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Isa Massu and Dalida María Benfield: FW: [Fwd: Suite de Notre Conversation]
In the fall of 2008, Isa Massu and Dalida María Benfield, both artists with histories of working with feminist media collectives and teaching in community media organizations, found themselves between collectives and in the same city. They began a conversation about Obama, about transitions, in lives, politics, practices, and strategies, and where to go from here. They began to envision a joint project.
“FW: [Fwd: Suite de Notre Conversation]”, is a conversation in process about transitions, or a series of transitional conversations about process, or conversations that initiate transition, or transitions that initiate conversations, as orchestrated in and through a series of sound/text/image encounters, between the artists and various interlocutors, including family members, friends, organized discussions, as well as passersby and random encounters. The following is a tracing of these conversations, as recorded through a series of email exchanges, of which these are initial phases...
In media res: sentence already used a lot but quite good no?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_media_res
I love this. Starting in the middle. This is where we are.
Can we merge politics and a spiritual belief in a new world?
But not just us. Il y a des modeles deja.
Or at least some people have tried alternatives to academia. I like the idea of being nomadic. Not stuck in one place. Moving our group/study group to various places. Places in transition.
I was thinking of our discussion on my way back, thinking how interesting to think in terms of a contemporary moment, the now, an approach that might resonate for us. A thinking space of and for people willing to understand how we enter this moment: transition/change/transformation. Perhaps these are people in: detention centers, hospitals, jails, moving from one home to another, or homeless, geographical transition place, such as suburbs, in exile, depressed, adapting to major life crisis, political shift, murder, birth, rejection, success. For example this image I took on the 4th of Nov....
Can we merge politics and a spiritual belief in a new world?
Here is a list of a few synonyms in French:
> phase
> changement
> transformation
> suture
> raccord
> préparation
> pont
> passage
> palier
> liaison
> intermédiaire
> degré
> acheminement
> accoutumance
> évolution
Can we merge politics and a spiritual belief in a new world?
I like the idea of being nomadic. Not stuck in one place. Moving our group/study group to various places. Places in transition.
A research question: How to tell the now through flashbacks? And a reverse chronology of
> the
> now?
Wouldn't it be a rule to apply for our work? Some sort of methodology to follow ?
Just a thought at the moment... and what about 2012, are we preparing for this shift ? Transition ? New era of aquarius ???
Can we merge politics and a spiritual belief in a new world?
Yes, yes and yes. Transition is universal and particular, lunar and solar, it's mobile and
static, space and time, long and short. It can be a place or a building or a people or a person or a moment in life. It is politics.
(I'm reminded too that I was going to do a performance last year but forgot to get around to it in which I would do one-on-one sessions for academics who are trying to be trans-disciplinary.)
Are we talking about a blog? A conversation? A book? OK, all of these things, but produced in pieces, at different stages.
It moves. It ripples.
Dalida María Benfield is an artist, filmmaker, educator and scholar. She works across contexts of community organizations, social movements, contemporary art, and educational institutions, with an emphasis on border-crossings, committed pedagogies and unreasonable playfulness. Benfield is currently based in Oakland, California, where she is producing media and writing a dissertation concerning gender, Third Cinemas and contemporary media practices at the University of California-Berkeley.
Her work may be accessed at:
Isa Massu is an artist whose work is rooted at the interstice of social justice, documentation, and art practice. She has worked with the collectives La Compagnie, A contemporary art space in Marseilles, France, and Les Penelopes, feminist news agency based in Paris, as well as many other artists organizations and NGOs in the U.S., Eastern Europe, France, Belgium, Senegal, and the Netherlands. Her most recent collaborations are through the City Studio Program at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Her work may be accessed at: