Filed under: Blogroll
http://sidselnelund.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/blogck/
Filed under: Blogroll
Dear readers,
Yesterday he told me that I was so important to him, that if I didn’t call him by Wednesday he would never talk to me again. I didn’t even know that he existed. This is why I am addressing you these thoughts, in case it was important that I didn’t.
I have been absent, and still am. Ideas have been there, things to write about as well ; on reading out loud, on the economy of give and take, on walid raad’s last show in beirut, on parallel engagements.. although she can’t do anything about it except being suffocated by these thoughts. She started developing affection towards them, like imaginary friends.
Each word can open up a multitude of possibilities, but she doesn’t have the strength to follow any of them. She can’t project at the moment and can’t make love. Try to pinch me, I would have to think before I feel anything. Her words and her breath are breaking up, her skin is mutating, her hormones are masculine.
She is renegotiating her voices, trying to shut some and let the convulsive joy flow again.
I don’t remember the time it ever did, but she does and I believe her.
I don’t have to do anything, just shut up. In this white nebulous period, there are some distant rhythms playing a perverse game with her heart beats. When I loose my breath, she dives deep inside to catch it back with her teeth. I would have to kiss her to get it back.
” Well, then. It is not so much a question of scientific knowledge. Nor certainly can it be a question of confidence in writing. There are certain things that force your hand. You find yourself incontrovertibly obligated: something occurs prior to owning, and more fundamental still than that of which any trace of empirical guilt can give an account. This relation-to whom? to what? – is no more and no less than your liability-what you owe before you think, understand, or give; that is, what you owe from the very fact that you exist, before you can properly owe. You do not have to do (emphasis of the text) anything about your liability, and most finitudes don’t. Still, it copilots your every move, planning your every flight, and it remains the place shadowed by the infinite singularity of your finitude. The obligation that can force your hand ressembles something of a historical compulsion: you are compelled to respond to a situation which has never as such been addressed to you, where you can do no more that run into an identificatory impasse. Nonetheless, you find yourself rising to the demand, as if the weight if justice depended upon your inconsequential advance. “
Avital Ronell, Crack Wars, p.57-58
“Pour un jeune garcon, la rencontre avec d’autres personnes est fondamentale: celles-ci peuvent changer le cours de sa vie. Quelsques-unes sont comparables a des aerolites, morceaux opaques qui a un moment ou un autre peuvent heurter la Terre en provoquant d’enormes degats; et d’autres sont pareilles a des cometes, des astres lumineux porteurs d’elements vitaux. J’eus la chance providentielle, a cette epoque, de rencontrer des etres qui enrichirent ma vie, des cometes benefiquent. Je pus egalement en voir d’autres, qui meritaient autant que moi un destin creatif, tomber dans la compagnie de rapaces qui les conduisirent a l’echec et a la mort, des aerolites”
Alexandro Jodorowsky, La danse de la realite.
This is the story of an image that moved from place to place, met different people and looked through different windows. Now it’s time to leave she said, but before doing so she would like to share with you some of the episodes of her journey through different rooms.
She found me, I think, among her stuff. I was made for a passport renewal, or for a visa (it might have been the renewal of her Venezuelan passport, or her student visa for London. It was in winter I remember and she was wearing this red-brownish lipstick that she still has, use to suit her although now she prefers to go for plain red. The other three of me are lost, who knows where. I don’t miss them anyways, and if they would have been here, I probably wouldn’t).
He asked if he could keep me but she said no. I got scared for a while, I mean, although he had some good records, I didn’t want to leave her now. But I met him again in her room (see entry push and pull)
this time, he looked like me but, as usual, he always had to do the big show and look dramatic; he was covered with trees and had a gun in his mouth, or in his other mouth. His eyes looked the same though, as if he just had seen something and had stopped for a while, apprehensive but inviting.
We stayed together for some time. She had decided that in that white frame, we belonged to each other. Then C. came along. Things were a bit breathless with him. C. asked if he could have me, and again she said no. This time I was really happy. I wouldn’t have like to stay in C.’s room, wallet, drawer even worse. Although he was nice, I don’t think things would have worked out with him.
We came back together and ended up in a beautiful new room. with this view.
she decided that me and him should stay together, in that same white frame until she saw Jacques Doillon’s movie, Une femme qui pleure, and realized that hippy love is sometimes sick that it was better to close windows to be able to open up others. That was Fin de Copenhage .
“Parmis les etres qu’il a pu rencontre sur sa route, cinq personnes seulement ont pu frapper son esprit « ceux l’a, je ne pourrai jamais les oublier, dit il » (Guy Debord -or was it Gitte? - and Asger Jorn). Wasn’t quite convinced. She changed her screen savor and decided to remove his photographs. It felt good because my corners were starting to slightly bent while he was comfortable behind his shinny glass.
Then S. came to Beirut and showed her the ID picture of her Jan Van Eyck application. She really liked it. S. had a kind of 20’s or 30′ s
“yo takin’ to me ” Look. Witty and elegant, always. We stayed on the table together for a while. She wanted us to stay next to each other but didn’t want to put us in a frame. The table was the closest object she had and she would look at it everyday, almost.
Until she finally decided to go to Istanbul to meet this window view. He was standing at the corner. Patient with a small smile and gentle eyes, waiting as well.
She needed a visa, although she thought that after 500 years of domination, Turkey should not ask for visas, but that is not what the ministry of foreign affairs said. She got this letter.
