Vincent Meessen

Those Who Left Are the Ones Who Return. May 10 marks the first year of passing of the late @madamekoyo and May 11 marks the anniversary of Omar Blondin Diop’s death at Gorée Prison in Dakar. More than 50 years have passed, and the Senegalese government, despite the first change in power, remains as deaf and silent as ever in the face of the family’s and loved ones’ calls for justice. However, at the 61st Venice Biennale, another voice was heard: that of the Vietnamese-Senegalese anti-hero nicknamed Bouba Chinois. He speaks, among other things, about the assassination of Omar Blondin Diop in the acclaimed film installation Ñi demoon ñoo dellusi (Those Who Left Are the Ones Who Return), by director Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn @tuan.andrew.nguyen (Pictures 1-3). Bouba, moved to tears, says: “Someone you’re talking to about escaping the day before doesn’t commit suicide the next day. It’s impossible. They hanged him.” More about Omar in Just a Movement to watch on @avilafilm.be and to read about in The Other Country, a book published by @sternbergpress_official with @wiels_brussels and @centrepompidou Eponymous 1975 music title by @pinhasrichard from their Allez-Teia (Heldon II) LP. #omarblondindiop #11mai1973 #omarenmai

« The Eye That Scrolls » In its brevity, the Instagram post mirrors the postcard. A brief, often anecdotal message, no longer intended for a loved one, but for everyone—and often for no one. Is it any wonder that @oriolvilanova ’s work is arguably the most photographed at the Venice Biennale and the most shared on Instagram? It was almost inevitable. But above all, it was pre-grammed. For in “Instagrammable,” we must carefully consider the meaning of the suffix with the help of Jacques Derrida. The gram: an archi-writing, that is, a coding. The one inherent in the living, that of spoken languages, math, writing, technologies,... Vilanova surprises with the simplicity and scale of his gesture: a kaleidoscopic and grammatological work deployed on a 1:1 scale within the Spanish Pavilion. This architecture, crafted as a picture book, unfolds a fascinating atlas in the form of a “back to the future.” It is as if, through his collection, classification, and display of postcards—small windows to and from the past—he had anticipated our contemporary condition and, in passing, gave a nod to the “Picture Generation”. “Between us, didn’t it all begin with a reproduction?” (Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, 1980) Creating art from little by orchestrating a massive return to the sender: the public, which in turn redistributes the work through mass sharing on social media. It is by experiencing this swarm of postcards that we better understand how photography instrumentalizes our visual impulses and that the postcard was a form of transactional object expressing the relationship: the desire to receive as well as to be received. By positioning all the postcards vertically, he mimics the framing that has become the norm since the advent of social media and is dictated by the shape of smartphones. By saturating our vision, our eye no longer knows where to “rest its gaze », our eye scrolls and drifts. An exemplary serie? That of the cave paintings in which our ancestors anticipated this pavilion, this “cave of the Moderns,” but also the data center that currently houses this post displayed on “my wall.” #ingridsala @carlesguerra

Sous la pluie et dans l’attente de découvrir Miet Warlop et Caroline Dumalin, émotion de retrouver, devant des cartes postales des souverains belges ( détail du Pavillon espagnol de Oriol Vilanova @oriolvilanova , les amis portant encore la mémoire du Pavillon Belge d’il y a dix ans déjà ! L’excellente Lotte Arndt @arndtlotte qui coordonna Karawane, le volet discursif du Pavillon au sein de l’erg @ergunlieuderecherche et ceux que l’on retrouve dans l’exposition comme l’incontournable Sammy Baloji @twentyninestudio , à nouveau présent dans un pavillon national ( le premier pavillon de la RDC) et dans l’exposition de groupe Minor Keys avec un travail produit sur les presses/imprimantes de @masereel.art Et puis tous ceux que l’on retrouve, la commissaire Katerina Gregos @katerinagregos et les artistes dont on retrouve le travail dans les pages de cette belle publication bilingue de la FWB coordonnée par l’infatigable Pascale Viscardy @pascale.2.1 . et dans laquelle je m’entretiens avec l’historien d’art et curateur Raphaël Pirenne @raphaelpirenne avec 10 ans de recul. Merci à eux pour leur confiance. Just in case pour les retardataires, un site toujours en fonction : www.personne-et-les-autres.be

