For you, getting ready for your show...

Hi current MA/MFA's...

Just 'cause I am really, REALLY happy that I'm finished with my MFA at KIAD/UCCA... Doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about you all.

So... In the interest of levity:

The Bunny's battle with theory

Good luck... And congrats for getting this far.

(trust me... With Richard and Ali in charge, it's always amazing...)

(just kidding guys...)

-- Tuckmac

from the red hot rokk..

Just a note to say how great it was to see you all again in England recently!.. and that I really really enjoyed looking at your individual projects and seeing all the rethinking you've done from beginning to now.. and I'm sure it will all burst out in a wonderful experience very soon!
Myself, I'm back on the hot island rokk...must be in the 40s today! After seeing you, I took the Eurostar to Brussels for a week which was fun. A tip.. for anyone who's never been and plans a trip, the journey from Ashford to Gare Midi is only 1.40 hrs... and a new artspace opened last June called the European Centre for Contemporary Art.. tube stop Place Saint Katerine (walk behind the cathedral). There's the launching exhibition running at the moment called "Zoo" (on the relationship between humans and animals) showing some interesting perspectives and some amazing horse sculptures and I liked the site a lot which is raw and cool. And I also enjoyed the very multicultural Port Namoor a lot for the evening, with some trendy fun well-priced eating places and a real cool bar called The Flat (with its full bathroom and bedroom as part of its lounge area)..

I'm sure the wires are tense right now with your heads in your show... I really wish I could be there to see it :( but unfortunately won't, so my thoughts are with you and I'm quite sure it will be quite amazing to see after all the energy and work.
So from here a Best of Luck to all and Enjoy the Moment!

ruth
www.ruthbianco.com

Saturday August 5th, Trafalgar Square

Pieta

Mazen Kerbaj's stricking art sums it all up.
http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/

Repositioning

I have come across this before. Frankly, I never paid much attention to its possible implications. Perhaps, what it meant at the time was different or that I was hearing it in a context which was not so loaded. And then it came up in “tittuping with Interality” by Ruth, and even then I could not see what was bothering me but somehow it stuck with me like a piece of well used chewing gum which is melted in the heat.

Repositioning or is it re-positioning?

In order to re-position, one has to have a position. Most of us here (and yes I include myself) are yet to establish a position. The great debate is often on the definition of such position. And the position if at all possible may be the great desire. But, why do we need to re-position something which is yet to find its position.

Position has a sense of stability; it may give us a point of view or indeed a sense for territorial. In warfare it is the deciding factor, it is your position that makes you the aggressor or the defender. Position provides us with the role that we play. Position is power, position is a platform, position is a place, position is a culture, position is a tribe and more, and position is the absence of all the above as that also is a position. Whatever it is, it is not so much as to what it is but that of the attachment to it. Is the attachment the same as the belonging?

And yet we need to re-position.

If I was in a bunker and I was advised to re-position, I would read it as a necessary tactical withdrawal, that the position is no longer sustainable and that I had to re-position. The intent is clear and the act follows. When I do re-position, I may begin to reinforce my initial position, so the re-positioning is a shift of the artillery but the aim remains the same. But the experience itself, the act of the re-positioning may change my position. Or indeed my re-positioning may be strategic. But do I need to re-position myself in principle. And what if the re-positioning has become a continues act, and the principle itself?

The temporality is an attractive prospect if you are in resistance but if it becomes a status which it often does, it is exposed. The need for the-in-betweens brought about the idea of interdisciplinarity. This differed from the cross-disciplinary approach and indeed it was not multi-disciplinary, it was not a position and not a hybrid. It momentarily offered the imaginal, the possibility of the none-place. Yes it challenged the position and perhaps we may have started to re-position. The intent was fantastical but not euphoric, there was no romance and clarity, no it did not exist. How could it? The imaginal took over, the complexities of the continues transitional.

So, why the re-positioning bothers me? It has become a formula, it has been diluted down, saturated with sugar, it is strategic or tactical and all is well if the intent is so. But what if it is a general prescription? An invitation for a continuous withdrawal and if I am on the run, I want to know what is it that I am running from or running towards. What is my intent?

