The soil on my plot is rich and black. As I dug it for the first time last year I uncovered odd pieces of bone and brick, crushed metal and plastic, then long reels of exposed 35mm camera film, buried in the ground. I pulled out these crooked ribbons entangled with soil. I thought of my own cartridges of un-developed films twenty five years old, coalescing back to their original darkness. Of how I had always put off getting them developed, how I feared seeing the images that I had shot, leaving that encounter until later, and later, and too late, until the images would have quietly closed over once more. I still have those film cartridges and now I cannot develop them for the proof of disappearance would be too definite. I would have to confront the dark unreadable space of losses incurred by obstinate deferral. I like the thought that some traces of past light might still lie inside the coils of film, hidden from view, but I do not want to disrupt them. I thought of the way that sometimes things can’t be said, or depicted, for a long time. Gestation is an unknown quantity, it demands darkness, hiddenness, but this can be overdone, risking the permanent obliteration of the image, oblivion.
Vues de l’avion, la ligne droite est une courbe et la planète est un tout où tout se tient, souvent la tête en bas. Seen from an aircraft, the straight line is a curve and the planet is a whole where everything fits together, often upside down.
Theodosia means gift of God. The city is ancient, founded by Greeks in the 6th Century BC. Crimea has always been desirable, and was settled by Khazars, Tatars, Greeks, Genoese, Russians and Ukrainians, and many others too. Theodosia is the port from which the Black Death was carried to the rest of Europe by sailors. I took this photograph on a hot summer’s evening in Quarantine, the oldest surviving neighbourhood of the Genoese city.
Looking at this picture now I wonder what happened to the boy who was reaching to the sky, swinging and balancing, beautifully poised in his element. The sky was so blue it felt like a substance you drown in. A little over a year after I took the picture Crimea was seized almost bloodlessly by Russia, and annexed. This was the beginning of the war that was kept at arms-length by the rest of the world, hoping it would just go away. The Russian invasion of Ukraine twelve days ago has shocked the world, although those who have lived through and been traumatised by the eight years of fighting in the Russian occupied territories, in Donetsk and Luhansk, were perhaps not surprised.
The boy in the photograph is now old enough to be fighting and could be on either side.
“And I learned how faces crumble, Under the eyelids, how anguish emerges, And the pain is etching on the tablets of the cheeks, Similar to the rough pages of cuneiform signs; How black curls or ash curls Become, in the twinkling of an eye, silver, How laughter fades on dark lips, And, in a dry little laugh, how fear trembles. And I pray to God, but it’s not just for me, But for all who share my fate, In the fierce cold, in the torrid July, In front of the red wall gone blind.” Anna Akhmatova, Requiem.
I did this just before the nightmare started. And this is what the city park looks like… Surrealism has conquered this one city. This is a portal… at night aliens come out and wander about the empty city (a local joke)
The events of 1939 should have been a lesson to everybody. This is especially true now when an impossible new war has begun. Here is an excerpt of my film Looking for a Fatal Dystopia (1939). Documentaries of that time show us an utopia of peaceful life with aeronauts conquering stratosphere, and everyday life with athletic parades and military exercises. Meanwhile, nearby the real fightings are already happening, and tension is growing everywhere on the threshold of the global war. This film uses the materials of the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive (RGAKFD) for 1939.
Difficile de traduire le présent, je ne peux que tenter de retracer les derniers jours et tisser quelques liens entre les choses.
Le mercredi 23 février je prends l’avion de Paris pour Prague.
Le lendemain, le jeudi 24 février, les nouvelles nouent l’estomac, focalisent toutes pensées sur l’invasion de l’Ukraine par Poutine.
Avant de partir, j’ai relu Europeana, une brève histoire du 20.siècle, de Patrik Ourednik. J’ai un étrange sentiment d’être restée dans le livre. Une phrase particulièrement me revient : « Et les Russes disaient que l’Europe allait à sa perte et que les catholiques et les protestants l’avaient complètement corrompue et ils proposaient de chasser les Turcs de Constantinople et de rattacher l’Europe à la Russie afin de sauvegarder la foi.»
