Gare à la sécutité / Beware of security

I looked up at this rocky ledge, layers of quartzite extending between me and the sky above and descending straight down into the valley below. The weight of the wall made my head spin, threatening to overpower individual polar-fleece-clad bodies scrambling along a narrow walking path. I could picture the stone crushing everything in its’ wake. Mass deportation.

Twice the population of Sweden. Removed.

Feeling like this rock or Antony Gormley’s Space Station or Richard Serra’s steel could fall on me (but probably won’t).

But the hammer has fallen on others before. It’s falling 6,117 miles away and will fall here again soon enough (after all, I am a woman in a “red” state).

The Cheraw people, also known as the Saraw or Saura, were a Siouan-speaking tribe of Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands that called this mountain “Jomeokee”, meaning “great guide.” On my drive home, I saw a bumper sticker with the words “No one is illegal on stolen land.” I made my husband stop the car so that I could take a picture.

Katja Stuke. Fear. Nov. 2024

Diary drawing _ No.9043_ September 20th, 2024

Beware of security. It’s a two-sided, or even a three-sided coin.

Tails side. What a great programme! Universal social security. Because of insecurity, I, you, he, she suffers and often dies. Women, children, the disabled, workers, immigrants, civilians exposed to the terror that kills, starves, poisons and buries – they all want security.  They all thirst for security. No one can go to bed with the certainty that they will be alive in the morning’, writes a Gaza columnist.

The opposite side. The first, second and third concern of the besieged citadel or its reduced model, the villa in the jungle, is its own safety. The villa requires high fences, never high enough. Better yet, it must dissuade attackers who hide among the thickets and high branches. The security of some requires the caging of others, even their extermination. In Hebrew, ‘security’ is called ‘bitakhon’. ‘Security fence’ is Arabic for “apartheid wall”. To my ears, the three syllables bi-ta-khon shouted by a green man into a megaphone sound like the opening of the hunt. 

Security for all, young and old, has a name: peace based on law and justice. The strong dismiss this peace with disdain. He’ll never have enough guarantees, enough assurances, he says. The truth is that he has no intention of giving guarantees to the weak. There is no intention of placing limits on his power. ‘I have the right’, he says, in defiance of the law.

The security of some is not the security of others. Standard of reaction. Defenders of the established order versus the subversive. Investment security, owner security, institutional security. Security cameras, security guards, high-security prisons, forces of law and order, walls and barbed wire, patrols at sea. At this game, the dictator is always one step ahead. He does more than ensure security, he imposes it. To his exclusive benefit.

There would be a time. Security of the street you walk down at nightfall, of the road you cross, of what you eat, drink and breathe. Security in the soil that nourishes us all. Security for those who are thirsty, hungry, living in substandard housing or no housing at all, for those who cross seas and continents.

And then the security of the words we confide, the arms in which we cuddle.

Gare à la sécurité. C’est une pièce à deux faces, voire trois.

Côté pile. Quel beau programme ! Sécurité sociale universelle. Car de l’insécurité, je, tu, il, elle souffre et souvent meurt. La femme, l’enfant, l’infirme, l’ouvrier, l’immigrant, le civil exposé à la terreur qui tue, affame, empoisonne, ensevelit, tous réclament la sécurité.  Tous ont soif de sécurité. Personne ne peut se coucher avec la certitude qu’il sera vivant demain, écrit un chroniqueur de Gaza.

Côté face. La citadelle assiégée ou son modèle réduit, la villa dans la jungle a pour premier, second et troisième souci leur propre sécurité. La villa exige de hauts grillages, jamais assez hauts. Mieux, elle doit dissuader les assaillants qui se dissimulent parmi les fourrés et les hautes branches. La sécurité des uns exige la mise en cage des autres, voire leur extermination. En hébreu, « sécurité » se dit « bitakhon ». « Barrière de sécurité » se dit en arabe « mur de l’apartheid ». A mes oreilles, les trois syllabes bi-ta-khon crachées par un bonhomme vert dans un mégaphone sonnent comme l’ouverture de la chasse.  

