What is the distance between a Swede sculptural beauty soaking in the Fontana di Trevi and an Italian brunette eating spaghetti, in a histrionic style, before the Fontaine Saint Michel in Paris? The latter, in a cannibal act, “devours” the misogynous construction that the first epitomize. It was one of the urban performances that the Neapolitan artist Romina de Novellis made when settling in the French capital (Splash! La Dolce Vita a Parigi 2010). Continuing […]
Whether we are more or less moviegoers, the filmic imprint has been storing in our subconscious. Maybe if we close our eyes and grope in our psychic archive, we will find an endless list of open files where childhood obsessions and footage from films that marked our lives seem to have been emulsified in the same bobbin. Although it would be absurd to pretend that we can discern between what we really lived and what […]
Despite the truths embedded in Theodor Adorno’s statement that it’s impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz, it’s equally true that in the face of horrors and traumas of war, lyrical beauty is often the only avenue of catharsis. When Hayv Kahraman recollects episodes from her childhood in a besieged Iraq, she recovers the human warmth that drove away fears while seeking refuge in anti-aircraft shelters. During temporary cease-fires, children left their hideouts and challenged each […]
The island’s geography has been chosen by writers and utopians as the ideal place for the development of horizontal communities, without rich or poor, without envy or competitiveness, such as Aldous Huxley’s Pala. But the history tells us otherwise, locating in the most beautiful islands bloody chronicles of colonial despotism, cultural extermination and natural exploitation, to end up as a cover photo in a tourist brochure. The Dominican Raquel Paiewonsky belongs to a generation of […]
In l’heure bleue, nocturnal animals have already gone to sleep and diurnal ones have not yet awoken. The entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre talked about this magical hour as a privileged moment to observe quiet nature, before the parade of armored beetles and other hardened insects on which he fantasized as if they were exotic ethnic groups. During the twilight hour the forms blur, nothing remains, shadows become longer. The thought flows and looks inside. It is […]
Je pense que le couple nègre/blanche est pire qu’une bombe, writes Dany Laferrière (Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, 1985). Sexuality is, more than anything, a matter of ghosts, and the ghost that join a black man and a white woman is one of the most explosive that there is. Sexual imaginaries in relation to ethnic otherness continue to bear the burden of colonial legacy. The topics are renewed, adapting to the changing demands […]
To be born in the forties of last century in a Cuba in transit between a dictatorship and a revolution that was nothing more than the preamble of another dictatorial regime, growing lulled by black and white Disney cartoons while the news were reporting the final leg of the Second World War, the sorcerer’s apprentice…, all that left a hotchpotch of memories in Jorge Carruana‘s vertiginous imagination. These lasting memories will return as raw images […]
Between the frivolous perfection of a mannequin and the tenderness of a handmade doll would be suggested an ample range of extremes and dualities. With one and the other Cathy Wilkes builds domestic scenarios where stereotyped models of femininity are just as or more fragile than those papier maché family groups. On the one hand, we walk among beautiful mannequins pushing strollers that in the mind of a window display designer would be arrange to […]
