sukran moral - hamam - le bastart

Sükran Moral, demolishing rancid traditions

Hypocrisy, a street which both begins and ends in the world, and there is scarcely anyone who doesn’t have, if not a house, then at least rooms or temporary lodgings along the length of it. A suspicious old man and a trusting young one walk to this main street of the world to observe closely habits and customs of their peers. To cross certain thresholds to see The world from inside, as Quevedo did in […]

carol rama - seduzioni - le bastart

Carol Rama, one hundred years dancing backwards

Alors vous lui réapprendrez à danser à l’envers comme dans le délire des bals musette et cet envers sera son véritable endroit, Antonin Artaud It was back in the 1930’s when Antonin Artaud was in and out of asylums; in the same decade, Carol Rama went daily to visit her mother admitted to a psychiatric clinic. The encounter with sick bodies and confinement conditions inspired her first watercolors. In 1945, Rama celebrates her first exhibition […]

romina de novellis - gradiva - le bastart

Romina de Novellis, old myths, new rites

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 […]

hayv kahraman - musical chairs - le bastart

Hayv Kahraman, body as a container of diasporic memories

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 […]

raquel paiewonsky - guardarropia - le bastart

Raquel Paiewonsky, irreducible hybridity

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 […]

irene cruz - blue - le bastart

Irene Cruz, territorial rootlessness, emotional roots

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 […]

maria acha-kutscher - womankind day 178- le bastart

María María Acha-Kutscher, between document and dream

As a nod to Genesis and its 7 days of Creation, Max Ernst summarized in “a week of kindness” his vision of human brutality. Made in the convulsive interwar period, he allegorized on the darker instincts. Its subversive power lay in the perfect blend between fragments from nineteenth-century publications of all kinds, from melodramatic novels to extracts from natural science journals. This poetic and poignant way of decompose reality seduced María María Acha-Kutscher, and it […]

marina vargas 7 oros - le bastart

Marina Vargas, body as container

Historians generally place the beginnings of art in the search of mimesis, the copy of the same, that Pliny the Elder exemplified by the story of a girl drawing the silhouette of her lover on the wall to retain his image. But the cave painting reveals that primitive man and woman barely-represented themselves, and when they did it was in merger with other animals (therians) or in a extremely fragmentary form. So, as Bataille observed, […]