MALOLA diary

Tuesday, 31
what i missed in Dakar... i went at least three times to Institut Français, there must be something important i guessed. but every time we reached there it was closed. i pondered maybe i supposed wrongly and i wasn't at the right place as mostly. like that evening when someone told me about a performance at Palais de Justice, but what i came upon was just some occasional visitors. though i loved that deserted atmosphere in the night. some waiters who i asked about the performance referred to a stylish woman who should know. approaching her she resolved that the performance was rescheduled to Le Gare. but she herself wouldn't go, too windy and too cold. she preferred a cocktail in warmth at Institut Français. after, we passed there and i think i almost expected - nothing but darkness. later, i mean today, via internet, i learned for the first time about the exhibition having taken place at Institut Français - La Maison Sentimentale. A show i would have loved to see. it hurts when you realise that you are not able to open doors you are longing for. it can happen that you succeed, but you need many pieces of luck to finally find the entrance.

apropos finding the entrance
a memory: in the late 1970s, traveling to Greece, we mainly enjoyed the beaches, boozed like hell, experienced LSD. one night i was so stoned that the other day i was cleared up about my desperate search for the entrance of a discotheque admits the nature of a green pasture where no houses had been in sight.

Monday, 30
you know, of course you don't know.... today i had a colonoscopy they recommended me of several reasons. it was so expensive i feel ashamed to tell. and of course i don't reveal the fee i had to pay. but what was definitely pleasant, the reason why i talk about, how they made me fall asleep. indeed, i was so scared about being made unconscious, i was afraid of never waking up again, or whatever they could do to me while unconscious putting their camera inside me, what when they graft a chip ... though the young brittle lady doctor told me, no problem, you'll fall asleep and after a while you hear voices and then you know it's over. well, the nurse applied an electrode at my annulary to control my pulse and i realised how nervous i was when i heard the toc toc toc e di toc of my erratic heartbeat. she briefed me about the soporific she would inject and they considered African music as appropriate to calm me down. at the same time they asked me to think of something nice (think of Gambia they actually suggested) and i dived into a wonderful dream. yeah, the moment i woke up was illuminating. it was like they had predicted: their remote voices led me back to conscience and everything was over.

Sunday, 29
But everywhere within the changing scene, young people suddenly rise up. Their bitter words indicate the desire to set fire to themselves or to leave. To leave on a journey in their bodies. Neither the South nor the North. Nor the East nor the West for them. None of the cardinal cardinal points. But where? Where to burn one's body because one's mind is so uneasy? Is he trying to burn the set of ancient values by replacing the latter with that of sensible values? Is he trying to overcome the taboos, the weight of ancestral defenses? Is he trying to stop associating music, works of art, with the profit that we can draw from the list of ill-gotten gains? Is he trying to free himself by some means or other and to remove the deliberate censorship of a bad conscience?
Issa Samb, 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts, 2012

Saturday, 28
i ask myself if it'll ever happen that i am proud of who i am. when my thoughts are getting off the track to a certain event in my memory i most of the time meet up with mistakes, misbehaviour, weaknesses and so on. why is it this being obsessed of finding and admitting failures. why do i act submissively like an animal that capitulates towards his offender putting his paws up and feigning death. because i am afraid people take from me what makes me happy: perceiving the chance of a complete freedom to determine identity, lifestyle, visions, art according to a comprehension that lies beyond a civilly defined and well-recognised knowledge.

Thursday, 26
i would like to thank all the artists whose works inspire me to go further, to do what i do, the same like every situation i am in and that gives an input to go further. like every idea that comes to mind to think about what suffuses with happiness and makes to go further and do what to do.

