibit) slowly drew a milky way of shit into a square of black paint on the ground. The title is inspired by "translation from the night" of Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.
This bilingual poem of Andrianjafy Rabekotroka (1961-1993), also, I think:

Thank you to my assistants on this piece: Ralisonna, Randrianasolo, Randrianandrasana Élyzé, Razakandrainy Albert, Rakotondrasoa Émile, Rasolofoniaina Hajatiana, and their family.



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




Curated/initiated by Joël Andrianomearisoa.
Thank you to Bérénice Gulmann (Centre Culturel Français Albert Camus), and Patrice Sour.

The Madagascar Plan: from 1938 onward, before opting for their extermination, Nazi Germany seriously considered and nearly carried a plan to forcibly relocate the European Jewish population to the African island. In his Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East, Heinrich Himmler declared: "I hope that the concept of Jews will be completely extinguished through the possibility of a large emigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony." ¹

A form of traditional Malagasy oratory, kabary is based on the unhurried telling of ancestral proverbs, metaphors, and riddles, frequently in a dialogue using call and response addressed in high voice to an assembly. Originally used in public gatherings and political assemblies of a pre-literate era, the form has since evolved and been popularized, but it has kept its specific rules. Today, despite the rising literacy rate and the familiarity with different manners of speech, kabary is still considered necessary for communication during ritual events, and is also used widely in regular, day-to-day talk.
If one of the main rules of kabary is that the subject or point of the conversation can never be broached directly (and in some instances cannot be stated at all) one of the specificity behind the Holocaust was precisely that it was masterminded as to erase all traces of its occurring as it was taking place: the work is therefore intended as a verbal monument to what didn't happened (the arrival of six millions of jews on Madagascar).

While the mpikabary (kabary practitioners) of the Petsileo people in central Madagascar are supposed to be the best, there are many types of kabary: ceremony, burial, circumcision, history/memory, exhumation, marriage, engagement, inauguration, apologize, etc.
This verbal monument (3 hours in length once included the important preliminary discussions) therefore gathered 10 Petsileo mpikabary for a Tsiok'afo kabary (litt. "blow on the fire" - revive the fire stands here as a metaphor for reviving the memory), a kabary of memory.

Their names were:

• The elders: Ndriamasolo Gabriel Pierre, Razafimandimby Daniel, Ralahy Ignace Delphin.
  
• The adults: Ramasy Alphonse, Randriamamdimby Alphonse, Rakotonirina Jean-Baptiste Dieu-Donné, Rakotonirina Dieu-Donné.
  
• The youngsters: Ratahirinirina Jean-Charles Angelot, Ranirina Nomenjanahary Lidrient, Ratsimbarinony Charles Narcisse.
  
  Project funded and supervised by Fabrice Mongiat, Appui au Bilinguisme à Madagascar (ABM: Malagasy sy Frantsay Miara - Miasa).
  Thank you to Mrs Ramamanarisoa Voahangininina and Mrs Randrianarivony Sahondra (translation/interpreters), and the Alliance Française of Fianarantsoa.
  
  1/ Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
  
  
  

"Animism is an intellectual system,
the first complete theory of the world".
Sigmund Freud, Totem and tabou.

After a day in the village, I explained the metragram series to the Betsileo elders, and asked the permission to work on a metragram with a Betsileo woman.
They lold me that it would be difficult (of course). That is always what I am told when I ask men about the feasability for this work within their community. I interpret this as the willing to defend what is (knowingly or unknowingly) ultimately sacred to any group: the womb. Perhaps to help me feel better, each of them nevertheless asked to take a picture of a previous work with them for the night, to think about it.
The next day, a faithful policeman who heard about my intentions came to me and told me he wanted to help, "because the womb need to be emphasized" he said, "there are too many women who abort lightly, and god wouldn't agree. Meet me tomorrow, a female friend wants to do it. She wants to heal her womb."

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.
Thank you to Isabelle Cirocka (Polish: Iza Cirocka, Kashubian: Jizka Cërockô), and Andrzej Hoja.

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

"Même un paysage tranquille, même une prairie avec des vols
de corbeaux, des moissons et des feux d'herbe, même une route où passent
des voitures, des paysans, des couples, même un village pour vacances, avec une
foire et un clocher, peuvent conduire tout simplement à un camp de concentration."
Première phrase de Nuit et brouillard de Jean Cayrol, éd. Fayard, 1997

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Mariusz Soltysik and Aurelia Mandziuk (PATIO Centrum Sztuki).

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

Dan liever de lucht in #1 (Installation view - 3 scuba divers, Belgian flag, underwater propeller and camera)

. . . .

Zwanze Brabançonne (installation view - carpet cut-out, anagrammed composition, 16m x 8m) . . . .


