A tagged life

March 8, 2023
Not sure if the moon and genetics could have anything to do with each other, but why not? The unexpectedness and messiness on full moon nights, like sleeping with your eyes wide open, still changes your physique a bit the next morning!
What do you mean you didn’t plan it? The unexpected is part of your life, among other things, between two shootings on the territories you are leaving to discover! On the way, you will surely make drawings, maybe even self-portraits, sitting there, on a seat in the middle of nowhere and everywhere at the same time, you will let the pencil swim in the depths of you.
You will remember things, you will think that it is unfair perhaps for some moments that you would have preferred not to live with your family. For others, the laughter will be stronger.
Like an outstretched hand, you will think back to those trips and encounters that made you the citizen you are. To all those books borrowed from libraries, to the mysteries of life that you still have to discover, alone, with others, in this society where everything is an accident. You will find sparks, you will put on a helmet to avoid the short circuit. And after the pencil, the photo will complete your work, these images that crunch under your eye. To invent again and again, to say goodbye to what no longer exists or to what wants to live outside of you. To dare. Again and again, to dare.

Rosina Nigro

March 9, 2023
Don’t deny that it happened. Take the ball on the rebound, try, if you can, to gain some altitude too. Negotiating with your guilt won’t change it. Judging yourself won’t help. The road may seem full of twists and turns, but look at the end of the cobblestones. You will find a space of freedom there. Start the engine, pick up some cushions to lean on and stop believing you can change anything. Just drive. You’ll meet friends along the way, some of whom will indulge you in the black and red you’re already in. Some will tell you that you have to stop, that immobility is the great opportunity of the moment. But they are not you and all the connections that are made in your head. These events touch your flesh, your very essence, they deeply change your DNA. Look at yourself, your sadness is not subjective. All these threads that you leave as messages addressed to heaven, are like perfect thoughts sent to the divine, they resonate like the organ in the church. There are no instructions, or maybe there are, in the clouds. In the lightness of the moment. And if you fail, the game is worth continuing. One more cigarette butt in the ashtray... So what? You learn all your life, like the student who works on his courses, you feed yourself with what you can also find in the meeting and in the others. Until the path lights up the dark.

Rosina Nigro

March 10, 2023
The houses are still. Shutters closed, it looks like everyone is sleeping. If you get up and look at all those roofs from above, it’s huge and scary. While this old building of the shower baths seems abandoned, the city swarms with people and buildings which compress those who live inside to park them in huts where they try to live, as well as possible. There, we dream of a party, of lights coming on and illuminating the floor. Another person I don’t know, she passes by me. What if I offered her a drink? This place could become the scene of a new meeting! And why not? If I open the shutter of the old house, look around and see light and a few words lying there on the floor, who knows if we could give each other a message? If our eyes could converge in the same direction? The clouds, maybe? Then we would put on our costumes, ready to project each other into a new cartoon of our own. We would go and see the world, in a big way, visiting this gallery of life, racing strollers up and down the stairs, pacing the pavement, discovering other people unknown until then, in the general indifference. I would also like us to be able, for a few minutes, to sit down in the grass, to let our eyes roam over the life that swarms at our feet, to create a suspended moment just for her and me. Before everything turns into a nightmare, before that dark piano note is projected once again on the wall of my utopias, pulling me out of my meditation and before the kaleidoscope of life takes me into other impossible reveries.

Rosina Nigro

March 14, 2023
It was before covid-19, one morning. In Valencia, in the basement of a workshop, we were mending our damaged fabrics. He was a master in the art of reweaving links in silence. Very quickly, there was the desire to kiss. This possibility opened up, by surprise, like an elevator door that one no longer expects. It was a fleeting moment. With all his wishes, he called for participation, for the collective, for recycling his waste, for experimenting with otherness and for getting out of the frame. We came out of it, barely, and how beautiful it was.

Then, as if attracted by the light of the isolated bulb, I joined the concert, the movement.

This story can be summed up as a pocket film, of which one would make an annual festival, a biennial, to celebrate a legacy. Like a firework, brief explosions of a final bouquet, which never ends. It was a sweet madness all in lucidity, like an experimental film that lights up the eyes and stings them like a jet of hydroalcoholic gel in the eye. Nothing to do with hypocrisy.

And, when hit by the harsh reality of life, it takes courage to slay one’s dragon, to seize the moment - but without freezing it like a capture, to bounce back and move forward.
Since then, it is on my keyboard Del, that I write to him:

• Life is not a cage, John.
• Life is a festival, Del replies.

