How conversations can go:
Just this afternoon my colleague Elie Nassar and I talked about unravelling societies and breaking down of systems meant for survival. How to survive what feels like a new 'Ancien Regime': an environmentally, financially, and otherwise untenable group of people whose continued actions are ruining everything on a planetary scale, destroying our very species, for a culture of goals that are literally insane, even if presently they may seem the pinnacle of Power. (so were once National/Socialists, Kings, Religious quests etc.)
And then to enjoy these 30 minutes of "Art resisting/despite War" by ARTE, featuring my colleague Tebby WT RAMASIKE working with fellow-South African visual artist Bruce Clarke, on a site of terror in #Kaunas #EuropeanCulturalCapital2022 (around 13min11 into the video)
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/105616-007-A/twist/
Reminded that #GeorgeMaciunas who originated the rather spritely-adverse-humorous #Fluxus came from Kaunas. The 1/3 Jewish population of Lithuania that has literally been exterminated during Nazi-Occupation, save for those who like Clarke's or #WilliamKentridge 's grandparents could escape.
The presented works of Aiste Ramunaite can remind anyone of #CoBrA in Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium after WWII : spontaneity, organic forms, colorist, elements from substrate (folk) art that survived Christianization, even linear Rationality, in a strikingly similar language.
Not mentioned here, Lithuania is a key #EU country working more closely with and towards officially recognizing #Taiwan. By doing this, it is now on a global axis point between two "opening" countries on the planet, (#Ukraine is the other) each threatened in its existence by an Imperialist Old Power at its borders, also two of the BRICS, unfortunately, several of whom are currently governed disastrously by Populist Presidents.
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Art can do a lot, and it was good to be reminded of art that was created in Lithuania during Soviet Occupation. Personal, momentary, small-scale, furtive, unofficial, open-ended, immersive, direct. Dance, coming from our experience of our moving bodymindbeings, originally a tangible art-form, can lead us back there, again & again. (which explains why it is so heavily regulated, censored, kept in formula, guarded jealously)
Quoting East-German writer Christa Wolf in Kassandra from 1983 : "It is the other, which they squeeze between their sharp distinctions, the Third, which in their opinion does not even exist, the smiling living, which is able to ever again bring itself forth from itself, the undivided, spirit in living, living in spirit."
And so, the work goes on.
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