Le jeudi soir je retrouve Simona, avec qui j’ai pris le même vol la veille. C’est son anniversaire et je suis désolée que la date soit aujourd’hui si dure à porter. Elle nous invite à voir une pièce de théâtre sur Jan Patočka -un des principaux philosophe tchécoslovaques et signataire de la Charte 77- qui parle de sa tragique fin dû aux interrogatoires brutales de la police en 1977. La représentation théâtrale de l’histoire est recouverte par un brouillard de l’actualité.
To read more (+Czech and English version) : https://www.calameo.com/books/007014644e92386313865
I filmed this in Odessa in 2012. The original work was shown in a wooden structure inspired by Gustav Kliutsis’s drawings. The title comes from Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein.
major seaport and formerly headquarters of the Imperial Russian fleet. It is famous for its Jewish heritage, its humour, its writers and its counterpart on New York City’s Brighton Beach.
Sergei Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin celebrates a famous mutiny in 1905, a precursor to the Russian Revolution of 1917, showing the solidarity of the Odessan citizens with the brave sailors rising up against their oppressors. This film has one of the most famous scenes in cinema, of Imperial Cossack guards shooting the onlookers who are cheering the sailors of the Potemkin.
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There has always seemed to me to be something friendly, comforting about moss, its springy, water saturated gentleness — so I did not feel threatened by this mass occupation of the pavement, although it was strange. I felt at home with these small creatures, reassured by their presence on the wet stone, by their proliferation, even. Up in the studio, I saw that the moss on the parapet outside my window had certainly diminished. Many of the larger lumps had taken flight, descended to the pavement, and there were bare gaps where once there had been bouncy hillocks of green. But I trust that they will grow back deep and soft, and cover the stone once more, keeping their company.
Magazine ELLE. Citations d’Une Femme mariée par Jean-Luc Godard, 1964.
Marcelle Ségal (8), une femme mariée
Dans les archives de ma grand-tante, classeur Collaborations diverses 1964, je trouve le scénario d’Une Femme mariée et une lettre de Jean-Luc Godard.
“Paris, le 19 juin 1964. Jean-Luc Godard à Mme Marcelle Ségal.
Chère madame,
Voici la lettre que l’héroïne de mon prochain film est supposée vous écrire ainsi que nous en avions bavardé ensemble il y a quelques jours ; en fait il y a deux lettres. Ces deux lettres ont été écrites par Mademoiselle Macha Méril qui jouera le rôle principal. Je lui ai dit de les écrire telles qu’elle les sentait elle-même, en tant que Macha Méril, mais dans la situation du personnage du film. A mon avis, seule la lettre n°1 doit être prise en considération. […] Il nous faudrait votre réponse vers la fin de la semaine prochaine afin de pouvoir la faire imprimer en accord avec le bureau de Mme Gordon-Lazareff. Vous pouvez toujours me joindre à mon bureau […] Sentiments distingués. Jean-Luc Godard.”
My daughter LK received it as a gift from my friend LK , and we made this puzzle together during the first lockdown. Sun was shining bright in Paris at this time, and we had just to watch spring coming, remember ? Since then, this is our personal sunshine made from puzzling times, dedicated to Michelle D. : Spring is coming again, soon.
The orientation of the temples must have been determined by certain stars, whose position in the sky changed over time, and this orientation was so quintessential that the temples of the earlier complexes had to be re-erected several times. It was not dilapidation that motivated the repeated construction work, but a religious necessity to follow the stars in the orientation of the temples. This is explained by the temples having been rebuilt upon old foundations, a thing which can be proved to have occurred.
The choir meets once or twice a week to sing traditional folk songs from Pinega. They gather in each others’ homes to rehearse and enjoy food and company. Like sisters, like the Crown sisters, they keep each other going and make art together. Some of them are in fact cousins from the same village. They have been on tour to Norway and elsewhere but mostly sing in Archangel. One of them had just got married and invited me to the feast. I look forward to feasting again (and maybe even singing) with my Crown sisters in the spring.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/673962044?h=208649b245&dnt=1&app_id=122963 Feuilleton of spinning swinging wishing Girls XXVI – Property of Michelle Deignan
Saint Agatha, detail from a painting of Francisco de Zurbarán Saint Agatha bearing her severed breasts on a platter, by Piero della Francesca (c. 1460–1470) Giovanni Cariani (c.1485-1547) – Portrait of a Young Woman as Saint Agatha Agatha holding her severed breasts (her iconographic attribute) on a platter ((Complesso domenicano di) Santo Stefano, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, Italy) Birds Blackcurrant Jelly
Image 1: “A Breast for a Breast”, Acrylic impression on paper, 2022 Image 2: “Wield it”, Body Cast; white cement, 2022
1) “A Breast for a Breast”
In this free world, still lives a colonizer named “Cancer”; who greets in silence through the mountains that shield us. It’s been days since he tried to conquer and colonize you, your body and your very own belongings. “Get Comfortable”, you said… For you knew no one can invade your safe space, your brave space. As you move ahead and build yourself to fight back, I offer you a breast for a breast; In solidarity, in strength and in hope. Mine are as tender as yours but much smaller to be defined But they are breasts after all. Existent or non-existent, they will always fight is all I know. A Breast for a breast, let us put your cancer to rest.