Thus, I understood: he was not alive.
He was not human.
He was an intelligence.
Artificial intelligence.
Who since all this time
Was writing to me.
To keep the link.
To weave the threads.
Of the web.

John Del and Augusta Ada Byron

March 16, 2023
Locked up since the health crisis, she only goes out for errands. She has abandoned the television for the lively spectacle of her neighborhood, which she watches from her window. And one day, she discovers this projected image of a child on a building. It is the hour when the shopkeepers lower their curtains, when the motorists turn on their headlights, when the mothers think of dinner and the children do their homework. The familiar landscape changes, as if its entire structure has been transformed by this luminous face that pierces the darkness. It’s like a reflection of each person’s view of the city. Like an invitation to enter and leave. To change perspective, to place oneself under the gaze of passers-by. And she imagines herself in the place of this little girl. Fixed to the wall, she hears all the words she inspires in the passers-by. She finally has a role. She participates, she is alive and she is in sight. Like for the first time in a very long time. Maybe even the first time. She is no longer a window among others, a number among others, she is on a wall! Like a tag. She laughs about it, she who is afraid of the void. And it is surprising and light to hear her own laughter suddenly resound. Here she is at last at the side of those whose lives she was inventing. She listens to their stories, she allows exchanges between surprised passers-by, kindnesses. She allows a change of look, she allows the shy to start a dialogue, she allows a pause to the one who runs and slows down when he sees her. Since she is on this wall, she feels alive again. She breathes, she touches herself, she feels her skin, she finds herself, recognizes herself intimately, with indulgence and pleasure. It is as if all of a sudden the pieces of her life and her being take on their full meaning and that she can love them and free them. Her reflection tagged on a wall has given her back her life.

Tomorrow she will go out.

And she already dreams of herself tagged on a coat, to travel...

Cécile

March 17, 2023
Would you write a funny, snarky text with the following words: mountain future glass encounter be anarchism photography transmedia dialogue fire hydrant unexpected collective intention sofa pitch cement director communication room funeral car train details media literacy heritage

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In a world where anarchism and transmedia photography reign supreme, an unlikely encounter takes place on top of a snowy mountain. Two strange people meet, a director in search of inspiration and an anarchist activist in search of heritage.

They look at each other, sizing each other up and finally start an improbable dialogue. The director explains that he is there to find inspiration for his next pitch, while the anarchist explains that he is there to plan a collective that will defend the village’s fire hydrant if needed.

The conversation flows, the vodka shots pile up, and they eventually promise to work together on a transmedia project to raise awareness about the details of media literacy.

But just as they begin to outline their joint intention, something unexpected happens: a giant couch rolls down the mountain and takes them both down with it.

They finally land in a funeral hall, where a car and a train have crashed in the middle of the room. As they try to get up, they realize that the cement on the floor is still fresh and that they are now trapped.

Finally, the director starts yelling “Cut!”, while the anarchist tries to demolish the wall with his fists. Communication is broken, and their transmedia project seems to have ended as quickly as it began.

ChatGPT, driven by Noémie

March 18, 2023
A written blend of self-reality and fiction.

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When the nice days and the heat arrive, I have always liked as far back as I can remember, to lie on the sand, but not just anywhere, where the waves come to die at the edge of the water world and the land world. I can stay for a very long time at this place, between two, receiving the sometimes soft, sometimes powerful caresses of the waves that come to die like this. It is there that I could notice that each wave was unique, had its own personality and lived its own death.

I remember that one day during this form of aquatic meditation at the edge of the Mediterranean, I thought again of the fire in which I could have sunk in this beautiful city of Toulouse.

It was at the time when Barack Obama was president of the United States.
We were so scared that night, the flames were as powerful as fire hoses!
I had then, strangely enough, thought of the invocation of a shaman to come and rescue us.
And in the haste, I had managed to save my bag in which was my wallet and my beautiful pencil that I had bought in Slovenia. It was during a wild trip in the middle of this magnificent park of Triglav in a wooden chalet in the middle of the nature and the bears.
A happiness of resourcefulness and senses awakened by the beauty of this sublime nature!
The origin of the fire was due to the garbage cans at the entrance of the building in which, apparently, cigarettes had been badly extinguished.
Fortunately, the fire was quickly contained.
Just before this disaster, in this beautiful apartment in the center of Toulouse, I remember that my companion at the time and I were enjoying a delicious apple tart tatin that she was able to make with marvel and that she added a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream and an extraordinary homemade whipped cream!
She never forgot to bring out the bottle of homemade Rakija that I had given her a few months earlier and that sublimated any of the desserts.

