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Caress Grapple Hold Swing
All-World-Embracing Human Contact Relationships
Part one: The Gentleness of Fight
Part two: The Strength of Lullabies
Part three: A sensory campaign: Subliminal Power for Social Cohesion
We all are born, we grow up, we make friends, we learn, interact, fall in love, maybe we marry, we gossip, find our style, share and collaborate with nature, work, work and sometimes we get stuck, so we ask for help, or we fight, but we all have memories and at some point we also all die. We all need shelter and food.
Since the dawn of humanity, we humans have shared time and space with one another - no matter the culture, color, language or sex. Before we venture out to create our own experiences, we understand what our grandmother said as our only truth. Mine for instance would expect that ironing and sewing were jobs for girls only, and that women wouldn’t fight, and men wouldn’t caress...
What is different easily becomes a threat to our own identity. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains it so perfectly: “the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. This robs people of dignity and makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult, it emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar.”
So, what can I, as an artist and observer of the indigenous cultures of the world do? I can share more stories. Stories of the people.
Why is all of this necessary? It is intolerable in this interconnected and globalised world to turn a blind eye to the fact that there are people with no shelter and food on a planet that we share together. The fact that this disparity exists means that we have not yet understood “that we all are on the same boat”. As Noah Yuval Harari remembers: religions and nations are human inventions. Borders are fictional, and so everything they are meant to contain. Respect is necessary everywhere and for everyone, that is beyond any origin, belief or sex.
I hope with the research and collection of these intimate gestures of sharing and solving conflict, to create an active archive. I wish to spread human poems to cancel or minimise the distance that allows us to neglect or discriminate. I wish to poetically celebrate our beauty as a wonderfully complex, diverse species.