words here and there

A friend told me that a friend told her to befriend the internet. To put up a flag to find like-minded friends. Here's me doing the same. Let's talk art in life, and having agency in the performance of our identities.

[wordshereandthere]

Fear and Aggression in Florida

Nobody bothered to point out that if Trayvon had attacked his murderer, he would have had the law on his side. How many other times had policemen or others stopped him for nothing? How much fear can we endure before aggression starts to promise relief? Sometimes I envy those whose first instinct is to attack. By hitting back, they take an active role in shaping their lives.

[wordshereandthere]

On an encounter at a Uruguayan airport

Today I was gazed and gazed at by a little black girl with a small pink bag. A briefcase really, if you will. She was the first of her kind I've seen since arriving in South America. As she approached the check in desk where I was standing, I wondered, as usual, how to respond to the situation. The situation, a not uncommon one, being: me and another black person. I felt like she was looking at me, but I couldn't be sure because we were doing this thing where we let our eyes slide off each other.

And she was awkwardly below eye level - there was that too.

I was still chewing over what to do when her grandmother, a white and weathered woman with pink lipstick, tapped me lightly on the arm and told me that the little girl wanted to meet another African. I smiled and said hello and what's your name. Lightly surprised and lightly pleased at the turn of events. And I made sure to look at her directly in the eye.  And she looked at me directly in the face with a quiet and searching intent - although maybe I just wanted to use the phrase "searching intent", but she was certainly looking. I felt a bit bad because when I knew she spoke French (bring originally from Senegal) I said "t'es tres jolie". And after I felt I should have said "you look very intelligent" which she did. A little less pleasing perhaps to hear as a girl of approximately eight, but much better, I would say, in the long of it. In any case there was something to this experience. There is something to it that was different in a very same same situation. Perhaps it was seeing someone so much younger... I'm biting my nail to figure it out. In any case there was something warm about it. Like I was doing this "good duty"; here is a little girl that wants to talk to me (needs to?) *because* I'm a fellow African. It's as if the 'black duty' (and I shall have to write more on this) was made more comfortable by the less polemic 'older kid' duty.  So yes, I am glad that her grandmother brought her over to me. And on the bus to the plane, though my mouth was comfortably virginal at seven fifty in the morning, and though my stomach was turning slightly, I readily accepted her offer of her ritz biscuits and smiled as I worked my teeth around the cracker.

[wordshereandthere]

on having a white baby

I think I've been trying to write this for a while now, but maybe I didn't know to. 

I've been under this pleasant illusion of 'comfortable controversial' - where I thought I could talk openly about certain issues - certain race related issues. And because I could talk about these issues - because I could write about them - I was mindful and I was articulate about "racial realities", and even (goodness) about life. Heck - I'm an anthropology major - this is literally the food that I eat.  And the people that make the food that I eat. And the source of the food and the people that make the food that I eat. You get me?

And so it is with a certain alarm that I find my chest is tight and my face is warm with embarrassment because I thought to share a question about a certain "racial reality" with some friends. 

I wrote a line in an earlier piece of writing about a black nanny I saw in Paris, and her "two white wards", two sweet little milky white boys that contrasted beautifully with her thin dark frame. And I was writing about the feeling of shared awareness and melancholy between us.

It is only now, and with a certain shame, that I realise the audacity of that presumption. 

I did feel something, there WAS an awareness: one of *me* being aware of *her*. It is only now, and with a certain shame, that I see that I didn't see how much we really did share, and how easily we could begin to share a certain presence in this world. I could not see the full blackness - a dark and occluding blackness - only a single articulation of black that I used to give words to my own feeling in a particular place and at a particular time. I feel almost guilty now, but more I feel sad. 

Because I *am* also that black nanny, and I cannot be honest with those around me about how scared to death I am of that. I cannot exhale the words to explain why I cringe when I have to walk with the white children. Because I shouldn't? I cannot explain that though it was not me, nor my mother, nor my grandmother that left alone their own children to look after little white children - I am all those women when I pick up a white child. And I cannot be 'those women' -- I resist being forced into the flesh of the idea of those women. 

But also, how can I resist? When all I really know to perceive is their presence in my space, ready to be sealed onto my own skin. It must be that what I fear is unknowing; I am frightened that people may not know me, engaging instead with a false and thin skin that I am complicit in creating. 