Wednesday, 25
something i deeply regret: because of that stupid backache i left my reflex camera at my lodge in Baobab. now i try to imagine what nice pictures i could've made looking through the view finder...
----------------------------------------
changing seats, some talk of my life
being a good girl was always more important than enlarging upon an occupation. my mother (one of my working colleagues mocked at me talking about mom addressing the young ones like she would say enjoy your beauty, but probably she referred to herself as she was the eldest in the round) used to point on my girlish tasks and when i got older she always feared i would become butch (probably not capable to find a man). i followed her because i couldn't cope with being less respected and more alone. the eldest of us three siblings i had a kinda particular role. for example, at our dining table i had nobody in front nor next to me; my mother was sitting next to my sister and my father next to my brother, each of them sitting in front of their contemporaries and me in front of the kitchen wall. a logic solution for a quadrilateral table with one edge pushed to wall because of space and kitchen size. i was four years ahead and expected to be able to be for my own. i think the problem was that our sitting order never changed during thirteen years. if there had been a rotation or a free choice of seats, it would have been different for all of us. in my puberty my father and me had a lot of discussions at that kitchen table. i think i wanted to challenge him. we never stopped being competitors towards my mother. even though, i considered myself absorbed perfectly into the family structure. yeah, sometimes i felt like being the most important, the hope of the family, and the most intelligent, and yet a lunatic again, a clown begging for appreciation - a truth they loved to mirror. concentrating on a work had been difficult, i got easily depressed and didn't see any sense in my work, for who, why and so on. i was not the only one. in our living community it had been a topic - how to make sense. it was about having a goal ahead you can work for. anyway, that was decades ago and i am happy to have left that time behind. but the be-a-good-woman's tasks still haunt me. yesterday, -i was a bit early for cinema - i found myself browsing through face creams. then i feel something inside me that tells there is no hope, because i don't see any hope in those creams - hmm, what would my shrink tell me then? ... Yes, talking to me is talking to yourself to find out ... all about business? no, for sure there are some good and reasonable dreams.

Tuesday, 24
o Julieta- what a drama, what a tragedy... Almodóvar
-------------------------
Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
Sister Outsider, Essays and Speeches, Audre Lourde, 1984, Kindle Version
--------------------------------
I could have returned, but why should I. There was no mission. i was part neither of the shows nor of the events, happenings and performances. I am not a journalist. i was just a visitor cruising the plateau and the outskirts - sicap, mermoz, liberté, ..... One of the million unknown artists who are trying to survive outside, glancing shyly at the activists and very important people. Hmm, but the memory of my stay has left a so sweet impression. Will Dakar be the same without this biennale? Difficult to imagine.

Monday, 23
As this is a diary I should write about myself... a bit, at least besides the voices I really enjoy to echo and which let me unlearn a presence of an unspectacular daily life - am not in Dakar, unfortunately. i had to leave, because of family reasons. My mother celebrated her 80th anniversary and she needed me there and I needed to be with them. It was a wonderful festivity I'll never forget. Furthermore, there are things to organise, packing, administrative issues. At the same time I live for the day what means a relief I'd never guessed. I do what I like; get up, cook and eat whenever time has come, meet and talk to whoever I bear in mind, work as much as is essential for a refreshing progress - an integral timetable consisting of variables only. But i believe as soon as I've booked my one way flight to Banjul - a kinda unprecedented condition contrary to return tickets that always connoted a holiday status, though a constant either - time will run faster, for sure. By the way, I've got my suitcase back.
---------------------------
---------------------------
“I love this city,” says Simon Njami, curator of the 12th Dak’art Biennial for Contemporary African Art. “I like a place where you’re driving and you are surprised by the sea. There is something light here that I like…the city is beautiful.” That love underlies his curation. The biennial in its fullness feels like a love letter to Dakar; in its specificities it feels like a series of distinct love letters from the artists to their own cities across Africa. Love, to Njami, is no frou frou emotion. Here it’s about delving into the nuances of the feeling. “Love is not always smiling and dadada,” he says, in a rhythmic singsong, “you cry, you fight.” You dig, one could add, you discover the mystery, the depths.
Nataal

Sunday, 22
The Everything-is-important era of the late 1960s and early 1970s
(it was shortly before and in the beginning of my puberty. i loved to dress as hippy at Fasching and to collect signatures on my jeans):
Rilke and Ponge assume that there are priorities: rich as opposed to vacuous objects, events with a certain allure. (This is the incentive for trying to peel back language, allowing the "things" themselves to speak.) More decisively, they assume that if there are states of false (language-clogged) consciousness, there are also authentic states of consciousness— which it's the function of art to promote. The alternative view denies the traditional hierarchies of interest and meaning, in which some things have more "significance" than others.The distinction between true and false experience, true and false consciousness is also denied: in principle, one should desire to pay attention to everything. It's this view, most elegantly formulated by Cage though its practice is found everywhere, that leads to the art of the inventory, the catalogue, surfaces; also "chance." The function of art isn't to sanction any specific experience, except the state of being open to the multiplicity of experience— which ends in practice by a decided stress on things usually considered trivial or unimportant.
Styles of Radical Will (1969) Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle Version

