User:Aitantv/blog2023

06.08.23

Amsterdam, Home, Grey overcast

I have returned from Georgia. Landing on my feet. I'm grasping for community and searching for it in the living rooms of millenial friends close by. The Netherlands is a cool grey steely geometric orderly rigid up-tight planned governed sort of place. I feel a sense of homesickness setting in as I look back on Georgia. A magentic pull from my body towards that geography, some sort of genetic map attempts to superimpose itself on that landscape; a negative layer looking for its postive, an etching finding its relief (wikipedia.etching).

I found a sense of home amongst the RB residents in Racha. This temporary community quickly formalized a schedule for domestic chores; a morning meditation and movement routine to create space for spontaneous creativity and emotional releases. Circling - the group act of attentive listening where we shared our immediate thoughts and feelings - was a tedious and challenging process. To sit with the concerns, grief, and complexities of others was a draining process. My body would be fully activated and ready to plough the day, but after circle it felt heavy, tired, and sore. These interpersonal emotions are weighty. The physical manifestation of heaviness equates with the gravity of the human experience.

I want to re-create (a slither) of this group field. My perception became a field of possibilities rather than channeled towards a specific point. Drawings became broad and almost fish-eye; film shots became mere crops of a wide omni-directional foley stereo soundscape; feasts were scattered with berries, salts, nuts, seeds, and oils, making a maximal taste mouthful of every bite. A de-centered approach to living, where the I was no longer so autonomous, produced a becomingness where process had a greater value than output.

I low-key mourn for my Georgian friends. Long-lost sisters, ex-wives, distant cousins, long-distance pen pals, a forgotten university colleague. They each occupied a position of familiarity from the very first encounter. I circle back to the body, and where the body finds its restplace. Is it climactic, cultural, social, cinematic, political, textural? Is it about colors, hairy, beauty, textiles? Is it to do with culinary tastes and satiating a void within with edible harmony? A sense of homeness in a foreign land. An uncanny belonging and being-with in the carriage of a Metro from Dezerter Bizaar to the micro-district of Gldani. Every grandma had a sparkle of Bibi with a soft comic gaze, a moth-scented wiry wool cardigan, badly-dyed hair, over-plucked eyebrows, and powdery doughy palms. Where do I go from here? Can I stay here in the cold steely grey grindhouse? Can I tolerate this clinical tepid womb?

07.08.23

Amsterdam, Home, Sunny with clouds

First day back to work, to the cycle, the hamster wheel, the assembly line batch production. My priority is to be productive with my time rather than remain dormant at a computer screen for the alloted labour time. I allocate myself phases of focused artistic labour/research to complete given tasks. I embrace morphological time; unlike chronological time according to the clock, this is a perception of time based on task. It's the how long is a piece of string mindset? "I'll meet you on the corner in the time it takes me to walk the breadth of the city". This changeability of time was an important feature of RB. Dinner preparation might take 4.5 hours. But every moment counted. & it may have felt like half the amount of time it took to get through a cicling session where we were encouraged to listen to one another's immediate thoughts and feelings. I'm still grasping for intimacy and community in my daily life. People are busy. Friends have prior arrangements. Society runs like clock-work, chronopolis. Time is measured by hours, minutes, seconds. Time is not relative. Time is measurable. I incorporate a more personal perception of time, that is relative and loose. 'Slow, slow, but steady' I focus on the task at hand.

The shot takes as long as it needs to elapse. The beginning and end of a gesture mark the moments of a cut. The static camera is a powerful tool to allow the audience to surrender to simple gestures and the pleasure of watching humans model. In 'Scoring the Long Shot' I hosted participants and gave them a brief introduction to slow cinema and Transcendental Style, two cinematic movements that fetishize the static frame. Together as performer-filmmakers we generated a broad soundscape that transcended a simple static frame of a projection screen located in the garden of Arteli Racha. A live foley soundscape was scored by the performer-filmmakers. The cinematic frame became a mere cropped referrent to this wide omni-directional stereo recording filled with rustling footsteps in the grass and performers tinkering with found metalic or plastic objects in the exterior. The output of this workshop was 'Making the Show' a one shot short film documenting the process, where performer-filmmakers were given the prompt: "the show is in 10 days and it's time to prepare the backstage for the audience". In self-referential social-realist style, the show was indeed 10 days away, and I considered the residency at Arteli Racha our private backstage.