And what if I do not even know the skin that other people see?

At dinner tonight I tried to talk about it. I asked my friends what they thought about people assuming that a round white baby was mine. The thought of their response still makes my stomach tight. It was *embarrassing* to see those forced eyes and those plastic smiles and the sheen to it all that slid off their faces and hit me with a thud that thickened my chest. 

But isn't it weird?! That people seem not to question, and that I question, and that I cannot seem to question with some others?! My friends literally *could not* talk to me about it. The same people with whom I had just been discussing the pain, the psyche, and the social realities of Palestinians/Israelis, and Germans, could not look me in the face and talk to me about blackness, and whiteness, and people's perceptions. And really it is not exactly pleasant to force it. Squeezing out a conversation like that leaves one with the unseemly residue of a pinched pimple.

It didn't work tonight, and it didn't work months ago on another continent in another community when I tried to talk about a similar experience. That similar experience took place in an affluent town in California. A white lady working at the upmarket supermarket referred to me as "mommy" of the little white children I was with. Truth be told and I swear to God, I think the first thing I thought was "how unintentionally generous of her".

Since then I've been quietly and intermittently chewing on that thought and that scene. Perhaps I should feel guilty about what was in my mind? But I'm just too busy being so damnably curious about the whole thing!

All I want is to discuss is what it may mean for someone to refer to a white child as my own. Both for me and for them. When it happens I always pause a fraction to look them full in the face, trying hard to find something in the shape of their eyes or in the curve of their mouth that will tell me what they could possible be thinking.

What intrigues me is that there does not seem to be a pause for thought on their end. When these people call the white baby mine there - just - does - not - seem to be what we might (pretentiously) call a moment of social mindfulness, where the person *chooses* not to question what kinship looks like. I cannot compute! 

Are they being progressive? Are they thinking? Has something been incalculated into them? Here I am frightened that they enclose me in the skin and situation of a black nanny, and there they are assuming the baby is mine. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? Someone talk to me about it. Please. Why am I so concerned? Have I taken things too far with this fear that I am being thought of as what I am not? Am I... behind the times?

[wordshereandthere]

POEMMM

Black Women of the nineties! Get it?!

We beamed at them. They looked at us. They wanted to understand, they really did, I really believe they did. But there was that plastic quality to their smile, that slight fright that widened their eyes Voices that emitted no more than an inarticulate "mmmlah?" These were country boys. Wild and free boys. Roam the world boys from upstate New York. These were boys in flannel shirts and no shoes. Black women of the nineties!!?

A sigh escapes us. We lower our hands.

They say (continuing):

We love the south

There are good people in the south

And I see these boys

from upstate New York

How they try to understand,

Purse their lips to understand,

Why we look at them when they beam at us.

[wordshereandthere]

A whole lot of lessons

I think, eventually, this will be a poem. 

For now this is what came out in a message to a friend.

I feel like my lungs were inflated, punctured, and left to descend into the distended mass that I'm trying to breathe with right now, and if I don't write something then I'll not be able to breathe properly. And because, honestly against my better judgement, I still feel compelled to write to you. Most likely I'll just deal with the consequences in the end.

The problem is I can't see things as isolated - always it's an amorphous network in my mind. Feelings, and logic, and emotion, and experience all interweaving in a way that I can't follow. And that's mostly ok you know? But sometimes it means that I have difficulty grasping ... events I guess, in a complete way. I also get confused easily - when it comes to understanding other people, men specifically. I find it hard to see the narrative, and its logic, in others' and my own life. That's why I think some people prefer novels. Everything is contained and presented to you. Even if you don't understand everything exactly, it's all there. You can follow it.

At the beginning of the year I did an illness narrative visual piece where I set up three cameras to film myself sitting in the basement of synergy talking about my own personal illness narrative. I planned to talk about the 'issues' I have in my life, with myself, with men and where they all stemmed from. I think I expected, no I don't think, I know I expected to have some profound experience - to produce some compelling narrative the logic and clarity of which would be astounding. I failed, miserably. It was amazing though. I didn't know until doing that how afraid I was to talk about some things, even to myself and let me tell you I spend a lot of time talking to myself. And all this time I thought I knew, in a sort of quiet way, why I felt some things, why I did some things, why I had dark times. But you know I realised that I'd been under some illusion. I had no fucking clue how to convey how I felt, how to put everything together so that it would make sense "Of course I am A such person, because B thing happened to me, and now I always feel C in a D situation". Just like that. That's how I expected it to be.

