Las Femmes Fatales de Luc Besson (Sobre el filme Colombiana)

Por Jaime Perales Contreras

Cuál hubiera sido el producto de haberse hecho una secuela de la película El profesional como su director Luc Besson se rumora que había previsto? El resultado es, acaso, el filme Colombiana.

El profesional fue dirigido por Luc Besson en 1994,  protagonizada por el francés Jean Reno y la norteamericana Natalie Portman que se muestra en la pantalla en su debut como actriz a la temprana edad de doce años. El filme relata la historia  de una niña, cuya  familia entera es asesinada por un agente corrupto de la DEA.  La única sobreviviente es Portman. Su vecino, un asesino profesional, de manera accidental, queda involucrado en el asunto, debido a que en un ataque de buen corazón, tiene que resguardar a la jovencita para evitar de que sea también asesinada. Portman agradecida le pide a su letal amigo a que la entrene, en el difícil arte de matar, para vengar a su hermano menor, quien es la única persona que siente de la desaparición de su disfuncional familia. Ocurren muchas cosas en el filme y la  conclusión sugiere una secuela para ver a Natalie Portman adulta convertida en una bella asesina profesional. Según se cuenta, el guión de  Besson estaba listo para producir una segunda parte de la película. Sin embargo, se quedó en proyecto y jamás  pudo llegar a convertirse  en película por cuestiones de derechos entre los estudios franceses que produjeron el filme original.

Colombiana, dirigida por el francés Oliver Megaton, quien colaboró en el guión del filme de El profesional, y escrita por el propio Luc Besson con Robert Mark Kamen,  comparte con el filme antes citado, situaciones similares: Una niña de doce años, cuyos padres se encuentran en negocios ilícitos con narcotraficantes son violentamente asesinados. La jovencita escapa de esa suerte a los Estados Unidos y pide a su tío, también narcotraficante, caracterizado por el actor neozelandés Cliff Curtis, a que la entrene para ser una asesina profesional. El tema y la estructura son muy similares en ambas películas.  En la primera es una niña que vive en Nueva York, en la segunda es una habitante de Bogotá. A diferencia de la primera, la historia se centra en la mujer ya adulta y en la manera en cómo va desarrollando su venganza. El personaje de la película tiene el nombre de Cataleya Restrepo –la hispanización del tipo de orquídea llamada Cattleya-- que deja como firma, en los cadáveres de sus víctimas, la flor que lleva su esotérico nombre. Colombiana, como ya se mencionó, nos da la impresión de ser, en cierta forma, la continuación y el depuramiento del filme El profesional.

Como se sabe, Luc Besson, no es la primera ocasión en que desarrolla este tema de una  mujer torturada. Entre la colección de femmes fatales, en la obra del francés, destaca, La Femme Nikita, como la más célebre. Nikita, no sólo sigue una larga tradición de mujeres letales, sino que, de hecho, se alimenta de la literatura clásica. Su influencia es Pigmalión, la obra de teatro de Bernard Shaw. Esa idea de una humilde mujer, transformada por su tutor para que se convierta en una dama de sociedad, ha tocado las puertas del teatro, del cine y de la televisión, en varias ocasiones. La más conocida es la comedia musical Mi bella dama. Luc Besson, astutamente, adaptó a Shaw al plano del bajo mundo y la violencia: Una mujer adicta a las drogas, y criminal menor, al haber matado a un policía, es condenada a muerte por inyección letal. . Un agente de la inteligencia francesa, la salva de la pena de muerte y la transforma en una mortal agente. Como en el mito de  Pigmalión, en La Femme Nikita, la estatua se convierte en una obra tan perfecta, que el escultor se enamora de ella.

Colombiana ha sido criticada de producir todos los clichés del mundo existentes contra Colombia. De hecho, los lugares supuestamente realizados en  el país sudamericano, se filmaron en México,  la actriz Zoe Saldaña,  la  presunta colombiana, es norteamericana de origen dominicano y puertorriqueño,  los  colombianos que llevan la batuta en el filme no lo son, además, se comunican la mayor parte en inglés, lo que le da a la película, a veces, una sensación un poco extraña, como cuando se veía a Hernán Cortés y los indígenas conversando en el idioma de Shakespeare en uno de los capítulos de la vieja serie de televisión de El túnel del tiempo  

Si se elimina el problema de la mala interpretación cultural de Hollywood sobre América Latina, Colombiana resulta ser un divertido western  contemporáneo en donde los buenos no son tan buenos y los malos no son tan malos.  A pesar de que Besson no dirige la película, como se mencionó anteriormente, hay mucho de su material presente en el filme.

En fin, la acción es continua como en una película de Luc Besson. La actuación de la bella Zoe Saldaña,  pesar de que no puede lucir demasiado sus dotes de actriz por el tipo de filme, cuando dispara, su manera segura de hacerlo, nos da la  impresión,  citando una línea de Jason Robards en Érase una vez en el Oeste, de que gente como ella  tiene algo en su interior…algo que tiene que ver con la muerte. 

