It's a confetti party

photo by confetti system

La danse "Serpentine" de Loïe Fuller

Juan Manuel Castro Prieto in Ethiopia

Photos by Juan Manuel Castro Prieto: http://www.agencevu.com

Katie Vernon floral illustration

Bloom 14

Crafts at the Barefoot College, Tilonia, India

Approach
In the early ‘70s, the lack of employment in the villages of Rajasthan forced many of the rural poor to migrate to cities. In the absence of jobs but still hoping for any job, they lived an inhuman existence in appalling urban slums. Many of these migrants were traditional craftmen and artisans who abandoned their trade due lack of access to broader markets. The humiliation and scorn they would face on returning to the village prevented them from coming back home. Anyone going back to the village was considered a failure and the shame was shared by the whole family.

When the youth fled, they took with them the dying hopes of their parents- who were weavers, blacksmiths, potters, builders, carpenters, farmers-to pass on the traditional skills to the next generation. They left behind not only their families but also the knowledge their elders had collected over the generations to adapt to local conditions.

The Barefoot College began promoting rural craft to address these problems of under-employment. Assistance in improving designs and techniques, creation of marketing outlets, and access to credit have helped to restore and create new income opportunities for craftsmen and women. Training and materials provided by the College also enabled women to work from home, helping them to generate income from craft.

Today, these rural artisans produce clothing and accessories, decorative home furnishings, furniture, rugs, textiles, handmade paper products, puppets, educational toys, metalwork, and leather goods. The crafts are sold through retail shops and exhibitions held in metropolitan cities of India, Europe, USA and Canada

Friends of Tilonia is working with the College to develop direct sales and marketing channels for these crafts in the U.S.A. To support this effort, FOT has developed an online store- www.tilonia.com that is promoting sales and direct marketing to individuals, wholesalers and distributors on behalf of Barefoot College.
www.barefootcollege.org

Ouvril l'oeil d'Hiroshi Nomura

Hiroshi Nomura met en scène ce qu'il nomme "la surprenante respiration qui habite la vie de tous les jours"

Kabîr

You do not see that the Real is in your home, and you wander from forest to forest listlessly!
Here is the truth! Go where you will; if you do not find your soul, the world is unreal to you.

merci Saipua

photos from the Saipua blog

Shine

photo from tumblr

La Croix du Perche and Autun

photos by Tilman Favier

is it a puzzle to find one's path?

photo by Iosif Kiraly

Shupein Qin - Reflective

un peu d'Henri Michaux

LE GRAND COMBAT

Il l'emparouille et l'endosque contre terre ;
Il le rague et le roupéte jusqu'à son drâle ;
Il le pratéle et le libucque et lui baroufle les ouillais ;
Il le tocarde et le marmine,
Le manage rape à ri et ripe à ra.
Enfin il l'écorcobalisse.
L'autre hésite, s'espudrine, se défaisse, se torse et se ruine.
C'en sera bientôt fini de lui ;
Il se reprise et s'emmargine... mais en vain
Le cerveau tombe qui a tant roulé.
Abrah ! Abrah ! Abrah !
Le pied a failli !
Le bras a cassé !
Le sang a coulé !
Fouille, fouille, fouille,
Dans la marmite de son ventre est un grand secret.
Mégères alentours qui pleurez dans vos mouchoirs;
On s'étonne, on s'étonne, on s'étonne
Et on vous regarde,
On cherche aussi, nous autres le Grand Secret.

« Papa, fais tousser la baleine », dit l'enfant confiant.
Le tibétain, sans répondre, sortit sa trompe à appeler l'orage
et nous fûmes copieusement mouillés sous de grands éclairs.
Si la feuille chantait, elle tromperait l'oiseau.

gentle dance between hands and bubbles

Keersmaeker at UNESCO for International Dance Day

She danced part 3 of Face, Four Movements to the music of Steve Reich. It was sublime!!

"I think dance celebrates what makes us human. When we dance we use, in a natural way, the mechanics of our body and all our senses to express joy, sadness, the things we care about.
People have always danced to celebrate the crucial moments of life and our bodies carry the memory of all possible human experiences. We can dance alone and we can dance together. We can share what makes us the same, what makes us different from each other.
For me dancing is a way of thinking. Through dance we can embody the most abstract ideas and thus reveal what we cannot see, what we cannot name.
Dance is a link between people, connecting heaven and earth.
We carry the world in our bodies.
I think that ultimately each dance is part of a larger whole, a dance that has no beginning and no end"
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker

Etty Hillesum: "La vie est pleine de sens dans son absurdité"

"Ce n'est plus moi en particulier qui veux ou dois faire telle ou telle chose : la vie est grande, bonne passionnante, éternelle, et à s'accorder tant d'importance à soi-même, à s'agiter et à se débattre, on passe à côté de ce grand, de ce puissant et éternel courant qu'est la vie."