How did I start talking about that? Wild. Anyway. Yeah, that brought home to me that actually it's incredibly difficult to read a life, and since then I think I've had a bit of anxiety about it. Like "why does this person act in this way? I assumed they would do this because of this" and if I can't predict or understand what they are going to do then there is a certain unpredictability and incomprehensibility and then what the fuck they could easily hurt me and I have no idea how to prepare myself for that or how to respond. Talk about word vomit. What I'm trying to say is that I was hurt today, by a new boy that I was seeing briefly. I knew it wasn't going to work but you know I wanted to be "present" and I thought I could "learn something" from him. Well do you know what? I can say with feeling that no man has ever done anything substantial - anything good - for me. What they've 'given me', ALL they've given me, is a whole lot of lessons. And it makes me feel crazy because here are all these lessons I've learnt, and here is my logic, and here is my experience, and yet still I am hurt. I applied my logic and my experience and my lessons and the outcome was unexpected. Wait. false. it was expected. It was sad. I have resisted being cynical, but you know, at this point I think I need to make the effort to be so. The thing is I can't live with the life before me constantly unravelling and being incomprehensible and painful when it comes to men. Apart from that being ridiculous, it causes doubts and shifts in other areas of my life you know? Eff.

And now after having read this whole thing through I am seriously debating not sending it to you. Ugh literally even this sounds like some cliché from a teenage angst novel. Pooooop. But I will because I'm impulsive. Oh also I want to tell you about my performance art ideas.

[wordshereandthere]

A dream I had

I assume we were somewhere in India - two people had to be executed. One was a young girl my age, beautiful, who was guillotined after being found guilty - I screamed that she was innocent and sobbed as they put her head in the contraption - she smiled serenely (and it must have been sadly) as she was about to die. At one point I ran and pulled her out but she got slightly vexed and fitted herself back in asking for me to be held back - her mother tried to explain to me. The executioner said forcefully though not aggressively that she had been found guilty - placing his emphasis in a way to suggest that though she had done nothing she had to die because she had been found guilty. She was wearing a green sari and had beautiful long almond eyes. Her mother was distraught too that her daughter had been chosen to fill this role, but she stood back quietly. The guillotine wasn't like the French one - it came from the side and cut horizontally as the person did a sort of leaning forward awkward kneel. But I didn't see the cut. I was high up very high up and all I could see was a partly crumpled body with blood on the ground and the small round bloody mass that must have been the head. And then I was on the ground and heartbroken. In dreams emotions are so strong but somewhat shapeless - I was next, I believe, in a supermarket that was gradually closing. Lights turning off and grey walls or some metal rising as I searched for my things. I must have been hungry, all the food items (namely rice cakes and bread) stood out to me and I spent a good amount of time making sure I had the specific one I wanted. I remembered my pain but was truly caught up in my shopping. And then ahead of me in the aisle I saw, walking away from me, backs turned, her family, I think a father and two other children and her mother. I debated trying not to see them but my eyes met with her mother's as she turned halfway to pat one of the little children. The child shuffled off and I approached the mother now alone. She was in white - not a sari, more the desert cloth covering of women in the Sahara. She looked dark, like she was Senegalese. I had the feeling that though the same person this woman was different. I was quite surprised to find that I didn't wake up sad.

[returnthegayze]

listen to the audio of this poem + singing here there is a story they never tell us: we, silent breaks in phone calls, space between english and mother tongue, fuck me holy, tongue i am sorry hari om thousands of years ago on a planet that looked something like this,except more...

[wordshereandthere]

Ilkley Cragg Yorkshire is breathtaking.

A few photos by: Chhaya Kapila (http://c-h-y-a.tumblr.com/)

[wordshereandthere]

Performance Art is so 'In'

Read this (it'll take all of three minutes and you'll need it for the rest of the post): http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/07/jay-z-marina-abramovic-pace-gallery-picasso-baby.html

When links to vines and text snapshots of what purported to be a Jay Z performance piece at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea popped up directly on my facebook wall (somehow several of my friends have caught on that I... adore Marina Abramovic, and that I... am always interested in happenings that involve her) I wanted to love it. I sort of almost kind of did.  