Friday, 20
In her first chapter about silence Susan Sontag writes:
A genuine emptiness, a pure silence is not feasible— either conceptually or in fact. If only because the artwork exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue.
(...)
Consider the connection between the mandate for a reduction of means and effects in art, whose horizon is silence, and the faculty of attention. In one of its aspects, art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention. (While the whole of the human environment might be so described— as a pedagogic instrument— this description particularly applies to works of art.) The history of the arts is tantamount to the discovery and formulation of a repertory of objects on which to lavish attention. One could trace exactly and in order how the eye of art has panned over our environment, "naming," making its limited selection of things which people then become aware of as significant, pleasurable, complex entities. (Oscar Wilde pointed out that people didn't see fogs before certain nineteenth-century poets and painters taught them how to; and surely, no one saw as much of the variety and subtlety of the human face before the era of the movies.)
Styles of Radical Will (1969) Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle Version

Saturday, 14
I hope I will get the names (to be found when clicking the @-button above the pictures at the right) of the artists whose works I show correctly. One of my suitcases, that I've used by now as hand luggage, where I put the more important and weightier things like the Reenchantments catalogue and other material I collected during my stay in Dakar, shoes - my beloved nike free amongst others - medicaments, cables and whatever I forgot got lost at Brussels or Frankfort airport. It was too heavy to carry with me as hand baggage and I had the option to check in two pieces. Of course I hope to get back my bag also.

Friday, 13
There is a trend how women present their faces in photos or selfies: a wind blows their hair into their faces, so they are partly covered. Why is it that women like to represent them hidden? Fear of nakedness? Fear of showing their true colour or fear of a fist that could harm their beauty? I don't know, but it implies the desire for a veil. Like in a traditional wedding - looking for a chosen man who'll lift the curtain?

Thursday, 12
met upon a quote of Kurt Cubain in my dictionary:
I am not gay although I wish I were just to piss off the homophobes.

Wednesday, 11
Sometimes we all traveling and winds hit heavy on the border line.
We meet souls not ready to be known.
In between hello and nice to meet you, we find ourselves smiling in private.
The universe and the world are sometimes not the same.
But remember when you browse through your mind.
Khanisile Mintho Mobongwa

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

Wednesday, 4
A very beautiful exhibition.