La sécurité pour tous, grands et petits, porte un nom, la paix dans le droit, dans la justice. Cette paix-là, le fort l’écarte avec dédain. Il n’aura jamais assez de garanties, d’assurances, dit-il. Le vrai : il n’entend pas donner de garanties au faible. Pas question de poser des bornes à sa puissance. « J’ai bien le droit », dit-il, au mépris du droit.

La sécurité des uns n’est pas celle des autres. Étendard de la réaction. Tenants de l’ordre établi contre subversifs. Sécurité des investissements, sécurité du propriétaire, sécurité des institutions. Caméras de sécurité, agents de sécurité, prisons de haute sécurité, forces de l’ordre, murailles et barbelés, patrouilles en mer. A ce jeu, le dictateur a toujours une longueur d’avance. Il fait mieux qu’assurer la sécurité, il l’impose. A son bénéfice exclusif.

Il y aurait une fois. Sécurité de la rue qu’on emprunte à la nuit tombée, de la route qu’on traverse, de ce qu’on mange, boit, respire. Sécurité de la terre nourricière. Sécurité pour ceux qui ont soif, qui ont faim, qui vivent dans des logements insalubres ou pas de logement du tout, qui traversent les mers et les continents.

Et puis la sécurité des paroles que l’on confie, des bras où l’on se blottit.

Simon Fieschi est mort le 17 octobre à 40 ans. Il était le webmaster du journal satirique français Charlie Hebdo quand les terroristes sont venus tuer tous les dessinateurs le 7 janvier 2015. Il a pris la première balle tirée en pleine colonne vertébrale et a résisté  dix ans. Il s’est confronté avec humour et rage aux terroristes pendant les procès et était toujours aux côtés des victimes d’attentats. Je l’ai connu enfant. Puis grand, puis grand handicapé survivant.

Simon Fieschi  died on October 17, 2024 at the age of 40. He was the webmaster of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo when the terrorists came to kill all the cartoonists on January 7, 2015. He took the first bullet fired into his spine and resisted for ten years. He confronted the terrorists with humor and rage during the trials and was always by the side of the victims of attacks. I knew him as a child. Then as a grown-up, then as a disabled survivor.

Photography, 2024

Katja Stuke from the series CCTV, Toronto 2005

diary drawing _ Nr.8372_ December 12th, 2021

Tallin, Estonie 2024
What was left behind and what lies ahead, Tallin, Estonia 2024

The sculpture, ‘Wings’, commemorates those who died in the anti-Communist resistance in Romania and Bessarabia between 1945 and 1989. It replaces a statue of Lenin. The ‘House of the Free Press’ was the former headquarters of ‘The Spark’ newspaper. This ideological soup of rehashed symbols and random vehicles, cosmic idols and exhaust fumes clogs the senses.

Photography, 9/2024, parc IOR, Bucarest.

One should be able to photograph the smell of this place. A park that has become a crime
scene, the scene of multiple murders. When will the trial take place? Who will represent the
victims? Poisoned trees, burnt greenery, animal habitats reduced to ashes… Speculation,
concreting, making a profit, in one of Europe’s least breathable cities.
I met there Andreea. She told me how she fights, with dance, with words, with others.
May clovers soon grow on this soil, may bare feet caress them… Parc IOR»»

I took this photo in Asheville, North Carolina 10 months ago. 2 days ago, Hurricane Helene covered the River Arts District in rain and loss as flood waters swept through low-lying areas of the mountain town. I don’t know if the sign (or the bridge) is still standing.

I purchased a home for the first time in my life last summer. Or rather, the bank that sold me a loan purchased a Craftsman style Bungalow built in 1921 in Greensboro, North Carolina and I paid a (mostly borrowed) down payment. My father always said “You need to spend money to make money” but I’ve always avoided debt and “investment” like the plague; I moved across an ocean to a country with socialized medicine, among other reasons, to avoid ever being caught in a spiral of medical debt. I’ve never owned property before, never lived anywhere for more than 10 years, never felt comfortable enough to put down roots in a place by signing (almost) everything I own on the dotted line. Now this place belongs to me (to us, I bought it with my husband), according to the deeds and the assessors and the property records books. The bank takes money out of my account monthly and will continue to do so for 30 years. Until I’m past the age of retirement. I’m supposed to feel newfound freedom as a bonafide homeowner, but mostly, I feel that weight.