Tanya Huntngton Hyde´s Mexican Nature

Tanya Huntington Hyde attended the opening of her own art exhibition with a performance inspired mainly by The White Godess by Robert Graves. “Mexican Nature”  explores a traditional dichotomy in the arts:  urban vs. natural settings.  The images juxtapose the visual arts and poetry in order to have a dialog. As Graves argues, "true" or "pure" poetry is inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of Graves proposed White Goddess. Huntigton text´s on the nature of poetic myth-making represents and questions our own approach to the femenine through the Earth.The first video is a poem about modern times. On the second she reads a poem dedicated to Aura Estrada. And the third video, we see Tanya Huntington blending away with nature.

*This exhibition took place in part thanks to the Houston Institute of Culture &  The Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA)

An Interview with Joseph Mulligan

by John Pluecker

I became familiar with Joseph Mulligan's work while reading his recent translation of Against Professional Secrets/Contra el secreto profesional by César Vallejo.  A review of the book is forthcoming in Literal´s fall issue.  As I was reading the book, I became curious about the translator behind this work and decided to send off a few questions.  I wondered how he came to this project, how he thought about his work in translation and its place within his larger writing practice.  Also, since this is Mulligan's first book as a translator, I thought it would be interesting to see how he thinks about his work at this stage.  So often the literary world erases the translator in a desire to get “closer” to the original, for example in reviews that do not name the translator of a particular book.  This interview is a small part of a larger movement to make translators a bit more visible and to recognize their role as collaborators, writers and artists.

JP: When did your relationship with César Vallejo begin? 

JM: It began in a small plaza in the town of Huaráz, Peru, at a flea market, when a vendor sold me a small, flimsy, knock-off anthology of Vallejo’s poetry. I was nineteen. At the time, the poems where a mystery to me, but I was captivated by them. A few years later, back in Albany, Pierre Joris suggested I take a crack at a few poems from Trilce and then write an essay about some of the problems that I was sure to encounter. Like many young, over-zealous writers, I got in way over my head, and over the course of the summer of 2002, translated a complete (albeit very rough) first draft of all 77 poems. The next year I continued to work with Pierre and began working with Ernesto Livon Grosman, editing my versions over and over again, constantly referencing Eshleman's Wesleyan version, to deliver, in May of 2003, my “finished” translation. Of course, it was not finished, and I ended up spending another seven years researching, editing, rewriting, and annotating it.

JP: How did you begin in your work as a translator of poetry?  What lead you to begin this work?

JM: About 10 years ago, at SUNY Albany, I had the good fortune of taking classes with three translators: Pierre and Ernesto, as I said, and also the Russian translator, Rodney Patterson. As a young poet, raised in a small western New York town, I felt the need to explore the “outside” and venture beyond the habitual poetics that were already known to me in search for other meaningful writings. Studying poetry in translation was essential in this regard. I was not bilingual at the time and recall scouring bookstores and the university library to find multiple translations of a single poem, so that I could compare and try to figure out why the translations were different. As I became acquainted with the ethnopoetics of Jerome Rothenberg (in Shaking the Pumpkin, Technicians of the Sacred and Symposium of the Whole), I was drawn to the notion of a “working,” a transformative text that does not necessarily claim to be a translation, even though it may very well be one. More than anything, ethnopoetics showed me how to write toward a text, how add on to one, or to put it another way, it revealed the relational meaning of language in transformative writing, and I would say that both poetry and translation very deliberately address such relations. I recall, early on, writing a series of “imitations”––I think I put Sartre, Whitman and Becket at a dinner table––more for my own amusement than anything else; but in writing them, I realized that by identifying the tonality of language one can learn to adopt different tones, to expand on those voices and modulate them. Throughout my years at Albany, I focused more and more on Spanish language studies, traveling to Peru and studying for a semester in Concepción, Chile. When I came back to the US, literate in Spanish, I started translating short poems and talking about them with Spanish-speaking friends. I found that writing poems in translation was fascinating, and I also soon realized that doing so opened up a dialogue between those who could read the Spanish version and those who could not. I was hooked.

JP: How did you come to this specific project translating Against Professional Secrets?

