Art visual np2

picture: Salo by Pier Paolo Pasolini (adaptation of Le Marquis de Sade's 120 days of Sodom ) Here is a short article I just wrote for Meredith Tenhoor's Pratt seminar Food/Architecture/Urbanism/ Biopolitics : Before the XVIIIth century, French (and by extension European) State' sovereignty was applied on territories and on their subjects' life and death. The Enlightenment and the constitution of Parisian literary groups and bourgeoisie (in opposition to Versailles' nobleness) questioned the status of an omni-powerful monarchy embodied by Louis XIV and inherited by less strategic kings Louis XV and Louis XVI. This led to the French Revolution of 1789 and the creation of a Constitutional monarchy then a Republic in 1792. This whole institutional dislocation, followed by a very strong centralized power (again) from Napoleon Bonaparte, brought up and applied some new means of sovereignty that established what Michel Foucault calls bio-politics . Bio-politics consists ...

Dark Days (2000) is a documentary by Marc Singer traveling in the New York's underground in order to meet the "mole people", a group of homeless living underneath and along Penn Station's railway. This zone is de facto not controlled by any instance of power, and life there is a mix of solidarity and conflict between people who chose this way of life.

Novelist Amanda Smyth. Photo by Lee Thomas. Her first novel, Black Rock,  was this month nominated for an  NAACP Image Award for best work of fiction by a debut author. Trinidadian/Irish novelist Amanda Smyth will vie for the honour alongside the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Marlon James (who are also nominated in the literature categories) not to mention dozens nominated in other categories like Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and Sandra Bullock. As she celebrated, Smyth took a moment to tell PLEASURE about the writing life, her highly anticipated second book, her past career as an actress and the toll of being split between Trinidad and the UK. Her interview is the tenth in a series of interviews on this blog featuring Trinidad artists. FIND the full interview here . READ an extract from Black Rock here .

WHO? I was born in Ireland, on the west coast. My father was a musician and my Trinidadian mother was young and in love, but she was also homesick. When they broke up, my mother decided that we (my brother and I) should go back to Trinidad. But it was the early 70s and there was trouble brewing. So instead, she hopped across the Irish Sea to England. I grew up in Yorkshire, but the three of us came to Trinidad every summer to see my grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts. I always hated leaving. I still hate leaving. I’m really pleased that my husband, Lee, loves Trinidad, too. That could’ve been tricky. WHAT? I’m sure there was a high price for this kind of life – one foot in England and one in Trinidad. And in some ways we’re still paying it now. Our family is scattered, and that’s tough when something happens - good or bad, because you want to share it with them. What to do? WHEN+WHERE? I was an actress in my twenties, in TV and commercials. I was in a movie called Savage Hearts (1...

The novel's cover is a detail from 'Grand Rivere' (2001-2002) by Trinidad-based British artist Peter Doig.  "There were no answers. I had nothing. There was only heat and the bright light that made that kind of heat. There was no shade, nowhere to rest, nowhere that the sun was not. You follow your life, you don't lead your life. I could sing with pain. Sing so high, high, high. Would my mother hear my singing? Once I had nothing. Now I had less than nothing. My whole life. My whole life I wanted to know my father. I wanted him more than anybody. More that Dr Emmanuel Rodiguez. I shall never know happiness. The light was on the other side of the world, in Southhampton, England. All my life I stepped towards it, little steps. I was halfway there and then I sank. The light pulled me from my darkness. I remembered the light when everything was bad. And now you put out the light. Just like that. I had less than nothing. It couldn't be like this. It couldn't be ...

The film allows Eastwood to cast a major white actor alongside Freeman Back in 2008, acclaimed black director Spike Lee accused Clint Eastwood of not having enough black actors in his films. Eastwood had made two movies about Iwo Jima back to back and not a single black soldier was featured in either, Lee noted. Eastwood's response? "A guy like him should shut his face," he told The Guardian . He then went on to direct Gran Torino , a film about an elderly, racist man, who learns to overcome his racial prejudices. That film, which is actually Eastwood's finest after Unforgiven,  appeared to be a response to Lee's allegations. It's in this context that Eastwood's latest, a biopic of South African legend Nelson Mandela, arrives. Why we haven't seen a major Hollywood Mandela biopic up until now is baffling. After all, some far less important and obscure people have had films of their lives made. Perhaps marketers did not think they could find a way to sel...