So I’m leaving now, with this letter renewing Lebanon’s friendship to Turkey. I’m going to end up on a visa for Istanbul. Nice destination. Her parents were living there before she was born and she recalls that her mother use to talk about Turkey as if she was very much in love at that time. I will miss her but I think that it’s time to go. And to all the people that wanted me, if I would have stayed with you, I wouldn’t have been able to tell this story. Sometimes it’s good to switch image and change haircut (I don’t think she will ever have that fringe again).
Filed under: Beirut notes
Maybe this is too big of a title for I want to say…
I am presently following the installation of some works for the upcoming forum in Beirut, Homeworks (www.ashkalalwan.org).
On of the works on show is a new sculptural installation that we are actually building on site. We had to take a choice today regarding the entrance passage of the work. We were hesitating between 50 cm and 60 cm . 50 would have looked better in relation to the work. Then we stared thinking about fat people and thought 50 was discriminatory. But what was partly determinant in conceiving the lenght of the passage is the fact, the builder said, that for toilets in private home, the minimum requested in 58 cm (and this is if you play around with some law regulations). We opted for 60cm.
I don’t want to associate the entrance to these two spaces, (although some art do have this appeal!), but I am interested in thinking the dichotomies between what is considered “private” and “public”, what laws regulate these distinctions, what politics.
Filed under: 98 weeks research project
This is to say that the 98 weeks research project is definitely launched ! (www.98weeks.org). Our first workshop will be lead by the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa and will revolve around the theme of the “ruin” in the city. The workshop will last 1 week and will take place at the beginning of September 2008 in Beirut To discuss the topic of the ruin in Beirut, we are organizing reading groups for people interested in participating to the workshop . If you are interested in the project and would like to take part in the reading group or/and to the workshop, let me know.
Filed under: Beirut notes
These are some fragments of thoughts and conversations I had with some people since I arrived to Beirut. Maybe I’m too lazy to develop them, but that is also because the article I wrote on Chantal Mouffe scared me, it is so boring. I guess that I haven’t found the balance yet (love libranation !), my thoughts are ahead and my body behind. I’m trying to bring things together, but it ain’t easy. So instead of developing melancholic, long and boring texts, I’ll stick to these pieces, write them down.
Some of these notes also stand in the title’s three dots. Several fashionable academic texts and ideas I have come across during this last year became almost ridiculous when seen through particular contexts (I’m referring to Lebanon) and so clearly the thrills of bored academics looking for new challenge.
There is no distance; this is the challenge for critical thought
Boredom is so creative
Big time/ small time
You wish you had a normal life, but you are an artist
The time of your life, of your child, is the time
The relation between the practice of the everyday and the disaster
Who sets the time and the space?
Chronotopia/dystopia/utopia
Hegemonic artistic community
The artist as “state” intellectual
Elitist populist
What is a public sphere?
What else to do but to exploiting misery, says the cool architect, (I think she is right)
Laboratory for whom?
Multitude, self-organization, bottom top, blablabla
If it’s not linear time, then what?
“Cute” is necessary
Our intimacy is not forced
There is no ruin here
Smoking as a private act
Creating rituals and private chronotopias
Thanking god that Sara is here
Missing u so much so much
Filed under: Beirut notes
(During the last French presidential election,I asked him why he didn’t vote. I don’t remember his answer but he meant to say it was pointless and asked me why he should do it. I answered him that he should do it as a romantic act).
My dad is a man of principles. That’s what they say. He served his country during 25 years, representing as well as he could. People would have talked about him as a refined, well-informed discrete and generous person. My father also stood for what he believed in.one of these things was his country Lebanon. Through the civil war, and whatever shaky regime was in place, through tribal violence and exacerbated confessionalism, my father tried to stand by the state. 20 years later, this ridiculously ghostly word hasn’t become more tangible; I don’t think it will ever be, never was.
On the national day, the flag was on, no matter what. The first song he taught me was the Lebanese national anthem (to his great joy, I would sing in his office, next to his flag, my hand next to my front in a military posture, dressed in these lovely embroided dresses my mother would buy me). I now see my father’s attachment, his own religion, with a lot of tenderness; his adherence to the belief in a state, romantic (that’s maybe just a way of rationalizing what is not rational). Representing his country the way he did, high social exposure, linking with the super bourgeoisie and their life style, being always dedicated and respectful of the law, fulfilling a function because he had to. What remains are the friends he always had and country in protracted civil war.
So how do you represent a nation-state that does not exist? Again, one can question how does a nation state exist? Can the representation of a non existing state make visible the ghostly nature of every form of nation state, can it provide a way to rethink the nation, its representation, constitution, etc etc, or is it just fuck up, because at the end of the day, you do need a nation state in order to “exist” for the country’s population as well as in the international arena.
Again, here it becomes a delicate balance of power (I still think that diplomatic representation is however interesting because you represent an abstraction through your person, body, smile, suits and cocktail parties).
She said that Beirut should be on the map and that she didn’t sleep because of that. She wanted to make a point by carrying out this event. I follow this point. I follow that one should keep on doing whatever one is doing, until it gets impossible. I not only understand carrying this through, I find it necessary. Again I find myself in a liminal space, an almost stupid place where the carrying through can either be seen as a heroic act, or a blind act. For whom are you doing it? And for what? How would these reasons take shape and circulate? If there is love involved, what kind of love are we talking about and how does this love gets represented? (my father’s love for Lebanon, her love for Beirut, his love for a lost one).
(He said that he was fed up with his fancy furniture and that he wanted a comfortable place with a built in heater).