Diary drawing_ No.8924_ February 7th, 2024

Whilst making this piece I thought about the values of materials and the perceived values, about fragility, permanence and impermanence, warmth and cold, use and non-use, the real monetary cost, the perceived liveliness and deadness of different materials. Others thought of making sweets as a child, pouring hot sugar into boxes and of frosted mornings— a sort of memory trigger.

Inside this worn, much handled and shipped box there is crystal, optical crystal, I think I remember the code LF5 from Schott, not the glass everywhere, like windows or screens. When I began working with glass, and historically, crystal had to have 24% lead in order to call it that, it was softer to cut— now lead is banned.

To get it lying there like a glove matching the textures and layers, involved making a mould, from cardboard to dental alginate, then an investment mould made from ground quartz, gypsum, china clay, water, and then the glass is slowly melted inside the mould. Value or cost in labour, time, technical knowledge, manual skill, electricity, materials, studio rent, memories and finally a value in the gallery. The box and crystal now have the same status.

Katja Stuke. No title.

Dividendum 1, 2024 photography

Or pathological debt avoidance

Garder ton souffle pour refroidir ton bouillie

Ou évitement pathologique des dettes

Voice-over and subtitles to come… …

Voix off et sous-titre à venir… …

I’d gladly Pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. 

Je vous paierais volontiers mardi pour un hamburger aujourd’hui.

Champtoceaux 49, France

Head to Head Blue. Drawing ink, chalk, pencil, on paper.

“Say the words ‘I feel safe’.”
I searched for the feeling in the dark but was unable to identify it.
“ I know security and safe enough,” I answered.
I think about small rabbits in a warren, still nothing.

We arrive at Wakehurst Kew, walking and examining this Septembers seed pods and seed heads on trees and plants. The official seed bank is also here – a concrete underground space. I think about the little banks hanging on the trees. We have come to a place of safety and saving.

I remember the drawing I saved for 35 years. Then I had been thinking ‘I was in you before you were born’ about embryos holding future eggs, a weird seed bank. I wanted to feel close to feel safe.

Excerpt from the secret image bank of Jeddah Diary, Nov-Dec 2023Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Before I joined The Crown Letter, my work primarily focused on events or incidents related to my Japanese background and history. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have had the opportunity to engage with women artists from Europe, South America, India, and Japan through the Crown Salon, held every Tuesday. We publish our works on the web every week. This project has significantly changed my mindset. We exchanged a wide range of views on daily life during the pandemic, current affairs, art creation, and the art scene from a woman’s perspective, and reflected these views in our thoughts. It was a new experience for me to work exclusively with women, and it was very refreshing.
While addressing feminist topics such as breast cancer, the anti-abortion movement, International Women’s Day, and women’s rights within the collective, I have searched for topics related to women that I could explore further for my own projects. In the spring of 2022, I met Sally, a Saudi Arabian painter originally from Jeddah. As our friendship and discussions deepened, I realized that the attitudes toward life of women in Japan and Saudi Arabia had many similarities. In both Europe and Asia, Saudi Arabia is primarily known for its Islamic religion, oil resources, and deserts; other aspects remain mysterious and are not well-known. Images of Saudi women are often shrouded in veils. I became interested in exploring this hidden part and creating a video work that tells the stories of women with diverse backgrounds.
In November 2023, with a grant from the Allotment Travel Award, I finally traveled to Jeddah, the second-largest city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. During my three-week stay, I filmed every day. I would like to share with you an excerpt from the secret image bank that I accumulated during that time.
It is no exaggeration to say that this project is also made by my participation in The Crown Letter. I would like to thank Natacha and all of the members of this project.

Katja Stuke. No title.