Infans Ludens In the ample retrospective of Helen Levitt (1913-2009) at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid, visitors are first helpfully reminded of her encounter with and the support of Walker Evans and, just as importantly, the decisive contribution of writer and screenwriter James Agee, not to mention her friendship and exchange with Cartier-Bresson. Three leading figures in documentary art who, in their own way, retrospectively position Levitt as a first-class interlocutor. And indeed, no one else has likely observed and respected the world of childhood—its inventiveness, its ability to foreshadow the world’s destiny just around the corner—as well as she has. An infans ludens is needed for a homo ludens to exist. This childhood (of humanity ?) is celebrated only in the form of pairings: children forming couples, proto-gangs, mixed families, or even micro-societies. Moreover, and above all, what the exhibition, in its generosity, allows and makes very clear are the expressive possibilities of assembled bodies: whispering, grimacing, coax, kiss, cast jealous glances, apply makeup, dress up, support one another, come to blows, chase one another, hide, protect, surrender to an adult’s embrace, lift girls’ skirts, lounge about, pile on top of one another, climb pylons and trees, clambering over parapets, bracing oneself or kneeling to urinate between the sidewalk and the wheel trim,…. Levitt’s photographs also challenge the conventions of proxemics. How can one find the right distance with subjects who seem to overlap the four types of distance that the psycho-sociologists believe they have calibrated on a universal scale? These photos compile an inventory of expressive gestures as singular as the situations themselves seem commonplace to us. As we walk in the show, we come to view Levitt as the creator of a photo-choreo-graphed work. And we find ourselves dreaming: what would happen if a contemporary choreographer took on this fantastic catalog of gestures to sequence them and set them in motion ? (Sorry for the very poor image quality and the numerous rough croppings that emphasize the body language) @arteyculturafm #LevittFM #childhood #singularities

An Antifascist Dramaturgy ‘Acción Portabella’ : 100 events in more than 60 institutions and 20 countries and in which cinema, art and critical thinking meet. This show is part of the international commemoration program ( Reina Sofia, Arsenal Berlin,MoMA, Macba, CCCB, TIFF, @cinematekbe ,Eye film museum Amsterdam, Bafici …) for the centenary of radical filmmaker Pere Portabella @pereportabella . This amplitude testifies about the radiance of the filmmaker, who was also a fierce anti-fascist militant and later a Catalan senator besides his early role as producer (Buñuel, Ferreri,…) and (clandestine) organizer under dictatorship. In this framework, the show curated by the artist @marcelo_exposito_ and which has just opened last week at Fundació Joan Brossa in Barcelona shows archives connected with the past and present of antifascist struggles ranging from Portabella’s shadow activities to the irreverent and iconoclast collaboration with Joan Miró, and regular collaborators as the poet /scenarist/artist Joan Brossa, the pianist Carles Santos and others ( the brilliant institutional critique of Grup de Treball) to the echoing practice of militants and contemporary artists including ao @danillaortiz ( on the mythic foundation of the nation-state) and @nuriaguell_studio ( on masculinity) . Expósito has conceived the show as a grand concertation—a concrete concert—of components, in which « The Irregular Concert » a collab between Portabella, Brossa and Santos is pivotal. Traces are material (sounds, music partitions, set photographs, posters, reports, works of art in dialogue with political and organizational letters, legislative efforts to bring back Spain in the democratic arena) but also subjective : minor knowledges, subaltern and rebellious subjectivities. Archival and contemporary contributions highlights vivid values and ongoing struggles and Portabella’s role as an organizer able to catalyze historical situations ( as for ex. organizing the head of Catalonia Josep Tarradelas’s return after twenty years of exile, and the day he will pronounce the famous «  : « Ciutadans de Catalunya, ja soc aquí  » ). @fundaciobrossa