archive > diary > may 16

@
Dak'Art2016 Tuesday, 31 what i missed in Dakar... i went at least three times to Institut Français, there must be something important i guessed. but every time we reached there it was closed. i pondered maybe i supposed wrongly and i wasn't at the right place as mostly. like that evening when someone told me about a performance at Palais de Justice, but what i came upon was just some occasional visitors. though i loved that deserted atmosphere in the night. some waiters who i asked about the performance referred to a stylish woman who should know. approaching her she resolved that the performance was rescheduled to Le Gare. but she herself wouldn't go, too windy and too cold. she preferred a cocktail in warmth at Institut Français. after, we passed there and i think i almost expected - nothing but darkness. later, i mean today, via internet, i learned for the first time about the exhibition having taken place at Institut Français - La Maison Sentimentale. A show i would have loved to see. it hurts when you realise that you are not able to open doors you are longing for. it can happen that you succeed, but you need many pieces of luck to finally find the entrance. apropos finding the entrance a memory: in the late 1970s, traveling to Greece, we mainly enjoyed the beaches, boozed like hell, experienced LSD. one night i was so stoned that the other day i was cleared up about my desperate search for the entrance of a discotheque admits the nature of a green pasture where no houses had been in sight. Monday, 30 you know, of course you don't know.... today i had a colonoscopy they recommended me of several reasons. it was so expensive i feel ashamed to tell. and of course i don't reveal the fee i had to pay. but what was definitely pleasant, the reason why i talk about, how they made me fall asleep. indeed, i was so scared about being made unconscious, i was afraid of never waking up again, or whatever they could do to me while unconscious putting their camera inside me, what when they graft a chip ... though the young brittle lady doctor told me, no problem, you'll fall asleep and after a while you hear voices and then you know it's over. well, the nurse applied an electrode at my annulary to control my pulse and i realised how nervous i was when i heard the toc toc toc e di toc of my erratic heartbeat. she briefed me about the soporific she would inject and they considered African music as appropriate to calm me down. at the same time they asked me to think of something nice (think of Gambia they actually suggested) and i dived into a wonderful dream. yeah, the moment i woke up was illuminating. it was like they had predicted: their remote voices led me back to conscience and everything was over. Sunday, 29 But everywhere within the changing scene, young people suddenly rise up. Their bitter words indicate the desire to set fire to themselves or to leave. To leave on a journey in their bodies. Neither the South nor the North. Nor the East nor the West for them. None of the cardinal cardinal points. But where? Where to burn one's body because one's mind is so uneasy? Is he trying to burn the set of ancient values by replacing the latter with that of sensible values? Is he trying to overcome the taboos, the weight of ancestral defenses? Is he trying to stop associating music, works of art, with the profit that we can draw from the list of ill-gotten gains? Is he trying to free himself by some means or other and to remove the deliberate censorship of a bad conscience? Issa Samb, 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts, 2012 Saturday, 28 i ask myself if it'll ever happen that i am proud of who i am. when my thoughts are getting off the track to a certain event in my memory i most of the time meet up with mistakes, misbehaviour, weaknesses and so on. why is it this being obsessed of finding and admitting failures. why do i act submissively like an animal that capitulates towards his offender putting his paws up and feigning death. because i am afraid people take from me what makes me happy: perceiving the chance of a complete freedom to determine identity, lifestyle, visions, art according to a comprehension that lies beyond a civilly defined and well-recognised knowledge. Thursday, 26 i would like to thank all the artists whose works inspire me to go further, to do what i do, the same like every situation i am in and that gives an input to go further. like every idea that comes to mind to think about what suffuses with happiness and makes to go further and do what to do. Wednesday, 25 something i deeply regret: because of that stupid backache i left my reflex camera at my lodge in Baobab. now i try to imagine what nice pictures i could've made looking through the view finder... ---------------------------------------- changing seats, some talk of my life being a good girl was always more important than enlarging upon an occupation. my mother (one of my working colleagues mocked at me talking about mom addressing the young ones like she would say enjoy your beauty, but probably she referred to herself as she was the eldest in the round) used to point on my girlish tasks and when i got older she always feared i would become butch (probably not capable to find a man). i followed her because i couldn't cope with being less respected and more alone. the eldest of us three siblings i had a kinda particular role. for example, at our dining table i had nobody in front nor next to me; my mother was sitting next to my sister and my father next to my brother, each of them sitting in front of their contemporaries and me in front of the kitchen wall. a logic solution for a quadrilateral table with one edge pushed to wall because of space and kitchen size. i was four years ahead and expected to be able to be for my own. i think the problem was that our sitting order never changed during thirteen years. if there had been a rotation or a free choice of seats, it would have been different for all of us. in my puberty my father and me had a lot of discussions at that kitchen table. i think i wanted to challenge him. we never stopped being competitors towards my mother. even though, i considered myself absorbed perfectly into the family structure. yeah, sometimes i felt like being the most important, the hope of the family, and the most intelligent, and yet a lunatic again, a clown begging for appreciation - a truth they loved to mirror. concentrating on a work had been difficult, i got easily depressed and didn't see any sense in my work, for who, why and so on. i was not the only one. in our living community it had been a topic - how to make sense. it was about having a goal ahead you can work for. anyway, that was decades ago and i am happy to have left that time behind. but the be-a-good-woman's tasks still haunt me. yesterday, -i was a bit early for cinema - i found myself browsing through face creams. then i feel something inside me that tells there is no hope, because i don't see any hope in those creams - hmm, what