2) “Imagining Michelle”
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil; May God rebuke him, we humbly pray… As we go on to recite this prayer to the patron of my parish church, I can’t help but draw similarities to Michelle. Drawing parallels to the origin of her name and representation of St. Michael; I can’t reverse my vision of Michelle as a warrior, fully armed with helmet, sword and shield, as she fights her battle.
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1211292703&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=trueanamendesana · Ana MENDES Week88
Self-portrait.
Self-portrait is a play based on the collection of my personal details, from my birthday to the track of diseases in my family. I always collected my personal details and wondered what is the role that inheritance plays in our life. It could be a police questionnaire, a health survey or a manifesto against all the interrogatories that we have to fill in over our lives. But, it is not. It is just a self-portrait. Perhaps, automatic.
It is the start of term. I am drawing with the new students in real life. We meet in the middle of Arnold Circus, at the bandstand, an octagonal structure set high on a mound and circled by seven plane trees. The ground about the bandstand is slightly raised and curved, like a cake, and the wide floor is covered with dry brown leaves that have been left to pile and rustle. You must go up two flights of stairs to get to the top, and when you get there, it is autumn.
RuthMaclennanTree Cover ERASE THE BORDERS a collective art work for Bienal Sur 2021 (Argentina)
The boundaries here represent forest cleared to grow crops of soya, palm oil… The fields have borders, the forest – a rich green canopy – does not. Many areas of Amazon rainforest are legally – but not always actually – protected indigenous lands. Fires are being set, or allowed to spread, to clear forest to plant fields of soy. The political borders of indigenous lands are being erased by fire and capital. The boundaries were brought in to parcel up the forest and impose a way of seeing land and place that is not shared by those who live there. Borders are made to keep people in, and out, but don’t keep out much else without a lot of work. Borders are strange and unnatural and depend on a deliberate blindness – turning a blind eye to what they do – to be recognized. Trees, birds, fish, insects, fungi travel thousands of miles and get called ‘native’ or ‘invasive’ species – though they don’t know it.
Les jeunes de son entourage l’appelaient tante Marcelle autant par déférence que par affection. Pour les amis, elle était Marcelle, pour les autres Madame Ségal. Seule l’administration l’appelait Madame Marcelle Schereschewsky dite Ségal. Cela avait quelque chose d’offensant. Elle était Schereschewsky par son père, Segall par sa mère. Pour des raisons de commodité, elle avait choisi Ségal au début de sa carrière de journaliste. more
https://player.vimeo.com/video/609213077?h=6f56391756&dnt=1&app_id=122963 Feuilleton of spinning swinging wishing Girls XX Feuilleton de Filles oscillante, filante, souhaitante XX performance with camera, 3 mins 6 secs
für Adriana – Postcard to Argentina You See This Work Of Art If You See Yourself Seeing Piece of art for the media consciousness, Conceptual art work / Mail Art, 2021
I have received hundreds of video and sound clips of trees and forests from around the world. I am touched and grateful, and relieved, that so many people have been inspired to join in this collective project. Looking through some of the clips, I wanted to touch the trees and smell the pine needles, the banana palms, the cypress trees – to smell smells I’ve never encountered before because I’ve never been in these forests. I stepped outside for some air and sky and walked to the little park near my studio. This is where I filmed the first horizon for the Crown Letter that gave me the idea of asking people to send me their horizons. The leaves are beginning to fall but it’s not full on autumn yet, though I found some irresistibly shiny conkers which I’ve brought back.
