Our place in the world
The continuation of life away from home. Or using art to find home.
We returned home to Ithaca (NY) yesterday after one month of traveling in Brazil. On this trip, I was alone with Helena and Ulysses because our financial situation still doesn't allow Marcin to stop working for an entire month. After three years without being able to travel to Brazil, I focused my time there on being with my closest family, my father, mother, brothers, and sisters. We also saw my closest cousin and aunts.
My goal with this text is to comment on how my family of origin carries keys for my creative life and how deepening these relationships is fundamental for strengthening the clarity of my work.
I have recently noticed how I enjoy transforming my experiences into overarching lessons of life with a totalizing tone. For example, I spent the last three years working with the notion that "everyone is an artist," after many years in academia studying art-making and avant-garde art from the 20th century. I'm not a traditional academic in that I am not successful in separating my research from everything else in my life, so I started to treat everyone I relate to as artists, searching for what they are already doing in their lives that they feel is art. During this trip, I recognized how this view of everyone as an artist heightens my expectations of others, putting pressure on our relationships, while at the same time, it gives me the privilege of listening to people's deepest longings and most creative ideas.
The realization of everyone being an artist also comes from the understanding that art only exists within relationships, so making art is always an act of being with someone else. The contemporary realization in the art world is that this someone else can be a non-human, often as a way to focus on our relationship with nature. However, much of this contemporary discourse highlights a hyper-independent human being who can relate with nature alone and find in nature, instead of in other humans, what we need to fulfill life.
Assume complexity.
The term Ubuntu is a concept that helps me think about this. Ubuntu is a Nguni word that can be translated as "humanity to others" and often is understood with the phrase "I am because you are." In the first definition, there is a recognition that we project our humanity in the world, in others (not only human beings!), and that projection is fundamental in creating dignifying and uplifting relationships -- The risk here always being that if I don't care or know much about my own humanity, I am not able to project a positive humanity to others! The second definition then brings more clarity to it, with the understanding that others are also projecting their humanity onto us, and when they do so, they give us the chance of Being. Again, the risk is that if one projects a lower sense of humanity on us, we suffer with it, creating the need for a higher and stronger conscience of who we are and how we stand as humans.
I am glad to have a word like Ubuntu and hope to find ways to use it without the definition of "humanity" in the future. Being a human and focusing on humanity is a European categorization, which historically tends to separate us from nature, and gives origin to all sorts of harmful classifications like the civilized and the educated, not to mention being at the root of the invention of race by dividing the human from the animal. Yet, the word Ubuntu, the way that we translate it, helps us to recognize that we are this particular kind of being that depends on relationships to live, that our existence depends on being with, on projecting ourselves onto others, and being projected on.
I'm using the word project and projecting a lot because in the back of my mind, I am working with the notion of family, thinking about my trip to Brazil, and seeing my family of origin. The family of origin or the people we related with while we were children are fundamental because they are the ones we first project onto and are projected from. These foundational relationships acquired a pathological tone over the years, I believe, especially with the manipulation of psychiatry within the capitalist world, but I defend that our capacity to deepen and activate the many layers of relationship we have with those who gave us life are important acts for our sanity and creativity.
On this trip, I was attuned to the things that I encountered while I was with my family, which showed me ways to take steps forward as an artist and find clarity about my work. I collected many items and photographs and did a couple of actions while I was in Brazil that I want to return to with time in the coming month in my home studio. This text marks the first attempt to bring this effort to my website and those who read it.
As always, I hope my efforts to enhance my creativity are helpful to others. Ubuntu.
At a very low point in my life, back in 2017, when I had suicidal ideations, I learned two things that I want to share here as a way to finish this text. The first is the only strategy that kept me alive, which I am still thankful for today: don't do anything, stay still, and don't act until the feeling passes and the best, most beautiful, and alive actions come to the mind and the body. Life wants to continue, it wants to thrive, and it will as long as we don't interrupt it. The second is that I already have everything I need to succeed in life; it was all handed to me when I was born and throughout my childhood. I believe firmly in this -- again, making a totalizing assumption for everyone: we were all given everything good that we need to live life to the fullest, no matter how hard our childhood might have been. It pains me to write such an affirmation in times when we are seeing so many children suffering the unimaginable in Gaza, so I want to note that I don't disregard any of it. This affirmation is, in fact, a recognition that at some point, everything that we have lived sums up and comes together to help in the making of life.
I read this morning in the Brazilian newspapers the twisting of reality done by the Israeli leaders, continuing to commit genocide, and I want to write more about how war creates the narrative that we only need food and a certain material structure to live life. At the heart of it is the cultural perspective, which recognizes that the Capital cannot provide the continuation of life. Here I locate the perpetual value of the Palestinian struggle: our home is where we cultivate all the relationships that strengthen our lives and connection to this world. Our home is not only the material structure of our house, but the relationships that define us, our family, other humans, and not-humans too, especially the earth and our immediate environment. Through war, one can manipulate our notion of basic necessities, but eventually, war has to end, and when it does, we remember that what sustains life is more complex than bread and water. Our culture is a basic necessity for the continuation of life.
I took these pictures one morning in Cabo Frio, a beach town where we spent one week in Brazil. Helena was eager to go to the beach and defined the place we were staying as "our new home." We had rented an apartment, so as soon as we arrived, I unpacked all our belongings and put the suitcases away, as a way to help us feel as at home as possible for those few days. Today, when we woke up in our bed at home in Ithaca, I felt the deep comfort of waking up particularly rested in our familiar mattress, pillows, and sheets. Yet, as soon as we got up, we had to search for the magic that was right there in our temporary Brazilian home.
While writing this text and looking at these photos again, I feel a sense of relief in finding that I did manage to make art (even if not as much as I wanted, not as explicitly, and not specifically painting) while traveling. There are many preparatory steps to making art, which are in essence already making art; something I need to remember so I can always stay home within myself.