JM: When I left SUNY Albany in 2003, Pierre and Ernesto were encouraging me to continue my research on Vallejo and my translation of Trilce. That's when I met Renzo Roncagliolo, who had been teaching Philosophy in Lima and had just moved to Albany for a PhD program. He was thrilled with my plan and immediately put me in touch with his friends and family in Lima. For the first month or so I lived with his family. While I was in Lima, I got a hold of the 13 volumes of Vallejo’s Obras completas that the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú was just coming out with in those years, and I soon realized that, while this was a writer who was and would always be primarily known as a poet, poetry only accounted for about one sixth of his total corpus. This fascinated me and while I continued my research on Trilce, I also started to read/translate a vivisection of his writings, selecting articles, chronicles, reports, plays, narratives, letters, and of course, texts from his books of thoughts. That’s when I first discovered Contra el secreto profesional and I was moved by the idea of publishing a collection that seemed to defy the laws of genre. My intention was always to publish my version of Trilce first, but after compiling 400 pages of notes (comprised of translations of commentaries from Vallejo specialists as well as my own descriptions of translation problems), it became apparent that the chances of convincing a press to publish a 600 page version of a 90 page book by a major poet, translated and edited by an unknown writer, were probably slim to none. So aside from the personal enrichment I got from that work, what good would it be if it wasn’t accessible to readers? Added to this, there was something else that attracted me to Contra el secreto profesional. Reading it over and over again, I started to make connections between it and articles Vallejo had published in magazines in 1930s. I soon realized that some of the magazine articles were longer, more expository versions of the shorter, prose poems I was working with. What attracted me so much to this collection was that it tries to propose an alternative to the avant-garde literature that was being written in Europe and imitated in Latin America during those years. Growing up and studying in the US, the alternatives to avant-garde literature, say William Carlos Williams, did not show me a viable path. I think that Against Professional Secrets is one of the strongest proposals I have come across, and it gives the trajectory of Vallejo’s poetry a new light, recalibrate the scope it's seen through, by Anglophones anyway, since in the US very few readers even know that Vallejo worked beyond the genre of poetry.

JP: The book jacket states you live in New York and Lima.  Do you go back and forth?  Spend time in both cities?  What does your relationship with Peru have to do with your relationship with Vallejo?

JM: I’ve been going to Peru for over ten years. First, as an attempt to shed the chimera of US cultural isolation, and then for literary purposes. My relationship to Peru gained a new depth when I met my wife, Beatriz Sosa Matta, who had grown up in Chincha and had been living in Lima for 15 years. So, of course, my tie to Peru is also through our family, our friends, and a shared belief that expatriation is a thing of the past. Beatriz and I try to go back and forth between Lima and New York as often as we can.

JP: How do you think about the distinction between “your own work” and your translations? 

JM: There are several ways to make this distinction. The easiest for me is to translate something I dislike, or, at least, don’t admire. It creates the necessary distance to remind me that I am at the service of another writer. However, I also believe that all languages are foreign to begin with, which means that an act of language is already an act of translation. I have spent more time translating works by César Vallejo than I have spent translating the works of any other writer, and this, among other reasons, because I admire many elements of his writing. But, as Oliverio Girondo somewhere says, “there comes a time to write something worse,” or, in our case, to be cautious of the danger implicit in translating heroes, since it can lead the translator to champion a text, where we run the risk of replacing rather than opening up the source text and no longer encouraging the reader to go back to and question the translator's criteria, evaluate his or her performance based on that criteria. For example, this is one of the reasons why I have translated Alejandra Pizarnik. Not because her poetry shows me a path I aspire to take in my own poetry, but because it is one that I specifically want to avoid, and in order to stay off that path, I had better know what it feels like to be on it in the first place.

JP: Does this distinction make sense to you in your own poetic practice?  It seems that each poet-translator has their own idea of the relationship between these two pursuits and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

JM: The distinction between my poems and my translations doesn’t make that much sense to me, but this is because it is hard for me not to read a translated poem without the eyes of a translator. For example, I cannot look at Eshleman’s versions of Vallejo’s poetry without thinking of Eshleman, but this is because I am constantly going back to the Spanish, often line by line, trying to figure out why he made the decisions he made and what other options are available. This is one of the great achievements of Eshleman’s work, I think. It makes the reader see the translation of a poem as a new poem. And yet, he is surprisingly loyal to Vallejo's Spanish. This contradiction may be inherent in translation itself.

JP: What projects are you working on now?

JM: The most pressing project I am working on right now is a sweeping anthology of Vallejo's papers that I am editing and co-translating: Selected Writings of César Vallejo. The project is massive, as it will include ample selections of the poetry, narratives, plays, articles, chronicles, meditations, reports, notebooks and letters in a 600 page English only edition. While this project is still in the preliminary stages, I have been very motivated by the encouragement it has received from Clayton Eshleman, Suzanne Jill Levine, Eliot Weinberger, Pierre Joris, Jason Weiss and Michelle Clayton, all of whom have expressed their interest in contributing translations to the anthology. This project, which was not my idea––indeed it was suggested by Eshleman––will give an anglophone readership the opportunity to look at the interconnectedness of texts across the genres, rather than limiting a reading to the poetry. It's my sense that the trajectory of Vallejo’s poetry will make more sense once we can read his poems in the context of the whole breadth of his writing. Among other things, these selected writings seem to show that Vallejo’s socialism, beyond a polemical stance, was for him a practical philosophy that led him into an anti-specialist exploration of writing beyond genre.