C’est la 200 ème semaine que nous existons, avons ouvert une fenêtre qui ne se referme jamais. Ici c’était dans l’atelier d’Emma W. un de ces quatre étés que nous avons partagé. Garder cette fenêtre d’atelier d’artiste ouverte sur l’horizon, le monde, me permet d’y assembler les pensées infinies inestimables, les utopies infinies inestimables, les espoirs infinis inestimables, les combats infinis inestimables, les formes infinies inestimables, les sentiments infinis inestimables, les désirs infinis inestimables. Cette fenêtre est comme une page d’écriture mais aussi comme un coffre-fort ouvert, qui peut contenir & offrir tout l’infini inestimable.

This is the 200th week that we’ve existed, opened a window that never closes. Here it was in Emma W. studio, one of those four summers we shared. Keeping this artist’s studio window open to the horizon, to the world, allows me to assemble the priceless infinite thoughts, the priceless infinite utopias, the priceless infinite hopes, the priceless infinite struggles, the priceless infinite forms, the priceless infinite feelings, the priceless infinite desires. This window is like a page of writing, but also like an opened safe, that can contain & offer all the priceless infinite.

I lay down on the grass to look upwards and caught sight of swallows darting about high up above. They reminded me of all the other swallows I have watched – north, south, east and west. They fly everywhere. I love them.

Katja Stuke, Prepare. Paris 2024

single channel HD video, 2 mins 12 secs, 2024

My friend wrote to me yesterday: “Where are you my sea?”

« En-semblables», 21×29,7cm, Papercut, Adagp2024, All Rights reserved 2024.

Neringa Naujokaite Sets of Typefaces and Matrices, 2024, photography

Katja Stuke, A tree in Lwiw
Google Street View 2015
June 22, 2024

Katja Stuke Tokyo Happy Shibuya Station, Tokyo 2019
from: Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber »La ville invisible«

These brown mists which invade our world, overwhelm ideals and freedoms, these brown mists which veil our continents all the way to the moon, these brown mists which are darkness of death. Have we reached the bottom of inhumanities and totalitarianism to rebuild a new world?

Diary of Eve’s Land is a video installation project encompassing 5 short films. It tells the stories of 5 Saudi women, and their daily struggles to balance the expectations of conservative society with their own personal aspirations. They are a divorced psychologist, a pediatrician, a nursing student, a manager of a startup IT company and an immigrant girl who can not go out without her father’s permission. Even though there are restrictions in all of their environments, each character describes how she thinks about her life and profession. Jeddah, the second biggest city of the country, which I visited in fall 2023, is undergoing rapid development, with new contemporary buildings appearing day by day under the stream of the government project “Saudi Vision 2030”. This stream has been improving the position of women in society and has been changing radically over the past years. Encountering them brought me continuous surprise, and I discovered unknown aspects of this country which are still hidden from our European and Asian perspective. I stayed there for 3 weeks between November and December 2023. This project has been selected by the Allotment Travel Award by a Japanese foundation in 2023. 

It was Sally who first told me about the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. I remember her telling me: 
– It comes from جدة, Jaddah, the Arabic word for “grandmother” and also this name would come from the fact that Eve, considered the grandmother of Humanity, would be buried in Jeddah. 

I met Sally in the spring of 2022, during her artist residency in Paris. Sally is a painter as well as an architect, and works for a Saudi agency on an equal footing with her male colleagues. Sally then introduced me to her friends and one of her sisters. Zeina, Asmaa, Rouaa were graphic designers, psychiatrists, … Their presence and vision of life shifted my preconceived ideas of this country. I also saw similarities with Japan, where I come from. What all these women had in common was that they came from Jeddah. 

The starting point for my artistic work is events and encounters of my personal life, my intimate life even. A conversation with Sally about marital pressures in Saudi Arabia reminds her of the similarities with Japan, particularly in terms of framed expectations about our roles and futures. 

Sally once told me that her sister didn’t want to return to Saudi Arabia. She had just obtained a PhD in psychiatry in the United States, and had a beautiful career ahead of her back home, but she felt she was too old to have any hope of finding a husband. It was a question I had also asked myself in 2013, the year I graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Montpellier. I replied: 

– In Japan, it’s the same thing, at 33 you’re an old maid! The best I can hope for over there is an old man or an idiot. And he would have asked me every day why I was still studying!