But how was it recieved? 'Making the Show' was under the spotlight as we gathered in Kororti - a communal open studio space in Tblisi - for the event that we prepared as the public vinissage. I naively introduced the film as if it was a succinct narrative short worthy of the audience's full attention. Our visitors were forced to sit through eighteen minutes of ordinary people walking back and forth with a smattering of random actions and gestures. They were probably better off eating the aggressively delicious food prepared by the hostile chef with a mischievous moustache N.

08.08.23

Amsterdam, Home, Turquiose-Grey overcast

I tell J about visiting Oni synagogue after having confronted an antisemitic rupture only minutes early. Jews = gold: Jews control capital: Jews control the world: Jews are money and power: Jews are the parasites that find ever more inventive way of extracting profits from the world. Jews are self-victimizing. They can't take a joke. 'Why can't I make a Jew joke? It's part of the humor, aint it? I make Jew-money jokes with my friends." For some Jews it's okay - these confirmations of semitic tropes through self-deprecating humor. Self-deprecating humor as a currency of the clown, the comic, the wandering Jew. 'If my nose is too big and hairy, if I reak of anxiety and post-holocaust trauma, at least I can tell a good one-liner, at least I can be the diplomatic bridge between perfect strangers, I can be the butt of everyone's joke, the Jew, the great equalizer, "the Jews hate the muslims, the muslim hate the christians, but everyone hates the Jews"'.

Victim:benefactor :: Host:Parasite. These positions are always oscillating, changeable, fluctuating. Who is more intelligent? Who is cashing in really? Jews as userers because they couldn't buy land. 'Why are Jews so private? Enclosed? Separatist?' It's because in medieval europe (and more recently too) they were forced to live in these ghettos, yes ghetto from Italian derives from the segregation of Jews in the inner-city of Venice into slum-like quarters. In Amsterdam the Jewish quarter - forced segregation - makes for easier round-up get them on the cattle train. 'Why get all sensitive about the holocaust now? It's like not even mid-century.' It's hard to forget when there are mundane vernacular quotidian reminders of your misplace on a daily basis. Antisemitism not lurking in the woodwork, just right there sitting on your plate, like a shmeer of dijon during maincourse, just petit discreet antisemitism as a satsifying garnish to daily life. Culinary metaphors are useful vehicles to consider the distain for a globally scattered people who have too much in common and yet everything separating us.

Jews are shape-shifting throughout history: host, guest, parasite. There categories are volatile, oscillating. To recapitulate the status of Jews is forever being negotiated. That unsettled symbolic condition (complicated by the very real Jewish and Evangelical settlers in Palestine) creates negative space, noise, where confusion, blame, scapegoating can catch and spread. There's something sticky about antisemitism, it has a pleasurable salty sass. It's dark and mischievous but still palattable. It's like almagnac as a nightcap with a belly full of beer, it upsets the balance by such an insignifant margin that it goes unnoticed.

I can't explain away the disgruntled sensation that comes from a racist encounter. Your own 'liberal', 'open-minded', intersectional, queer, poly-hyphenate comrades looking you lovingly in the eye as the bazooka your heart. It tears a gulf between good people. Antisemitism's evolved to successfully dehumanize. Using it as post-woke humor doesn't eradicate the original purpose of the form. The medium is the message. The message of antisemitism is that Jews are less than human. As long as that is the case, the jury is out on who else might be considered an alien by the native species of our neoliberal hyper-pop global utopia: white folk.