All the tidbits I read that were produced in the immediate aftermath of the celebrity event called direct attention to the moment between Jay Z and Marina Abramovic, and for a good amount of time I thought that was the whole thing. I thought, "hmm that's different - 'interesting' that she would choose to revisit a work of hers in this way". I was wondering though, why a recalcitrant thread of - suspicion, perhaps, wasn't convinced. 

  Then I found out that Marina was only one person in a string of people that Jay Z rapped at. And then I read that article "The Rapper is Present" by Emma Allen (above). 

  The article is wonderfully observant, and brutally honest. The tone is perfect. It was such a relief to read! I felt like I'd been taken by the hand and brought to look more closely at what turned out to be little but a clear glass above a pool of shallow water. 

There was just so much posturing, so much desire, so little depth and so little meaning. so many white people, so many 'art enthusiasts', so many 'denizens of the art world'. I really - it was just - there was just so little that seemed to be - essential - about the happening. It felt as if Jay Z was trying to be artistic. I think Kanye is more successful than he is at this sort of engagement with art/performance. But Marina, of course she still was able to realise (in the sense of manifest) what intensity of experience could be found. 

  I looked on the Pace Gallery website and it summed it all up for me (http://tinyurl.com/np3b5wd): 

  --

07/12/13 at 07:00PM

JAY-Z's "Picasso Baby" video shoot at Pace Gallery

Coinciding with the recent release of JAY-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail, Pace Gallery hosted the video shoot for his new single, “Picasso Baby,” on Wednesday. Organized by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn of Salon 94 withAndrea Glimcher of Pace Gallery, the music video was directed by renowned director/filmmaker Mark Romanek.

--

  Not so much essential intentional embodied art seeking to connect people, as opportunity to create artsy on trend (performance art is so in) music video.   

[wordshereandthere]

La Chanson Voyageuse

Un court documentaire réalisé dans le cadre de l'atelier de documentaire de Stanford à Paris.

Avec les artistes musiciens Camille et Eduardo Gill (CamEdu). 

Un film de: 

Yvette D-Tetteh - Miranda Shepherd - Luana Dias Gomes

Caméra: Rebel T3i

© YML 2013

[wordshereandthere]

Marina Abramovic interview with Jian Ghomeshi for cbcradio

http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2013/06/12/marina-abramovic-is-not-dead/

"She sits down with Jian to discuss The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (which debuts this week at Toronto's Luminato Festival), whether she thinks her new-found celebrity could eclipse her art, and why she has more stamina now than 40 years ago."

So much more than this short blurb suggests - especially good from about 15mins in. One of my favourite lines:  

"[death is] so important, we taking death away from our lives and then we spend time doing bullshit because we dont know how little time we have .. I want to die consciously without fear and without anger"

(Image via CBC News)

[wordshereandthere]

The Black Passion of Sleeping Lions:

The Hüzün of the Colonised People’s Descendants

When I first arrived in Paris I noticed immediately how many black people there were; how many Africans; how many dark faces to match my own, how they moved around and in relation to me and against me. And I wasn’t sure why I felt such an awareness of them, I wasn’t sure why it was always as if I took a small breath whenever I encountered another African in Europe – and I was self-conscious of this, and somewhere for some reason I was ashamed, too. There’s something we have together, I’ve realised, that makes it this way – and I think it’s not just me. I feel their awareness of me, as well – the people of my origin (“Black Africa”), their eyes and minds sliding on me when I walk down the street, when I enter the metro, when I sit on a bench alone on the street.

I’ve been trying for a while now to know what it is.

It is, I believe, that is the thing which creates this awareness; it is the idea that this awareness must exist. That we must feel each other. It is, I believe, both imposed on us (by a ‘shared’ history, by the confining paradigms of race, by the thought that if a group of black people stand together it is very likely that a white person might imagine they are related) and it is also subscribed to by us. It is, I believe, the collective black passion we share; our attachment to our history; our common existence as the living mix of life and ruin and pain and wealth and empire.

It is, I believe, our hüzün as the colonised people’s descendants.

