The Hope and Anchor.
After visiting my friends exhibition at the Thames-side Gallery, I cycled passed London’s flood defence and had a drink in The Hope and Anchor.
Black sail white sail or the misunderstanding of wars, Video 1’32, The Port of Essaouira, Morocco, March 2024.
During a war, Tristan, mortally wounded, calls the blonde Yseult to his aid because she alone is capable of healing him. He sets up a code with his men and asks that a white sail be hoisted to the top of the mast of the boat that will bring her back if she agrees to treat him and a black sail if she is not on the boat. The sailors take on board Yseult the blonde, eager to join her beloved, and raise the white sail, but when the boat approaches the coast, Iseult with white hands, his wife, consumed by jealousy, tells Tristan that the sail is black. Believing himself abandoned by the one he loves, he lets himself die. When she arrives at his bedside, Yseult the Blonde, learning of Tristan’s death, dies of grief in his arms. The lovers are dead.
Tinder’s data bank – still from Gala Hernández López ‘s movie “La mécanique des fluides”, 2022
Thinking of Safety boxes in banks, this image reappeared in my mind. All those virtual lovers, all those swipings, matchings and datings contained in this gigantic data base. Isn’t this the very representation of the end of love? Mechanization and the boxing of thousands of dehumanized solitudes?
Global Seed Vault, Svalbard, October 2023
An ecosystem is a peculiar kind of self-organizing archive – a collection of interconnected things rubbing along together, reliant on each other, connected with other organisms and systems, adapting to changing environmental conditions, or dying.
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Vœux
Hier, je m’apprêtais à poster un billet sur un sujet désolant de banalité : les vœux de nouvel an. Ces incantations m’ont toujours paru vides de sens. Elles me paraissent aujourd’hui indécentes quand je songe à celles et ceux à qui 2024 n’apportera aucun soulagement à l’enfer de 2023.
A quoi riment des vœux quand l’urgence est aux actes ?
Et puis, tard dans la nuit, alors qu’une fois de plus je lisais les nouvelles consternantes d’une guerre qui ne dit pas son nom, je suis tombée sur le visage d’un adolescent dans le magazine israélien en ligne +972. […]
Tal Mitnick, 18 ans, les bras croisés sur son tee-shirt Nike regarde bien droit dans l’objectif en s’efforçant de ne pas sourire. Il est le premier objecteur de conscience depuis le 7 octobre à être jeté en prison. C’est ce qui lui vaut trois pages dans +972 illustrées d’un beau portrait photographique. Le fond noir fait ressortir sa tignasse châtain, ses yeux clairs, sa stature de beau gaillard en pleine santé. Après sa comparution le 26 décembre devant la Commission de conscience de l’armée, jury composé de plusieurs militaires et d’un universitaire, il a été condamné à 30 jours de détention dans une prison militaire.
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This is the view northwest from Fuglefjella – Bird Mountain. The birds had all flown South when we hiked up here, though we saw a pair of ptarmigans and a few reindeer.
We climbed up a narrow ravine and along the plateau to the edge of this cliff. It was snowing and windy, until we reached this view of a string of pink mountains floating above the sea. I fell under the same spell as everyone else, imagining Ultima Thule – the overused northern no-place, to yearn for but never reach. Tired out and with freezing fingers and noses, standing on the edge, only 1400 miles from the North Pole made it almost believable that over the horizon was a heavenly land of milk and honey.