Touche pas a la femme blanche ( Don't touch the white woman ) is an incredible satirist western by Marco Ferreri filmed in 1974 in...the center of Paris. In fact, the entire movie is taking scene in the sector of Les Halles which were currently transformed from the central food market to a huge mall that we still know nowadays. Since this period Les Halles are known as "Le trou" (The hole) due to this impressive crater which needed to be dug. Marco Ferreri therefore used this enormous construction site as the settings of his parody in order to eventually reproduce the battle of Little Big Horn (1876) as a battle against modernity. Whoever lived in Paris for more or less time would be probably amazed by those following very contrasted images of a recognizable Paris hosting troops of Indians and XIXth century US Army. One could possibly regrets that the final battle seems to happen in a quarry (see last picture) rather than in "the hole" but the transition Ferr...

The border between Amritsar (India) and Lahore (Pakistan) is special by the "spectacle" it hosts every evening for the lowering of the flags. In fact, soldiers from the two sides daily starts at the same time a kind of ceremonial of intimidation dramatizing in an almost grotesque way, the conflict between the two countries. Stands have been built for the audience of both nation who compete as well to know who cheers the best his country. This ceremony emphasizes considerably the symbolic and representative aspect of the border and constitutes a daily battle that nobody win, thus perpetuating the war to the infinite.

Here is a movie we couldn't avoid for this thematic, Steamboy a masterpiece of the great mangaka & director Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) . This movie his presenting a retro futuristic view of the mid 19th century in England, where a family of genius is building a steam powered tower combining the most incredible technology for the Great exhibition of 1851 in London. One can notice the highly detailed mecanic parts and beautifull retro machinery (cf : Wild Wild West by Barry Sonnenfeld ). More over the graphic quality is bringing the picture to the dream, the perfect mix between 2d , 3D animation and color tones gives a great feeling of depth and a perfect motion fluidity. The 19th century London as a background is just as amazing as the wonderfull scenes that takes place in Paxton's Crystal Palace ... I will notwrite longer about this movie and let you discovering it, following few pictures to give you a quick overview .

Detail from Blue Shade by Romare Bearden 1972 © Romare Bearden Foundation/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2009 An exhibition, featuring artists ranging from Trinidadian Christopher Cozier to American Kara Walker,  opens today at the Tate Liverpool, UK. "Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic explores the impact of different black cultures from around the Atlantic on art from the early twentieth-century to today. The exhibition takes its inspiration from Paul Gilroy's influential book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness 1993. It features over 140 works by more than 60 artists. Gilroy used the term 'The Black Atlantic' to describe the transmission of black cultures around the Atlantic, and the instances of cultural hybridity, that occurred as a result of transatlantic slavery and its legacy. Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic reflects Gilroy's idea of the Atlantic Ocean as a 'continent in negative', offering a network c...

A Tate employee looks at 'Afro Sunrise' (2002-2003). Photo by Felix Clay. Trinidad-based British painter Chris Ofili has a show at the Tate Modern in London this month. The exhibition features 40 paintings as well as pencil colours and watercolours and opens today. SEE more images  here . READ more here .

3 Canal's Wendell Manwarren  Carnival used to have an edge. It used to terrify, fascinate, enrapture. Go back in history and witness the “Jamette” carnival. “Around the 1860’s the Carnival came to have a distinct character, the ‘Jamette’ carnival,” notes historian Bridget Brereton in The Trinidad Carnival in the Late Nineteenth Century . “The jamettes who were the band members were the singers, dancers, stickmen, prostitutes, pimps and “bad johns” in general. They boasted of their skill and bravery, verbal wit, talent in song, dance and drumming, their indifference to the law, their sexual prowess, their familiarity with jail and sometimes their contempt for the church. In short, they reversed the canons of respectability, the norms of the superstructure.” Rapso band 3 Canal has, over a decade, built a strong following with its distinctive blend of socio-political soca and rap. Amidst the increasingly anonymous soca now being produced annually for Carnival, the band has become a ra...