ABRACADABRA ! The Fraternity of Metaphors : the Barcelona exhibition’s title is in itself a poem that encapsulates Godard’s program of relations. Metaphors as moving units to problematize a situation or metaphors as some kind of set theory ( théorie des ensembles) in mathematics. In other words: no poem without a theorem (and vice versa). But this ´science of relationships’ is not constructed here by applying existing diagrams, formulas or pre-programmed algorithms, but by patiently attempting to draw an infinite curve. Film as strip. Behind the art of montage lies Godard’s cinematic equation: x+3=1. Simple only in appearance but unsolvable except maybe through the sum of all his films, which may, in fact, be nothing more than the sequences of a single, spiral-like film. I visited the exhibition’s 15 halls arranged in a nearly circular path (in Barcelona’s La Vireina Centre de la Imatge ) five times in a loop. As if caught in a whirlwind of images that make you spin and realize that in this ‘infinite curve’, Palestine is a recurring metaphor - that of a people « without images » - but also that the spiral is indeed the metaphor of the metaphor, and Godard its prophetic essayist. Godard as GOAT. Congratulations to Manuel Asín, the exhibition curator, for his own vibrant cinematic edit, the newly created Jean-Luc Godard Foundation, and the lenders who made magic happen. Those unfamiliar with his work will be guided by the hand, connoisseurs will be delighted, and the foremost specialists will be surprised. For as “Abracadabra”—the title of the oil painting by the very young Godard (pic 19)—proclaims, the magic of images operates here in a continuous flow. #GOAT #Jean-LucGodard #Anne-MarieMiéville #Jean-PierreGorin #ManuelAsín @lavirreinaci @nicolebrenez @fabricearagno

The Longest Day’s End (1975-2015-…) It is a drawing in the air, or a sculpture beyond museum proportions, or phantom architecture, or a monumental tribute to Gordon Matta-Clark’s legendary Day’s End (1975), or the trace of Pier 52’s gay spaces at the height of the AIDS epidemic, or a sandy gathering place where one can remake the world at dusk… or… all of these at once. David Hammons is present, but as always, “in negative.” Minimal but critically rooted into history, the work becomes a submerged trace, a supporting structure of possibilities, a crippled memory waiting to be filled. For example, with the various light filters used in cinema and installed by artist Margaret Honda on the facade of the @whitneymuseum as part of the current Biennial, ‘Day’s End’ seems to step back in time and engage in a dialogue with its past. The tones and hues alone draw us into a history of techniques, processes, and imaginations. Archives pictures by @gordonmattaclark_estate #Film (Withney Museum of American Art) #GordonMattaClark #DavidHammons #MargaretHonda @whitneymuseum

Human Humility Very last day of ‘A Mexican Atlas of Contemporary Architecture’, a great show at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico. Focusing on outstanding Mexican projects completed over the past fifteen years, this exhibition curated by Pablo Landa @landaruiloba demonstrates that the recent period has been of a striking creativity. Even though approaching a subject or generations of practitioners through a national lens is problematic by definition—arbitrary and somehow outdated—certain proposals of this kind, such as this one, are not without their indirect effects. More than a national template, we realize that it is first and foremost a particular attention to topography and context that led Mexican architects to develop tectonics and situated approaches. Perhaps it is ultimately the volcanic presence that has shaped and mineralized the architecture here, deliberately reduced to a single stratum. Human humility in the face of the geological. As an atlas, the exhibition examines projects and practices developed in different regions of Mexico, carried out by members of various generations. Here are just a few personal highlights : (2-5) @productora_df , (6-7) @fridaescobedo , (8-10) @taller_mauricio_rocha + Gabriela Carrillo, (11-12) Urquiza + de Alba + von Wenz, (17) Atelier ARS,(18) Sordo Madaleno.

MAES ANAMNÈSE This is a retrospective exhibition, but it is undoubtedly also an anamnesis—a reconstructed narrative of a story depicted through a selection of images drawn from remarkable series produced since the mid-1980s. This retrospective seems to hinge on a very recent shock: a TV news archive in which the artist recognizes her grandmother and, only later, the little girl her grandmother is holding by the hand: @_chantal_maes_ herself. This 6-year-old girl with a haughty bearing—one immediately thinks of Ernesto, also “framed” by adults—in Straub & Huillet’s sublime film « En rachâchant »—it is she and indeed she, crossing the threshold of what the journalist calls in his commentary the elementary school where one goes to “Work - Learn - Study.” What we see emerging in this exhibition is perhaps the very unlearning of this entire belief and its patient deschooling / recoding into images. It is undoubtedly her linguistic struggles that guided Chantal Maes toward the creation of images…silent. But images that speak. For the entire body of work rests on this dialectic that engages the medium where it stands, since its invention, in distress if not in crisis: photography calls for its caption, for a discourse. Chantal Maes, stuttering and affected, struggling with words (see the 3 videos in the exhibition), finds her solution in images. For to suspend time is to block its accounting artificiality and thus its commercial productivity, its yield. In her “inhabited” portraits or in her patient observation of workers’ social interactions, Chantal Maes thus uses photography as if to put (bodies) on strike. Deliberately freezing time, inviting us to consider the suspended time of inaction: a celebration of the unproductive, of time for oneself. Photos as discrete units for the visitor to assemble in order to imagine a liberated time. A “poor medium”—here employed precisely for its gaps and shortcomings—seems to regain some credibility and perhaps even a historical utility once thought lost. @bps22.charleroi @elia_pijollet @jfchevrier_eliapijollet