L’arbre noir – Black tree

Un poignard pour scier les barreaux de ta cellule, un poignard pour mettre fin à ta vie prisonnière, un poignard pour aiguiser ta révolte, un poignard pour fendre ta solitude, un poignard pour graver les jours qui passent, pour écrire, pour blesser, pour te défendre, pour crier en silence, pour donner à voir ton vrai visage, pour avouer tout le sang coulé, pour le faire couler encore, un poignard en lame de résistance.

A dagger to saw the bars of your cell, a dagger to put an end to your prisoner life, a dagger to sharpen your revolt, a dagger to break through your solitude, a dagger to engrave the days that pass, to write, to wound, to defend yourself, to scream in silence, to show your true face, to admit all the blood shed, to make it flow again, a dagger as a blade of resistance.

My sister, friend,

 said she was feeling sad

through a WhatsApp message,

sitting in Delhi,

occupying the last few days 

offered to her by the house

 she used to live in

for the last 5 years.

I had returned from a hot day  at my institute

to the shade at home in Palakkad

craving some ice cream.

I ordered  for her a cassatta ice cream

and a nice body wash,

whose smell reminded me of 

a very old smell of oil,

through a delivery app.

My partner and I are returning to our small town

the following week,

on a highway,

from a big city;

he remarked that there are too many trucks on the road

since these online delivery companies

have taken over the world.

My friend felt very touched when she received the ice-cream,

she told me on a video call immediately after.

She shared it with her friend,

and forgot to share a picture with me.

I felt happy too.

What did people do before the time of telephones?

Would the sadness have disappeared 

by the time a letter reached the other side of the country?

Maybe women of a certain age could never  be alone.

Maybe women did not talk to other women who were not family.

Maybe loving vicariously and getting hurt by someone never existed beyond a secret.

Maybe they all deserved cassatta ice creams without delivery apps

We all deserve cassatta ice creams, despite delivery apps.

Cassatta icecreams, shaped like a rainbow, but not with all colours in it…

Another friend texts me, she is a mother too;

She asks me how I am taking everything,

that is happening in another part of the world

Gaza

She cannot go by a day without it shaking her

I recently went through a surgery

I lay awake the whole of last month

after the surgery

Now  there is embodied pain and real wounds in my uterus

to blame my sleeplessness for

What will happen when I heal?

Will nightmares of Gaza cease?

Will nightmares of impending election results stop?

I have not replied to my friend yet.

Two kittens— white and grey and white and ginger

 sleep peacefully on the net by my bedroom balcony.

They have grown up here on the roof;

Their multicoloured mother has not taken them down to  the earth

keeping them safe, until she will not return one day.

They will sleep until the next moment;

it is raining;

thunder will strike soon.

They are always anxious

not knowing what to expect next from this world

They sleep, yet.

Katja Stuke, geography of the body 2022

oil on canvas, 58 x 56 cm, 2024

No doubt it was necessary for the whole world, for not a single part of our world to be representable for me to have the idea of ​​making a postcard. There was there, in this unique moment, a semblance of peace, of plenitude, without anyone, and at the same time a theatricality reduced to beach deckchairs representing the human horde. In front of these empty beach chairs, I wondered how many of us would still be alive this summer of 2024. So, on the back of the postcard I would have written: “Dear sky, dear mountains, dear sea, thank you for still offering us your landscape as the world burns and humanity shrinks. I am now sky, mountains, sea, sand and belong to you”.

Devant la mer devenue rose, peu de temps après la tragédie, alors que l’incendie qui a ravagé la ville de Lahaina est à peine éteint, je pense à cette phrase extraite du poème de Etel Ednan, Time : “sometimes I regret my love of splendor”. Ce n’est peut-être pas l’amour des choses splendides qui me hante, mais le désir d’apprivoiser les fantômes.

In front of the sea, which has turned pink, shortly after the tragedy, when the fire that ravaged the town of Lahaina has barely been extinguished, I think of this phrase from Etel Ednan’s poem Time: ‘sometimes I regret my love of splendor’. Perhaps it’s not the love of splendid things that haunts me, but the desire to tame ghosts.

Katja Stuke, geography of the body Osaka Street View, 2024