"La vie est difficile mais ce n'est pas grave... Je suis une femme heureuse et je chante les louanges de la vie, oui vous avez bien lu, en l'an de grâce 1942, la énième année de guerre."

"La vie est pleine de sens dans son absurdité, pour peu l'on sache y ménager une place pour tout et la porter tout entière en soi dans son unité ; alors la vie, d'une manière ou d'une autre, forme un ensemble parfait. Dès qu'on refuse ou veut éliminer certains éléments, dès que l'on suit son bon plaisir et son caprice pour admettre tel aspect de la vie et en rejeter tel autre, alors la vie devient en effet absurde: dès lors que l'ensemble est perdu, tout devient arbitraire."

Poétesse, Albane Gellé

le petit cheval blanc dans ma tête il n'est pas seulement dans ma tête il est blanc il est dehors je vais avec lui voir les oiseaux les rivières tout ce qui est grand et vert il m'emmène toute entière il porte mes doutes mes humeurs alors galoper disperse abandonne allège

Albane Gellé dans L'air libre, édition le dé bleu, page 37

After the Dream de Chiharu Shiota à la Maison Rouge, Paris

Les longues robes blanches - Que symbolisent ces cinq robes blanches bien trop longues ? L'innocence, le mariage, la maternité ? A moins qu'elles ne rappellent plutôt les chemises que devaient porter jadis les femmes internées... Cela expliquerait pourquoi elles se trouvent prises dans les réseaux noirs, comme des papillons dans un filet. A ces questions, l'artiste ne répond pas, laissant chacun imaginer son interprétation.

Bien qu'elle vive à Berlin depuis quinze ans, Chiharu Shiota, née à Osaka en 1972, n'a été que rarement invitée en France. Regrettable indifférence pour une artiste qui a exposé en Allemagne, mais aussi à Londres, à New York ou à Moscou. Formée aussi bien en peinture à Kyoto qu'à l'art corporel par la performeuse Marina Abramovic, Shiota conçoit des installations aux dimensions des lieux qui sont mis à disposition - et aussi des décors pour les opéras.

Photo de Tilman Favier et texte de Philippe Dagen.

La Maison rouge, 10 bd de la Bastille, Paris-12ème. Tél: 01 40 01 08 81. Du mercredi au dimanche jusqu'au 15 mai. www.lamaisonrouge.org

La fabuleuse Agnès Varda

Elle continue à jouer.
Master Class avec Agnès Varda au Forum des Images le mercredi 6 avril à 19h.
Forum des Images - Forum des Halles, 2 rue du Cinéma, Paris www.forumdesimages.fr

Camille Claudel and her Vertumnus and Pomona

The fabric works by Louise Bourgeois

Text from the Hauser and Wirth Gallery in London

Fabric played an important role in Bourgeois’s life. She grew up surrounded by the textiles of her parents’ tapestry restoration workshop, and from the age of twelve helped the business by drawing in the sections of the missing parts that were to be repaired. A life-long hoarder of clothes and household items such as tablecloths, napkins and bed linen, from the mid-nineties Bourgeois cut up and re-stitched these, transforming her lived materials into art. Through sewing she attempted to effect psychological repair: ‘I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole’.
The fabric drawings are abstract and heterogeneous, deriving their formal logic from the juxtapositions of patterns printed on their materials and the artist’s long-standing motifs. Over a six-year period their designs evolved, exploring more intricate geometries and increasingly incorporating collaged elements. Stripy and chequered drawings that Bourgeois began making in 2002 weave thin strips of her garments together, bending the modernist grid. Later works adopt polygonal structures, stitching the fabrics so that the patterns form concentric circles and spirals similar to spider webs and the vibrant mirrorings of a kaleidoscope. Rather than being minimalist, these morphing geometries are supple and embracive, softly corporeal.

For over seventy years, Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) submitted her psychic life to intense examination, transforming her thoughts and emotions into a body of work of startling formal complexity. An extraordinarily radical and influential artist, her reputation as the most important female artist of our times was consolidated by an extensive retrospective of her work shown at Tate Modern (2007 – 2008) that toured to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington DC until May 2009. A major solo exhibition, ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed’, will take place in South America in 2011, opening at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, in March and travelling to Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paolo, and Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro.