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The lush surreal illustrations of this book and its short humoristic story telling make it a fun, quick read for all ages and for anyone obliquely interested in our thirst for development and the nature of who we are. Through a poetic parody of human's desires for more of everything, we become aware that such a quest does not bring us any closer to knowing ourselves or seeing, as contemporary scientific or spiritual leaders are telling us: all things and beings of our planet are intimately related, alive and ultimately "One." While each colorful painting alludes to our close relationship with the world, short lines innocently and wryly comment on the predicaments of our lives pertaining to t...
This body of work is a contemplation of human beings' passage on earth and their intimate interrelation with the environment. This book attempts to bring humour to the things we are getting attached to. It points at the invisible within the visible, the immaterial within the material or the vertical nature of being (and its mirror-like quality) within our horizontal way of living (where our mind, time, and space condition our experiences). The naked body is seen as our primary indivisible unit of perception which is usually pushed and pulled by our thinking mind's desire to either get less or more. In other words, our lives are coloured by our minds and since body-mind is a single entity, most of the colours painted on the body are an allusion to the range of our changing desires from being invisible or transparent to wanting to be singular and the centre of attention. The book's Interviews (the interviewers are from Russia, Colombia, Korea, Germany, and the US) stanzas, and photographs are not seen as being subservient to one another but can be seen as an assemblage of three independent directions that may or may not intersect following each reader.
"What beautifies the desert is that it hides a well somewhere," says Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince. As one of the most fertile symbols in the writings of almost every tradition, the desert is often seen as the place of our origins, the place of our gods or demons. We go to the desert to seek visions, to commune with nature in its purest, wildest form and to find artistic inspiration. The photography of Jean Paul Bourdier captures beautifully the ethos of "finding more than we seek". His images of people situated inside a desert landscape shimmers like heat escaping from pavement on a hot afternoon. Bourdier aligns the body with the landscape, and renders the landscape onto the bo...
The main body of the book assembles a collection of photographs of painted humans, shot on analog film, without any digital manipulation, in the context of several desert landscapes in the United States. All photographs attempt to bring forward the body as our most intimate tool of perception -- outside of Eros -- of the universe's complexity and beauty. Through the careful staging of the models and colors, it is hoped that the viewer may see a poetical performance suggesting the multitude of rapports we can experience with our environment. Further, the work attempts to evoke a most common human longing: the experience of freedom -- which is seen by some as a basis of a host of spiritual practices.
The diversity and complexity of African vernacular architecture remain widely unknown both to the general public and to architects. Yet Upper Volta (Burkino Faso) encompasses an astonishing variety of design principles and building techniques that belie the widespread image of the primitive hut so readily associated with rural Africa. This provides a convincing interpretation of the relationship between spatial organisation and daily activity in Gurunsi life.
This exquisitely illustrated study takes us into the traditionally built dwellings of African society. This life-in-architecture material culture reveals the socioeconomic and cosmological organization and the world views of these societies. Bourdier and Trinh connect structural patterns - setting, design, decoration, orientation - to factors such as kinship, gender, history, religion, poetry, and oral traditions. The authors focus on a variety of African peoples, including the Fulbe, Tokolor, Sereer, Joola, Soninke, Mandingo, Jaxanke, and Bassari. Through photographs, beautifully detailed drawings, and theoretical reflections, Bourdier and Trinh challenge the common perception that traditional dwellings are static artifacts.
"The dwellings of hundreds of African ethnic groups offer a variety of ideas and construction practices which contradict the widespread image of the primitive huts comonly atributed to rural Africa... The cultural dimension and its application using different architectural practices are illustrated in this work."--Book jacket.
Framer Framed brings together for the first time the scripts and detailed visuals of three of Trinh Minh-ha's provocative films: Reassemblage, Naked Spaces--Living isRound, and Surname Viet Given Name Nam.
"An image is powerful not necessarily because of anything specific it offers the viewer, but because of everything it apparently also takes away from the viewer." --Trinh T. Minh-ha Vietnamese filmmaker and feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in independent filmmaking. In her writings and interviews, as well as in her filmscripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the "infinite relation" of word to image. Cinema-Interval brings together her recent conversations on film and art, life and theory, with Homi Bhabha, Deb Verhoeven, Annamaria Morelli and other critics. Together these interviews offer the richest presentation of this extraordinary ...