And now I have just painted these treelines from some of the clips that have been sent to me. I wanted to make something that I could touch, that was wet and alive like the trees and ponds were when they were filmed.
I am going to cut these into postcards and send them to Adriana in Argentina so that she can take them to the Bienal Sur and arrange them in any order she likes.
La semaine dernière Manuela nous a invitées à écrire en Argentine, pour Biennal Sur.
Elle nous a dit qu’on pourrait envoyer une à plusieurs cartes postales chacune, qui seraient exposées sur un grand panneau horizontal transparent de manière à les voir de chaque côté et pour faire face à la verticalité de l’édition des lettres numériques qui seraient imprimées sur de grands rouleaux de papier peint.
J’ai préparé 10 enveloppes roses, 10 cartes blanches — Les mêmes cartes blanches qu’on avait utilisées avec Natacha pour le film sur la vie de Warburg — et 10 photographies ; des surimpressions que je collectionne depuis longtemps. Puis 10 timbres, que j’ai trouvés dans le bureau de ma grand-mère.
Je ne sais pas encore ce que j’écrirai. Mais chaque dimanche, avant d’envoyer un image en ligne, je tracerai des lettres sur une carte blanche, que j’accompagnerai d’une photographie. J’aime l’idée qu’a chaque envoi se fixe une nouvelle idée, un message d’amour pour mes Crown Sisters.
Liza Dimbleby Pierre Bonnard: Photograph of Marthe, c.1899
Letter from Glasgow: Looking Out, Looking In
People have started to visit the house. I have watched them, in my rooms, in my chairs, precisely lit by familiar angles of light and shadow specific to these interiors at certain times of day, the faces I had seen only on the street, blurred and over exposed for most of the past two years. Inside, we reclaim the space and shifting light of intimacy. more
Dettie Flynn Pocketperformance with camera Feuilleton of spinning swinging wishing Girls 0bis Feuilleton de Filles oscillante, filante, souhaitante 0bis 2nd July 2020
Manuela Morgaine I TAKE MY TIME I SING AS A KISS I WAIL WHEN COOKED ALIVE
The snail moves, only forwards, thanks to its foot, which is a gigantic muscle which contracts and lengthens alternately: this is the phenomenon of crawling. The average speed of a snail is one millimeter per second, or six centimeters per minute. The glands of snails also secrete different types of mucus containing many compounds that both allow it to move more easily by sliding over obstacles and even attach itself vertically to certain walls. Mucus is also part of the composition of the shell. Thick, it hardens and dries on contact with air, leaving a brilliant trail in the light. The songs and noises of the snails all seem to be reduced, with variations, to a single physical phenomenon: under the effect of a sudden and rapid retraction of the animal, withdrawn from its element and excited, a mass of gas, like air bubbles, trapped in a cavity is violently expelled and passes through a narrow orifice, encumbered with more or less viscous liquid, and it bubbles: the noise produced thus may go from a simple twitter to an almost musical sound close to kissing. Likewise, the contact between the snail’s shell and a glass pane emits, during the movement of the animal, a noise similar to that of a wet finger on a glass; the shell playing, opposite the glass, the role of a bow on a stringed instrument. Some snails produce plaintive calls when caught. In captivity, Planorbis corneus emit a high note, similar to the sound produced by a flute, with each daily feeding. Helix aspersa, utter cries of agony when cooked alive. These noises were at the origin of European beliefs, attributing to the “song” of snails a premonitory value.
Z. avançait sur un volcan en éruption. Les explosions se succédaient au rythme de la canonnade. Des fragments de rochers pulvérisés retombaient en faisant trembler la terre dans un large périmètre alentour. more
I wanted to photograph this procession of figures as they passed across the wall, so certain and elegant in outline, so removed from the actual, more awkward and garishly painted bodies who had given them life. But I was too absorbed in following the movement of my friend’s voice and the shadows passing behind her, holding the two of these together, and could only imagine reaching into my bag for the trapping camera. I could not risk such an interruption. I listened and watched and let them pass. more
J’ai passé l’été seule dans un château comme en quarantaine, pour occuper mon temps, j’y ai inventé un nouveau rituel, une vague réminiscence du Jeu de Paume réactualisé par le plaisir, qui semble ne pas s’assouvir, de la contemplation des accessoires gantés multicolores qui embellissent notre quotidien. more