Following the previous article about the desert, let's stay in the realm of sand with the masterpiece 砂の女 ( The woman in the dunes ) by Hiroshi Teshigahara directly interpreted from Kobo Abe 's novel. The plot dramatize the captivity of a man in a house which lays at the bottom of a sand "dwell" in which lives a woman who needs each day to extract a certain amount of sand for the nearby village and in order to maintain her house out from being swallowed by the sand. It represents a daily fight for the existence of her life environment in order to survive against the intractable process of the sand. Whether one talks about the book or the film, the sand descriptions are absolutely splendid and even comports a kind of metaphysical aspect to some degrees. Here is an excerpt of the novel: Sand: an aggregate of rock fragments. Sometimes including loadstone, tinstone, or more rarely gold dust. Diameter: 2 to 1/16mm A very clear definition indeed. In short, the sand came...

Desert is something between an heterotopia and what I would call an atopia (a non-space). It defines itself as a territory whose limits seem to reach the infinite, which is not to say that it seems to have no limits. In fact, in the cinematographic desert, one always tries to reach the horizon as a tenacious impossible quest. I think an appropriate author to quote here is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (see previous post ) in his beautiful humanist novel Desert: They appeared as if in a dream at the top of the dune, half-hidden in the cloud of sand rising from their steps. Slowly, they made their way down into the valley, following the almost invisible trail. At the head of the caravan were the men, wrapped in their woolen cloaks, their faces masked by the blue veil. Two or three dromedaries walked with them, followed by the goats and sheep that the young boys prodded onward. The women brought up the rear. They were bulky shapes, lumbering under heavy cloaks, and the skin of their arms ...

Franz Kafka, in his short story called The Great Wall of China, draws an interesting literate association between the most horizontal edifice with the mythic vertical one, the Tower of Babel, the first one being the foundation of the second. I am pretty intrigued by the obvious anachronism and its Cabalistic aspect... "First, it has to be said that achievements were brought to fruition at that time which rank slightly behind the Tower of Babel, although in the pleasure they gave to God, at least by human reckoning, they made an impression exactly the opposite of that structure. I mention this because at the time construction was beginning a scholar wrote a book in which he drew this comparison very precisely. In it he tried to show that the Tower of Babel had failed to attain its goal not at all for the reasons commonly asserted, or at least that the most important causes were not among these well-known ones. He not only based his proofs on texts and reports, but also claimed to h...

The film Fahrenheit 451 is a 1966 cinematographic adaptation from Francois Truffaut of Ray Bradbury 's 1953 novel. More than a visualization of the book, Truffaut's movie is a real personal interpretation and brings something in addition of the original plot. Fahrenheit 451 is the story of a system where firemen are burning every books they find since those records of knowledge are being prohibited. The heterotopia here is this zone in the woods where rebels to the system are living and happen to have traded their name to a book they have read and remembered. Literature and knowledge are thus being transmit from generation to generation as both a hyper-personification of their content (since somebody actually embodies it) and a personification of this same content (since the author is not anymore the important thing here). This heterotopia is then dramatizing a territory where culture is not contained by objects but by people and triggers thus a global solidarity and equality...

Our Daily Bread illustrates human's anthropocentrism by following Descartes who was wishing to see human becoming "master and owner of the nature". In fact, what this movie introduces is a global elaborate machine providing food for the Western World. It is then interesting as architects to wonder who are the designers as such a system and to notice that those ones are completely disconnected to the daily operation of their devices. The comparison of this machine to a wider extent of a political system seems appropriate looking at the mechanization of the apparatuses, the subjectivation of the bodies and the exclusion and suppression of elements that are not adapted to such a system (here weak chickens, oversized apples, weirdly shaped eggs etc.). However, the film, by its aesthetization of the machinery and the absence of comments, leaves the documentary genre to series of very ambiguous paintings often tending towards Rembrandt and Bacon as far slaughterhouses are co...