This is not the first time and it is not the last

But it is real. The moment of silence which we observe is for this very reason. No word can possibly describe the real. We live in the world of fictions and this is our privilege. The pain is great and it is not borrowed, it is for every child. And that child is not the others but it is mine. Am I to be absorbed into this, perhaps there is no other way. Dust and blood has a familiar smell. This I did not choose, it was part of my inheritance. I chose exile, the land of fictions. The choice is that of a mad man, how could it not be? And the fool can laugh when there is nothing else left to do. The coward that I may be in the land of fiction can make up big words in the midst of laughter to obscure the real. I could not choose the real but it kept chasing me. In a different dimension I can run in parallel and look into its face eye to eye. In the land of fiction I am safe. Eye to eye I may find a way and I am still here and tomorrow may bring another day.

This could happen to you

This is what happens when one only crows about THE MEDIA (the big word that we often brandish and feel oh so contemporary, so, so postmodern).

This is what happens when we let our politicians wreak havoc.
“I don’t understand politics” what a lame excuse.

Apathy is GREAT. Its terror is omnipotent.

Please do not read the news about the Middle East. Read your own countries’ news.

Be prepared.

Tasty Treats: Love it or Hate me.

The 2000 U.S. census put New Orleans's population at 484,674, but Hurricane Katrina in 2005 caused the city's evacuation. Population estimates as of June 2006 range from 192,000[6] to 230,000.[7]

(This information is from en.wikipedia.org, search: New Orleans, LA)

"From a world structured and preoccupied by history we have landed ourselves in a depthless horizontality of immediate connections." ..."History becomes unthinkable."
Doreen Massey, For Space

Except in person. The first experience I ever had with a roundabout was in New Orleans, driving around it sitting next to my friend Joy, we called her Joy Beans. We left the abandoned strip mall by the levy, drove in the white van through the 'Garden District' for a few minutes, turned one corner and an overgrown field opened up to reveal 'The Projects', just like that.

We offered to jump-rope with the little girls, a small boy sat on his own saying nothing even when sweet Kreesta tried to coax him into swinging high and flying on the set in the shaded green grass.

--

I sat in a small farmhouse, wrapped in blankets, wearing two pairs of jeans and sweats, drawing pictures of the Christmas decorations on the Piano. I was making cookies from the basketfull of eggs I collected every morning from the chicken coop. It was 8 degrees below 0 Farenheit. The water pipes had frozen the night before. Two days earlier, a giant Tsunami had crashed into 12 countries in South East Asia. I just heard it on Public Radio which only came in when it felt like it.

The birds played tepidly at the feeder, the fat gray cat watched them from her warm(ish) perch just inside the window, next to the candles which had melted over onto the table cloth.

--

We drove around a giant three part roundabout North of London, the sun was almost directly overhead. I knew that we'd get home late and I didn't want to go back and sleep by myself. These people I half knew, have wanted to remember me.

Someone said it was magic. What? The roundabout. Oh. Didn't you know that. (I don't know much I thought.)

--

Walking down the street in Chicago, it's around 0 Farenheit and it's raining. Not even, it is downpouring, lightening and thunder and I am wearing high heels and a skirt. I have no phone numbers. My family doesn't know I'm in the same country as they are. I hardly know it. I'm still two years before, sloshed on Orange Reef at Ziggys'.

The weather in the world doesn't make sense anymore. Last fall a hurricane wiped out the city of New Orleans, will it reach the same fate as New York? The proposed memorial two giant square holes in the ground, water rushing into them like the end of the world? A plastic city like all the rest.

--

There are missing pieces in Beirut. Black holes where buildings and homes once stood.

--

Outside the city of Prague, there is post-war destruction.

--

On the North Coast of France, you still see the Battlements from these "world wars" everyone talks so much about.

--

You can visit chernobyl now, just a few decades after the nuclear accident. They still worry that the site will collapse and the radiation will spread further again.

The symbol for radioactive materials was developed to seem dangerous even when the languages of the world have ceased to be in use, comprehendable. I still find this a little ironic.

--

I was reading about instanteneity and global preoccupation with 'events' equalling space, and time. I was afraid to write anything after all the news of the country I happen to be from/of, saying it was 'alright to bomb the hello out of a country, for just another week'. Then we'll look at the situation again. this type of behaviour always makes you hit your palm to your forehead a few times and hope you don't 'look of' that place. I don't want to have to stick up for my government, and in fact, I don't support them but right now, I have nothing to say about their decisions either. I'm sorry if I've let anyone down.

And to my lebanese friends, perhaps you'd like to arrange a fist fight with me and an Israeli, we could ground battle the situation out, video it and send it to our respective governments, and let them know who won overall, before anyone else bothers to get involved. That should sort things, eh?

--

Everyone needs a little tasteless, selfist commentary now and again eh?

--

ftlsphy.

The Independent