Exhibition scheduled in the Belgium embassy in Tokyo before its demolition on the 16th of November (towards rebuilding).
It was split and simultaneously pursued in Lokaal01 gallery in Breda/The Netherlands.
These details reflect the fact that at the time of the show Belgium didn't had a government since 142 days and was allegedly on the verge of collapse, and that the United Kingdom of the Netherlands was the Nation from which Belgium took its independence in 1830 (Which itself took it from the First French Empire 15 years before, etc). In effect, the riots leading to the independance of Belgium in 1830 were inspired by the presentation of a French opera (La Muette de Portici) for the birthday of a Dutch king (Guillaume 1st).
Dan liever de lucht in (which translate in "Rather to blow up, then") are supposedly the last words of Dutch national hero Jan Van Speyk (or Van Speijk) as he blown everything altogether in a kamikaze gesture by firing a barrel of gunpowder on his boat when besieged by a mob of Belgian revolutionaries in the port of Antwerp, as they asked him to put down the Dutch flag of his vessel on February 5th, 1831.

Works exhibited:

• Dan liever de lucht in #1 (performance-installation): A group of divers in full scuba diving suits appeared carrying a Belgian flag, and made their way through the building before "raising" it at the bottom of the sky-blue swimming pool of the embassy. In the space of 30 minutes the team, resembling cosmonauts in space, fixed an underwater propeller which simulated wind and an underwater camera oriented towards the sunken flag, then projected in real time on a large screen near the roof of the Embassy.
  
  
  
  
  
• Zwanze Brabançonne (installation): The first sentence from the "Brabançonne" (Song of Brabant, national anthem of Belgium) in its Dutch version was cut letters after letters straight out of the red carpet of the embassy second floor salon, before being subsequently nailed on the opposite wall, as an anagram in French language:
  
  

  o dierbaar België, o heilig land der vad'ren onze ziel en ons hart zijn u gewijd.	zwanze* déjà Belge jolie horde enhardie duel irrationnel zig-brigand : ovnis
  * Word which find its origin in the Brussels dialect: "Belgian humour" Joke, sort of over-done mystification, caracteristic of Brussels' humour (zwanzeur "joker" : in the writings of James Ensor, Discours de kermesse, page 100, 1899 [Bruxelles, éd. Sélection, 1921]).

  
  
  
  
  
  
• Dan liever de lucht in #2: stills from the video. (C-prints, 30x40cm)
  
• Abreaction in Leuven. (52' video, 2007)
  
• Metragram on a Walloon woman.
  
  Thank you to Jan de Bock and Malik Kusters (Trainspot.jp).

"Many Maghrebian and Sub-Saharanian peoples are today proud of being Belgians and
to have succeeded their integration. Personally, I have been able to witness the effects of
division in my country of origin, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
We aren't ready to accept the division of the kingdom".
Emmanuel Biniamu Nganga, Representative of the African Community of Belgium, quoted by
Pascal Airault, Touche pas à mon pays!, Jeune Afrique magazine, 23rd to 29th September 2007, no. 2437, page 22-23.


Dan liever de lucht in #2 (still form the video (52'),Ambatoroka cockfight arena, Madagascar, 2007)

This exhibit prolongs a simultaneous show in the premises of the Royal Belgian Embassy in Tokyo, Japan, before its dismantling (for reconstruction). The date of the opening of the show (November 16th) corresponded to the date the embassy's destruction was scheduled to start.

The piece was shot in the Ambatoroka neighbourhood of Antananarivo in Madagascar, where the artist organised a two hours cockfight in an arena chalked according to the map of Belgium. Each protagonists and the referee were wearing the three colours of the Belgian flag and coat of arm: "Sable a lion rampant or armed and langued gules" (black, yellow and red).



The region covered by Belgium today was labelled the "cockpit of Europe" in the past (James Howell, 1640) because it has been the site of more European battles than any other country on the continent (for example: Oudenarde, Ramillies, Fontenoy, Fleurus, Jemmapes, Ligny, Quatre Bras, Ypres, Mons, Waterloo, etc).

Dan liever de lucht in (which translate in "Rather to blow up, then") are supposedly the last words of Dutch national hero Jan Van Speyk (or Van Speijk) as he blown everything altogether in a kamikaze gesture by firing a barrel of gunpowder on his boat when besieged by a mob of Belgian revolutionaries in the port of Antwerp, as they were asking him to put down the Dutch flag of his vessel on February 5th, 1831.
History turns in a loop, as was, precisely, the video. I am reminded of an installation I did last year in Mitzpe Ramon in Israel on a runabout in 2006, while the Lebanese war was under progress, titled after one of Bertold Brecht dictum: human beings learn as much from catastrophes as laboratory rabbits learn about biology.