Liti Liti : un ciné-fils à Dakar Si vous avez manqué la première du 9 avril , deux prochaines projections ( sous-titres anglais) ont lieu à Bozar à Bruxelles le 22 et 26 avril. C’est l’histoire d’un cinéphile venu de la banlieue populaire dakaroise et qui voulait, tout en tournant un long métrage, rester un fils. Serge Daney a inventé ce terme à double entente : « ciné-fils » pour désigner ceux qui ont grandi avec le cinéma et sont parfois nés « dans » les films . Liti Liti ( L’attachement) parle des liens qui unissent le fils ( Mamadou Khouma Gueye ) à sa mère et la mère à son quartier de Guinaw Rails. Ou le cinéma comme « art des raccords » qui vous montre comment se tenir debout même quand le sort s’acharne. Déguerpis - comme on dit en Afrique- les habitants obligés de se disperser perdent alors toute les formes d’entraide coutumière et de sociabilité construites pendant des décennies. Liti Liti ou aussi comment tenir comptable un État qui sacrifie l’un de ses quartiers populaires historiques sur l’autel du « progrès » ( un train de banlieue) et ce contre un chiche dédommagement. La mère figure ici possiblement une patrie meurtrie - mieux appelée ici « matrie » - qui, de par sa résilience et l’aide des siens, sauve la mise... Leçon de démocratie énoncée depuis une situation filiale et dont le film constituerait un cordon ombilical de substitution, une forme apte à dire que l’attachement est à la fois filiation et fidélité. Merci à @xumagueye et à @djiamambu pour votre échange et à @twentyninestudioproduction .

Sharp Lam (and Aimé ‘son Ami’ ) Who better than Lam has secretly glimpsed the current epistemological turning point, imagining and synthesizing the encounter between cultures and other, more-than-human worlds? Of both Afro-Cuban—though in reality Congolese—and Chinese descent, having settled in Europe before fleeing Nazism and being denied asylum in the U.S. and Mexico, Lam returned to Cuba and there pushed the boundaries of his plural identity to the point of embracing the animal and plant worlds and making pacts with various invisible Afro-Caribbean entities. Hence these intermediary figures, which are nothing but interwoven relationships, networks, interlacings, and tangles of hybrids shared among various forms of life. In this forest of totemic signs, the bat seeks to become a bird, which in turn finds itself propelled into a mantis-becoming, and everywhere the human figure becomes spectral, vegetal, and zoomorphic: horned entities, horse-women, leafy brains, wooden legs (tree trunks and human legs), sharp fetishes as if inhabited by spirits… In other words, the interspecies realm makes pacts and celebrates its rediscovered origins! Following the landmark retrospecrive at the Centre Pompidou a few years ago, he is once again in the spotlight in an absolutely sublime and unique exhibition, distinguished by the quality of the works on display. Among other surprises is this gouache (photo 3) from 1938, renamed “Madame Lumumba” in 1961 on the advice of his friend Aimé Césaire. The Congolese prime minister had just been brutally assassinated by the Belgian authorities, aided by the American and British secret services. A trial is set to begin in Belgium: one of the kingdom’s most influential men must answer for his own responsibility - then as a young dilplomatic intern working for the Belgian state - in this state crime. He is the last living person connected to the court case initiated by the Lumumba family

Thanks to @efluxscreeningroom flux, its curator @lukasbrasiskis , and the large audience that came out last night. @naeem_mohaiemen and I were able to watch our films again under ideal conditions, and this pairing was quite surprising in the many ways it resonated. To be continued