Thoughts

« There is no need to have considerable material resources, but only to have a line of conduct, a certain rigor, a will capable of facing all the obstacles on the path that one has resolutely set for oneself. »

Professor Hyacinthe Bastaraud

We are constantly erasing physical fragments of our memory to replace our insides with promises we already know will not be kept. We act in the image of our city and our builders, we raze to make something new without taking into account our stories, but only by wanting to resemble those who made us as we have become, without taking into account who we were, to create a so-called « social cohesion ». However, we know from experience that hardness makes hard, that without a horizon the mind cannot escape, that without a reference point we end up being idle, but we are housed in barricaded, juxtaposed, stacked caloges units, with bars or enclosures for our safety and opposite, we still have the same thing and next door too. A sort of spatial common place where being and its being merge in the « We » societal without necessarily taking into account the « I » particular other than in the illusory. It does not prevent the fact that it will be necessary for the « I » defines itself, or rather that the « I » asserts itself; because the « I » has already defined itself, identified by the « who I am ». We must now assert ourselves in the « what I am »This affirmation requires an appropriation of History, our History, our stories, and not a reappropriation, because that would mean that we possessed it for a time before being dispossessed of it. How can we do this, how can we learn when everything is done to dissuade us, by giving us a few scraps of memories; when the system thinks it can quench our thirst, at least mine, which is far from being the case because no commemoration will give us back our History, nor will it tell us about the stories that flow from it, as long as History is not clearly told, quoted and written in its entirety.

It was at that moment that I began to look at the social individual and to work on his stories. To understand the why of our being, and the how of our becoming. In my works until 2008, which had as their support our History and our stories, as their material our existence, and as their expression our becoming, the primary goal was to show that the problem was not only to be an individual of color (because we are all of a different color and that is the richness of nature that allows us to recognize ourselves in our differences, or in any system), but also to be a social Individual actor in the world. I would have liked to speak to the slave, not the one of the slave trade, but the one who prevents us from progressing, the one who bends, who rebels in silence and lowers his head in public and accepts, in his cry, to follow the minority that leads him. I would have liked to speak to this slave to tell him that we will have to build ourselves every day, asking ourselves what we are doing to glorify the fight that men and women have led to offer us this freedom that we have today. But also and above all, that we will have to build ourselves from our heritage, because we can no longer leave time to time, nor take our time. It is more than time today to redefine, to commit and to act.I was then looking to paint this time, the time of our lives so that we could look at ourselves through our ills, our hopes, our sufferings, our joys, our doubts, our certainties, our deliverances. and paradoxes that make sense in our societies where time is personified and sometimes endowed with will. We often find ourselves caught up in time, not knowing what to do with the time we have left, overwhelmed by time, but now, this time is running away so quickly that we no longer have time. Well, let us be actors and not slaves, and let us seize time, not to dominate it or exploit it, but to navigate its flow, sew with its thread and care with its duration. It will be long, laborious and uncertain, because we will have to learn and relearn by getting rid of our certainties to subject them to the test of reflection. A reflection that should be done by having set a course for a new humanity while tracing the path that we should follow together separately.

Goodÿ – 03/09/2016