Works exhibited:

• Dan liever de lucht in #1: (2 C-prints, 40x50cm - installation views, Tokyo Royal Belgian embassy, 2007)
  
• Zwanze Brabançonne: (C-print, 170x100cm - installation view, Tokyo Royal Belgian embassy, 2007)
  
• Dan liever de lucht in #2: (52' video - looped, Ambatoroka cockfight arena, Antananarivo, Madagascar, 2007) + (2 C-prints, 40x50cm - Madagascar, 2007)
  
  Curated by Linda Hoo Hui Lan and Frederik Vergaert (Lokaal01).
  Thank you to Patrice Sour, Joël Andrianomearisoa and Bili Bidjocka.

I consider this artist talk to be a storytelling object. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Annie Fletcher and Charles Esche (Van Abbemuseum).

"A circle like vast space, lacking nothing, and nothing in excess."
Shinjinmei, written in the sixth century with reference to the Great Way of Zen.


Ensō (installation view - 11 "sumisuriki" machines, electricity, fluorescent light, water, air conditioning, darkness - 4m x 4m)

A sacred element of Zen Buddhism, the Ensō is a Japanese word meaning "circle" which is perhaps the most common subject of Japanese calligraphy, symbolizing altogether enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and the void; it is also an "expression of the moment". It is traditionally believed by many that the character of the artist is fully exposed in how he paints Ensō, and that only one who is mentally and spiritually whole can paint a true Ensō. They range in shape from perfectly symmetrical to completely lopsided and in brushstroke (sometimes two brushstrokes) from thin and delicate to thick and massive.

Note concerning the "sumisuriki" machines: from a historical and cultural perspective the moment of the preparation of the ink is commonly acknowledged in Chinese and Japanese calligraphy as a fundamental and initiating moment of the Way of the Brush. Preparing the ink traditionally took many hours, slowly rubbing in a repetitive, mind-emptying, circular gesture, the ink stick into a suzuri (ink stone) filled with water. Hence, the eleven "sumisuriki" machines used in this installation are rare objects which appeared in modern ages, where only few remain willing to prepare their ink for three hours or more in order to write for ten minutes. As an object, and a compromise, it -rather melancholically- incarnates the shock of modernity with tradition.

Participating artists:
Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Eric Van Hove, Mami Kosemura, Seiichiro Miida, Toshikatsu Endo, Toshiya Takahama, Toyomi Hoshina, Novaia Liustra, Hisaharu Motoda, Xu Bing, Wei Qingji, zhu jinshi, XuGuang Liu, Qin Chong, Shi Hui, Wang Tiande, Guan Huai Bin, Zhang Yu, Weiwei.

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Šejla Kamerić, Haris Pasovic (Academy of Drama, Sarajevo) and Asja Hafner (Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art).
Funded by "Step beyond" mobility fund / European Cultural Foundation.

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Nataša Djurović (Academy for fine Arts of Cetinje) and Svetlana Racanović.
Funded by "Step beyond" mobility fund / European Cultural Foundation.

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 labelled a Metragram and that consists of inscribing on the hypogastrium (womb) of a woman with monochromic black ink -- tabula rasa, pinakis agraphos. A Metragram is a symbolic (perhaps cathartic) inking of the origin of the world.

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

Seminar focused on the place of writing in my practice as a contemporary artist, and how it is articulated within the work.
I consider this artist talk to be a storytelling object. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Seminar directed by Michel Assenmaker.

(Exhibition view - Doctoral graduation group show, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music)

This artist talk is part of a larger series of discussions which should be considered storytelling objects. It used a number of earlier works and interventions -some unfinished or never even shown- as the base for a display of ideas and ruminations believed to be more meaningfully conveyed through stories. Maybe here the traveling contemporary artist is in some way similar to the Kamishibai of Japan who, between the two world wars, was telling from the back of his bike different stories based on a number of picture cards. We can also think of the bakhshi or Ashug of central Asia or the itinerant storytellers of africa (mikilist of the Congos, Griots of Mali, bards, ashiks, jyrau,...) who go from one village to the next, unfolding a story.

Starting from concrete examples (i.e. "Abreaction" intervention / Shanghai-2004, "A nos morts" intervention / Senegal-2005, or "Off the record" curating project / Tokyo-2006...) the talk attempted to show how the use of the "broader public space" -meaning the foreign public space- for artistic interventions pondering such ideas as statelessness or diasporism, can offer an appropriate catalyst for engaging with issues of today.

Talk invited by Roger McDonald and Yuko Ozawa (AIT).

Participating artists:
Joep van Lieshout, Jan Fabre, Moritz Ebinger, Seymour Likely, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Peter De Cupere, Maurice Carlier, Frans Van Praet, Christophe Broich, Hans De Pelsmacker, Dries Otten, Emiel Veranneman, Hannes Van Severen, Thijs Bakker, Sarah Pillen, Dirk Van Gogh, Peter Van Riet, Arne Quinze, Xavier Lust, Jurgen Oskamp, Dirk Wynants, Eric Van Hove, Louis De Cordier, Tim Volckaert, Chantal Grard, Bart De Zutter, Koen Van Mechelen, Frederik De Wilde, Geoffrey De Beer, Frank F. Castelyns.