Finally, after four years since the house was finished, there is also a sign board.
We are in the process of applying for a visa for Europe. The nature of the questions and possible answers to tick make me aware that we live in a fascist system. There are no opportunities for the individual to be creative and stay self confident. You have to bow. That's why people choose the so-called backway (land route and crossing the Mediterranean Sea by boat). This seems easier to overcome than the invisible obstacles that bureaucracy and technocracy establish.
Monday, 8
Only after three years of this diary does an 8th of May appear. In the 15 years there are five entries on this date, i.e. exactly one third. It was carried out very irregularly and sporadically from the start. This will probably not change, despite all attempts to defy it. A quality inherent in this diary.
2011
Sunday, May 8
I like changing roles. Sometimes to slip into other people's roles gives me the believe in my own flexibility. I am not reduced to one and only character. Further I can be closer to others and feel them.
For example, actually I am not good in teasing people. So that's something I have to practice. To tease people means to change from victim to committer. It's easy to be always the victim and complain. Just to be free from guilt and waiting for God's presents. Ohh, I am not guilty, I am so perfect, please give me some goods. No, no that's not the way I want to be. Not that I want to relish hurting others, but better modifying between particular behaviours. Waiting doesn't change anything. Let me be a committer. Sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. Mistakes are part of life and development, as well as prosperous records.
2013
Wednesday, May 8
I just go to bed early. Better times will come soon.
2014
Thursday, 8
So I've learned smoking is not allowed in the public, not even in our yard. Sorry for doing wrong. Since 've been living in the city, I forgot that the neighbourhood can be that strict.
Depression is not a solution. Moving forward, not going too deep into thoughts. No water, public electricity broken. When to take next shower, not a question of abundance, but of disposibility.
D5*
2016
Sunday, 8
Strictly business that is what I told everybody about my stay in Dakar. To boost my plans as committed to a given order everybody expects to be fulfilled. But the people I've been looking for closed my eyes and released me into a freedom I hadn't even dreamed of: being welcomed as someone who runs her well tempered pace.
From the catalogue Dak'Art 12: Reenchantments - The City in the Blue Daylight
Non-Western countries do not follow the definition, inherited from Enlightment, of a radiating and conquering universality. Quite the opposite. They are so busy rethinking and reinventing themselves after the dictates of history and so subjected to the implacably belligerent logic of today's global economy, they are forced to dabble. Not in order to confess their failings and weaknesses, but as an absolute form of freedom. The humility that goes with dabbling guards against the expansionist and colonialist temptations that were the result of 19th century Western thinking. (p 36/37)
What is art today, if not a vast masquerade in which the players pass themselves off as different to who they really are? Or worse still, seek to take on roles they know they cannot fill? (p 37)
To dabble is to go against the pseudo-professionalism of the world and chose the role of the amateur. Contemporary art is a place of experimentation and discovery, thus necessarily free of the certitudes that dominate reason and reasoning. It is about trial and error, an attempted ontology to be built day by day. To dabble is to try to get away from reason, or the myth of progress that has been bandied about since the 19th century, like a mantra that holds all the solutions to our problems. (p38)
Simon Njami
2021
Saturday, 8
work on the roof has been going well the last two days.
Monday, 1
Art Space Work of the Month
Cindy Sherman (1954) Untitled #114, photography,1982, 125,5 x 76,2 cm
Schirmer/Mosel Jubiläumsportfolio 1999, 45 x 34 cm