Paris, 2010 // Toronto, 2006 // Toronto, 2008 // title: Colette – Claudine and Annie (1903)

Anne Sexton wrote that. I’ve blogggged it before. It’s one of the most perfect pieces of words brought together I have ever read so here it is again & again. Amsterdam and its constant downpours are almost over, a few more days until I have to go back to Toronto, and then I fly home (??), fly back to my city where I have no place to live, no potential roommates and the second year of my MA to start/finish. I have no home in Toronto, just memories. Where am I going? Maybe having no place to go opens me up to go anywhere, to have the potential for everything.

I hated Alphaville for its blatant cinematic masturbation but then I started to love it. I want my whole life to look like that.

Transcribing and translating French poetry to work the/my language.

This is where my inspiration lies right now although it’s hard to keep standing with the heavy clouds and rain following me from Amsterdam to Paris to Amsterdam again. I don’t know how long I can take this.

Last night I sent off my first pilot interview questions to my lovely friend Vaccine, who also happens to be one of my favorite artists. She is thrilled to participate in my project.

I want to re-try some things. This is it. Waiting never works out.

View from the balcony in St.Cloud where I stayed at my friend’s house  in Paris. It looked like this almost every morning for weeks.

The last day of Ile de Ré the sun almost burned my eyes out.

Here is Elodie and some of the other passengers I took a rideshare with. They were a contemplative bunch. I tried to engage in a discussion by speaking broken French. I had to be very loud because of the highway winds circling around the back window. I don’t think they even heard me.

This is what I see when I walk out the door in Val d’Or, where I have been most of my Paris trip staring at my laptop and working on my Project Proposal. 

My leg is not really bruised, and I would never smoke so many cigarettes at once, but you can’t argue with a preset.

Outside Monceau Park. The day I realized I can drink almost an entire bottle of wine and not get drunk (anymore).

Have to compete with the precious Parisian girls you know.

My friend’s family owns a Moroccan restaurant, so he took me there and made me fish tagine and it was like a VIP service for me. I pretended I was a celebrity who could only go out at off-hour times not to get mauled by her needy fans. Except he made me other food at the restaurant and the tagine at his mom’s house. Obviously they use a gas stove in the resto!

magdalena dramatica.

Pompidou, August 2010

All my photos are turning out really shit lately. I have no idea what’s wrong with my eyesight. Not to say my photography is so great to begin with but I was feeling more self-assured in finding a bit of voice, a bit of perspective and I was able to work through my ideas and materialize them more than before. WTF? Have any of you gone through this? I think it’s the stresses of needing to churn out my MA Project Proposal by the end of this week, totally obliterating any exciting time I could be spending in Paris and making me miss the first week project of my Digital Methods Advanced Class in Amsterdam.

Why am I always so slow and scattered at everything I do? Why can’t I have faith in my decisions?

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Below is a photo of me posing with Marina Ambramovic at the Pompidou last week. When I walked into her room of three sculptures I started shaking and bouncing around and had to be calmed down. Being able to be part of Marina Abramovic’s energy made me crazy! I love her! She changed my life.

The Pompidou has this ridiculously amazing exhibition on right now - elles, featuring women artists. It’s not tokenistic and doesn’t feel overly pushy, like here are some women artists and what they did, rather it’s more of a weaved narrative able to work through art history without just projecting ‘giants‘. At first I was excited to be surrounded by women’s art but I’ve also been re-thinking a lot about the category ‘woman’ (because of the focus of my Project) and what the boundaries of gender even are (and should we be reinforcing any boundaries at all?), and I wonder if the Pompidou thought of it too. How do you not reinforce problematic gender boundaries by focusing on gender? Maybe this is where Donna Haraway’s ‘situated knowledges’ fits in. Fitting in Cixous’ écriture féminine also makes sense, but I’m struggling with her work much more than Kristeva’s. Kristeva shakes up your whole idea of Being, and Cixous seems a bit like a French bell hooks to me, which as much as I appreciate its influence, doesn’t really work within my thinking. BAH!

]]> http://words.raisecain.net/2010/08/09/shitty-shit-shit-the-pompidou/feed/ 0 http://words.raisecain.net/2010/07/22/dancing-auschwitz/ http://words.raisecain.net/2010/07/22/dancing-auschwitz/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:29:45 +0000 Magda O! http://words.raisecain.net/?p=860

In June 2009, Jane Korman with her kids and her holocaust survivor dad travelled to Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany to retrace her parents’ past including Oświęcim (Auschwitz). Jane says:

The installation  Dancing Auschwitz, stemmed from my desire to create artwork that conveys a fresh interpretation of historical memory. This way, the lessons of the past will not be forgotten.

Dancing Auschwitz comprises a large photographic image together with three video pieces:  a contemporary performance dance, an old video footage of a dance, and a documentary. The contemporary dance and documentary video were filmed during our recent family trip, while the old video footage is from a family home movie from my childhood.

The contemporary dance video portrays the family, comprising three generations, improvising an awkward dance to the pop song ‘I will survive.’(Gloria Gaynor, 1978) This was performed at numerous historically traumatic sites from my parents’ past. The dance expresses an attempt at celebrating life, but also evokes absence, loss and mourning.

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I can’t believe people are all offended over this. This reminded me of my beloved grandpa and so many members of my family that refused to talk about the war and now they are dead and their stories are dead and that’s it. What the fuck? How amazing is it that Korman’s dad was able to go back and DANCE. To me, this is a way to re-articulate an experience you had with joy and reclaim a place of struggle to belong to you and own it, not be owned by it.