would my shrink tell me then? ... Yes, talking to me is talking to yourself to find out ... all about business? no, for sure there are some good and reasonable dreams. Tuesday, 24 o Julieta- what a drama, what a tragedy... Almodóvar ------------------------- Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe. Sister Outsider, Essays and Speeches, Audre Lourde, 1984, Kindle Version -------------------------------- I could have returned, but why should I. There was no mission. i was part neither of the shows nor of the events, happenings and performances. I am not a journalist. i was just a visitor cruising the plateau and the outskirts - sicap, mermoz, liberté, ..... One of the million unknown artists who are trying to survive outside, glancing shyly at the activists and very important people. Hmm, but the memory of my stay has left a so sweet impression. Will Dakar be the same without this biennale? Difficult to imagine. Monday, 23 As this is a diary I should write about myself... a bit, at least besides the voices I really enjoy to echo and which let me unlearn a presence of an unspectacular daily life - am not in Dakar, unfortunately. i had to leave, because of family reasons. My mother celebrated her 80th anniversary and she needed me there and I needed to be with them. It was a wonderful festivity I'll never forget. Furthermore, there are things to organise, packing, administrative issues. At the same time I live for the day what means a relief I'd never guessed. I do what I like; get up, cook and eat whenever time has come, meet and talk to whoever I bear in mind, work as much as is essential for a refreshing progress - an integral timetable consisting of variables only. But i believe as soon as I've booked my one way flight to Banjul - a kinda unprecedented condition contrary to return tickets that always connoted a holiday status, though a constant either - time will run faster, for sure. By the way, I've got my suitcase back. --------------------------- --------------------------- “I love this city,” says Simon Njami, curator of the 12th Dak’art Biennial for Contemporary African Art. “I like a place where you’re driving and you are surprised by the sea. There is something light here that I like…the city is beautiful.” That love underlies his curation. The biennial in its fullness feels like a love letter to Dakar; in its specificities it feels like a series of distinct love letters from the artists to their own cities across Africa. Love, to Njami, is no frou frou emotion. Here it’s about delving into the nuances of the feeling. “Love is not always smiling and dadada,” he says, in a rhythmic singsong, “you cry, you fight.” You dig, one could add, you discover the mystery, the depths. Nataal Sunday, 22 The Everything-is-important era of the late 1960s and early 1970s (it was shortly before and in the beginning of my puberty. i loved to dress as hippy at Fasching and to collect signatures on my jeans): Rilke and Ponge assume that there are priorities: rich as opposed to vacuous objects, events with a certain allure. (This is the incentive for trying to peel back language, allowing the "things" themselves to speak.) More decisively, they assume that if there are states of false (language-clogged) consciousness, there are also authentic states of consciousness— which it's the function of art to promote. The alternative view denies the traditional hierarchies of interest and meaning, in which some things have more "significance" than others.The distinction between true and false experience, true and false consciousness is also denied: in principle, one should desire to pay attention to everything. It's this view, most elegantly formulated by Cage though its practice is found everywhere, that leads to the art of the inventory, the catalogue, surfaces; also "chance." The function of art isn't to sanction any specific experience, except the state of being open to the multiplicity of experience— which ends in practice by a decided stress on things usually considered trivial or unimportant. Styles of Radical Will (1969) Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle Version Friday, 20 In her first chapter about silence Susan Sontag writes: A genuine emptiness, a pure silence is not feasible— either conceptually or in fact. If only because the artwork exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue. (...) Consider the connection between the mandate for a reduction of means and effects in art, whose horizon is silence, and the faculty of attention. In one of its aspects, art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention. (While the whole of the human environment might be so described— as a pedagogic instrument— this description particularly applies to works of art.) The history of the arts is tantamount to the discovery and formulation of a repertory of objects on which to lavish attention. One could trace exactly and in order how the eye of art has panned over our environment, "naming," making its limited selection of things which people then become aware of as significant, pleasurable, complex entities. (Oscar Wilde pointed out that people didn't see fogs before certain nineteenth-century poets and painters taught them how to; and surely, no one saw as much of the variety and subtlety of the human face before the era of the movies.) Styles of Radical Will (1969) Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle Version Saturday, 14 I hope I will get the names (to be found when clicking the @-button above the pictures at the right) of the artists whose works I show correctly. One of my suitcases, that I've used by now as hand luggage, where I put the more important and weightier things like the Reenchantments catalogue and other material I collected during my stay in Dakar, shoes - my beloved nike free amongst others - medicaments, cables and whatever I forgot got lost at Brussels or Frankfort airport. It was too heavy to carry with me as hand baggage and I had the option to check in two pieces. Of course I hope to get back my bag also. Friday, 13 There is a trend how women present their faces in photos or selfies: a wind blows their hair into their faces, so they are partly covered. Why is it that women like to represent them hidden? Fear of nakedness? Fear of showing their true colour or fear of a fist that could harm their beauty? I don't know, but it implies the desire for a veil. Like in a traditional wedding - looking for a chosen man who'll lift the curtain? Thursday, 12 met upon a quote of Kurt Cubain in my dictionary: I am not gay although I wish I were just to piss off the homophobes. Wednesday, 11 Sometimes we all traveling and winds hit heavy on the border line. We meet souls not ready to be known. In between hello and nice to meet you, we find ourselves smiling in private. The universe and the world are sometimes not the same. But remember when you browse through your mind. Khanisile Mintho Mobongwa 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 Wednesday, 4 A very beautiful exhibition.