It was from Orhan Pamuk that I first learnt hüzün, from his heavy, unashamed, and loving description of the grief of his beloved city, Istanbul. Born of life amidst ruins and the knowledge of being less than the great Ottoman Empire that came before, the hüzün of Istanbullus is “not as the melancholy of a solitary person but the black mood shared by millions of people together” (92). So particular and devoted are his words, and yet I believe that he gifts us with a way of understanding, a process of knowing and feeling, that cannot resist being extended to other realms as important and affecting.  And so I claim hüzün too; I claim it because I feel it – it is so close to tangible though it does not exert itself, but rather lies on and in our lives. I feel it in the black nannies with their two white wards; I feel it in the men and women in their traditional cloth sitting quietly on the train; I feel it in chic young dark girls with their hair weaves and edgy cuts; I feel it in the young black boys on their way into the banlieus; I feel it in the smart young professionals and the resigned faces of older men. 

Except in our case it is not that we are living among ruins, we are not faced daily with the “…detritus of empire” (101) – but that we are the living product of a history affected, afflicted and distorted. A history that casts its remains on the present life, not in the physical form of the dilapidated limbs of a city, but rather in a lived and embodied reality – with all the colonised people’s descendants carrying it around with them. Although I cannot say that we carry our hüzün by choice, I do agree that hüzün here is also not “an illness for which there is no cure” nor “an unbidden pain from which we need to be delivered” (103). It is the inevitable and appropriated state of being; as Pamuk says of his hüzün “ ... it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating” (91).

And with the burden and weight of our hüzün we must also acknowledge the complicated honour that is present in it, in “… the hüzün we absorb with pride and share as a community” (94). Just as with the Sufi hüzün of holy anguish, our suffering brings us a certain dignity; we are still proud peoples; we had and have magnificent cultures; we have endured and we have survived the destructive force of empire; we are making our lives even as we carry and live this suffering which we cannot forget because it is in our flesh.

I am often wondering how the others feel it. The other young black Africans. Do they think of it? As I do? Do they feel the weight in their skin and in their thoughts and in what privilege they may have – as I do? We all have suffering, and we all have suffered, but we have not the same history and not the same present. So when I am spoken to of revolution I am at a loss as to how to respond – how do we enact such change when we are infused with the history? When we are living with these threads in us that inform even our happiness, when we have already and continuously factored in the pain and shame and loss? When we don’t even know these things, when we didn’t experience these things, not really, but have to build our lives with what has been left to us and what we are yet to do?

[wordshereandthere]

"It's more like perfume than a poem"

- feedback from my writer friend. I decided to take that with a smile. 

Been meaning to write another poem for the ol' blog. This one's a little soppy, but I wrote it while in bed unable to sleep at 3am in the morning so there you go. Perfumes have titles, so I should give this one a title too....

Um I can't think of one right now - stil tired.

--

In all my imaginings we're lying down. Because I'm exhausted.

And because when I can't sleep the return to rest weighs down the body of every thought.

In one of my dreams I'm on my side. My arm outstretched begins and completes the curving line of my body, a line that swells to connect the air with the ground. I'm so tired I don't see you well, I only feel you well.

The pressure against my back; the change in the air behind me; you matching my curves, fitting into my spaces.

And it's just the two of us, exhausted and heavy, being there in that space. And it's so good. And it's so nice.

And I'm suspended in this state where all I want is to fall asleep with you.

--

[wordshereandthere]

Found this when looking for posts to do with Marina Abramovic on tumblr. I feel affected. There is so much to know and feel and discover when your art is absolutely embodied - and what happens when your art is embodied in two bodies? More art? 

[wordshereandthere]

In Conversation w/ Andrew Aguilar

http://youtu.be/ZGAdLZVXqnE (6min38 or so)

Andrew is a fantastic musician. He is a fantastic many things, but today at lunch we were talking about music. He was educating me about emotional indicators in music, his clarinet lessons in Paris, and about the music he’ll be playing with his teacher (tutor? Is there a specific term in music?) during their recital next month. VERY interesting – particularly as I might justifiably be described as lacking (definitively) in the music department. He was in the middle, I think, of rather enthusiastically explaining what the term “appassionato” means in music, when I decided to whip out my camera and start filming.

There was a lovely light, and I felt an urge to film our conversation, so I did.

I’m quite used to doing this with my friends now, so I didn’t think much of it. It’s sort of just a nice way of feeling like I’ve done some art for the day, or engaged in it or something, and a way of acknowledging my friends as the intentional accomplished people they are. Actually this last was particularly in mind today when, at the end of our little conversation, one of the two men next to us leaned over and said, “Now, I have to ask the 64000 dollar question – who are you?” 