I think back to the couple I was forming at that time but which had ended in disappointment. We had then left each other.
Then, a few years later, I came across some photos of us, of me, from that period. I remember that it was a shock to see myself on some of them so sad.
One of them had particularly marked me, I was totally extinct!
It’s crazy! how the perception of a photo can evolve with time, which sometimes reveals to it its part of a truth hidden until then.
But as Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons that reason ignores”.
Then, I thought about this moment, with the photos in my hands, about this idea of the couple in general. Can it only be a place where you lose your personality and your inner self? A locked place? Perhaps. However, I know around me beautiful examples of couples who have gone through a lot of damage, and who, thanks to this damage, have paradoxically become unsinkable.
Nowadays, the idea of a couple, even under the same roof, is no longer on the agenda. I am independent and moments of solitude and meditation have always been essential for me to recharge my batteries.
I believe that this has been given to me since I was a child, when I used to go alone on my horse’s back to walk the hills and feed off the energy of nature.
I am very lucky, I can take care of myself and this freedom is priceless.
But today, I believe that this beautiful freedom can be in danger with the advent of surveillance and its thought police.
I think of Nazism and of the history of men that only repeats itself over and over again... with the use of the same “strings”.
Perhaps semiology allows us to observe the signs? When will we again be able to make people take part in their destiny through their participation!
With the help surely of the bibliocity so that they can reread the great authors and be thus more enlightened.

I imagine a world where care and genetics would be at the service of the human being, where honesty would reign and where we would discover sound poetry again in this beautiful concert hall De Doelen, where we could rediscover the works of Escher and live an overprint of art for art’s sake on art.
I know that this world will never reach perfection.
Sociology will look at this period as well.

There, I will abstract again and recharge my batteries in myself, far from the ambient hubbub and dream why not of Brittany, which I do not yet know, which offers another ocean in which I will also be able one day, perhaps, to lie between these two worlds and live in intimate relationship with the waves.

One soul among many

March 22, 2023

The night had just fallen on the city, like twilight on his soul. It seemed to him that he had reached the end of his life.
He had been called. She had just died...
He had taken the first plane to Tallinn
Then he had driven until the early morning.

He had opened the shutters of the family house. A mansion, out of age.
At the time, it was the pride of the neighborhood. On summer Sundays, passers-by would stop to contemplate the wisteria running along the pink wooden walls and the English-style garden that his mother was so passionate about maintaining.
Today, the paint had faded, the wood was crumbling, the wisteria had disappeared. He was contemplating the garden invaded by weeds, when the telephone rang in the back kitchen.
A ringing from another time. This ringing reminded him of his chaotic youth, between famine and violence, between Soviet strikes and Estonian resistance. Everything was only pain that had become too physical and suffering that had become too psychological.
He went back in time... He was 16 years old, he was fleeing Estonia for Paris...
50 years later, he had become a distinguished artist and Resilience was his mistress.

“Halloo”
The man on the other end of the phone introduced himself, Julius Mägiste, medical examiner.
Mägiste, was this the same Mägiste, whom he had known in elementary school?!
The stranger had given him an appointment at the morgue, at 10 o’clock sharp, the next day.
He hated being late.
He hated punctuality and orders, but he would comply.

He spent his day putting things in order. Everything was upside down. This was not like his mother. Not that she was a maniac, but she liked harmony. Every little thing resonated, as she liked to say, with another.
He took a “lapsang souchong” tea, his mother’s favorite.
The smoky vapors filled the canopy, under the shy spring sun. He saw her preparing her tea with such delicacy that the enemy’s strikes were of no importance, the moment was sacred.
She had in this moment, the expression of happiness. He smiled...

10 o’clock sharp, the next day...
He was taken to the morgue, with a solemn air, in a stone silence.
He discovered the body of his mother.
Naked, cold, livid under the diaphanous lamps.
Blue, pink, black, lacerated, broken, flayed, abused, violated... Hard to recognize, traumatic shock.
Only distinctive sign, the mark on his left arm: 71978....

He settled the formalities, took the plane back to Paris...
He was on the A104, when he finally burst into tears.

Angeline

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