I immediately knew what he must think, or what maybe I think he must have been thinking; in any case I found it immensely amusing. And also, equally, a little uncomfortable – like I’d been caught out or something and my insides got that light squirm, you know? I was very unsure how to answer, or at least there was a tension between what I really wanted to say (something along the lines of “We are artists. Artists in training, if you will, and we are speaking”), and what I felt I had to say (“Oh don’t mind us, we’re nothing special, we’re just students having fun”). Aaaahhh! I still don’t know. What I did say was sort of a half-hearted insecure jumble of the two (“Oh we’re students, and we’re just talking, but also we’re in Paris, and also we’re training as artists, or at least I am...” hmmmm). Andrew was much quicker than I was and responded instantly with the line “Actually, it’s a 65 000 dollar question” – to which we all suitably guffawed.

It’s quite funny now, but I still feel I need to figure this out. I guess that’s the whole point of what I wanted to do here; I wanted to have space and time and inspiration to think about who I am and how one does… oneself I guess. And how art fits into all of that etc etc… Well it was quite the fun rencontre as the French would say. I really like their word, it implies more of an intellectual as well as personal meeting of two people coming together to think about an idea, you know? 

--

Restaurant: Le Saint Régis (For lunch)

I had the delightfully classy incarnation of an egg, bacon and cheese burger – I added mustard and black pepper, and ate it with my hands (scandal!). At 12E I would call that a steal in Paris, and on the Isle St Louis no less! The neighbouring restaurants were not so amenable to my student pocket. Afterwards one must have Bertillon Ice Cream. It’s a thing you do. It’s really rather fantastic. The whole experience of eating the ice cream and walking around. Very lovely.  (See Andrew’s food blog - www.honorthyfood.tumblr.com - for more on this restaurant and others in Paris – he is the embodiment of the phrase “I’m here to eat” – absolute gourmande)

 --

[wordshereandthere]

Afternoon of a Faun - Thoughts!

Depending on your sensibilities, you might find it difficult to imagine a production of the ballet Afternoon of a Faun more [thought]provoking than the naughty, wonderful, scandalously different 1912 original by Vaslav Nijinsky. With its painfully stiff style of movement and its final scene depicting “graphic sexual desire” (Wikipedia, fount of all knowledge), it certainly seems to take up all the mental space allotted for such things.

That said, I have already prepared room at the inn for Joel Robbin’s 1953 reconceptualising of the piece. It is to be danced at the Palais Garnier as one of the spectacles organised by Paris Opéra. Having come across the good fortune of acquiring tickets for the premiere tomorrow, I’ll be seeing the first dance – and my skin is tingling with anticipation (both for this, and, of course, for Marina).

From a performance art/embodied art/self-as-art perspective, his piece is particularly intriguing. It is an expression of a love story between three ‘elements’: two dancers – and the mirror. !! . Robbins is said to have been absolutely taken by this idea when one afternoon observing a male dancer stretching (and casually checking himself out) in the mirror. Apart from its preoccupation with – and recognition of – the body as both artist (dancer, human) and art to be admired in its own right (by the dancer, human themselves) (!) it also implicates the audience in and as the art too.

I’m already in love.

One of the beautiful, beautiful, elements of this new art story is that the audience is given the role of the mirror, the dancers look to us when they wish to see themselves. Unsure whether this constitutes a dialogical art piece, but it certainly makes clear that the audience is needed to complete the art.

Closing off, a few questions I have going into tomorrow’s dance:

How do we understand the allure of our own embodied art? To others, and to ourselves? How do we realise, express and live our art without finding ourselves caught up in our own self? What does it mean in terms of our art that we may look to others when we are trying to find an image of ourselves? 

We shall see!

[wordshereandthere]

In Conversation with CamEdu (musicians, artists)

(Watch in HD!)

Eduardo et Camille sont des artistes musiciens -- Ils interprètent la musique folklorique et traditionnelle des Caraibes. Je les ai rencontrés dans la station métro République où ils jouaient pour les passants.  Camille raconte qu' Edu fait de la musique depuis son enfance, et maintenant il lui apprend. Ils dansent aussi.

VERY exciting to speak with them and to hear their thoughts about themselves, and more generally, people, as artists.