El paisaje contemporáneo

Como un homenaje al paisajista José María Velasco, La Galería José María Velasco (GJMV) organizó una muestra de magníficos fotógrafos mexicanos contemporáneos (Yolanda Andrade, Lourdes Almeida, Lourdes Grobet, Francisco Mata, Gerardo Montiel Klint, Pablo López, Ernesto Ramírez, José Carlo González, Eniac Martínez).  

“Panoramas, Espacio y Territorio”, intenta incluir la aproximación a contextos habitados y construidos por el ser humano, dando una referencia paisajista sobre el espacio y el territorio más amplia y contemporánea; por este motivo, los panoramas aquí presentados se orientan bajo tres líneas de aproximación: el paisaje como imaginario simbólico; el paisaje intervenido por el artista o interpretado por éste y el paisaje como huella, narración, evocación o mero territorio; en suma, interpretación humana del espacio y las posibles definiciones de su uso y su sentido, testigo mudo y lacerado de nuestra interacción con él y con los demás.

Algunos de los artistas hablaron de esta exhibición para Literal.

 Gerardo Montiel Klint

El carácter  meditativo que concede el desierto es milenario, no es de extrañarse que personajes como Jesús o Don Juan hayan encontrado en su aparente quietud la revelación, la certeza, o la enseñanza básica. El personaje literario de MuaDib en Dune, se convierte en el Mesías que todo lo ve, todo lo sabe y todo lo presiente a raíz de su experiencia en Arrakis el planeta desierto. Entender al desierto como un paraje estéril es no prestar atención a su condición reveladora mistíca. Mi intención en esta serie es la de reinterpretar en el desierto mexicano escenas reconocibles ligadas a la muerte, el desastre o la miseria que provienen de la pintura, el grabado, los códices o la fotografía y que pertenecen a la psique colectiva. La confrontación de escenas reconocibles, el desastre, el desierto y mi cuerpo como mártir protagónico, mediante puestas en escena en sitio en un contexto contemporáneo es un homenaje a la historia de la artes visuales, y al espíritu revelador del desierto.

Ernesto Ramírez

Mis imágenes transitan entre el paisaje interpretado y como huella o narración del territorio. Aunque estas fotos no pertenecen a un solo trabajo (excepto las panorámicas que forman parte de Cerca del Cielo), sí responden a mis preocupaciones artísticas y documentales sobre nuestro país y particularmente Ciudad de México. Me gusta apropiarme del paisaje para reinterpretarlo libremente. Creo que siempre está latente en ellas eso que llaman "estilo fotográfico", que en mi caso explora el humor y la parte lúdica de las cosas, sin dejar de lado las problemáticas sociales de mi universo fotográfico. E.R.

A Conversation with Pablo Gimenez-Zapiola

By Rose Mary Salum

We had the opportunity to talk to Pablo Jimenez Zapiola in order to work on his article for Literal´s fall issue. We are pleased to share that conversation here with you. You can also visit Literal´s site to see his work

Your decision to become an artist is both, intriguing and admirable. What moved you to do what you do and why?

Ever since I can remember, I have enjoyed creating. As a kid I liked making tiny sculptures with matches and wires. Drawing was something that helped me understand form and scale, and in my teenage years, I approached photography, thanks to my brother who gave me an extended ìleaseî on his camera, complete with three lenses. Architecture opened a door for me, showing me how to see the world and how one relates to it in spatial and human terms.  It also drove me to significantly improve my expression methods. I think an architect is essentially a sculptor, as he creates large scale ìobjectsî in which we can live, work, and do many other things. Then Graphic Design helped me learn how to communicate ideas and concepts. All of these disciplines taught me different skills and opened a variety of doors that helped me understand the world and life. As a consequence, my lifetime passion for art grew in an unlimited way, as I progressively acquired more and more freedom to create. I don't usually think on what project to do, and how to do it. I see something that intrigues or attracts me and then decide to experiment with it intensively. My interest in projections and words started when, during the 90s, I saw some British and Dutch designers that were applying those methods to their work. So my first experimentations were totally random, just choosing words from the dictionary and projecting them on the walls with slide projectors. I always felt these experiments had no specific purpose other than pure enjoyment. I showed these experiments for the first time in two photography exhibitions in Argentina (2000, 2001) that included multiple projections of images and words. Because of this initial attraction, it was very natural that when I came to the US in 2002, and saw the tremendously long trains that run through Houston, that I couldnít wait to see what might happen when I projected words and phrases on these lumbering Leviathans. Frankly, I was compelled to do it. I don't know why, but I knew it was going to be special. In 2004 I devised my first experiments by the rail lines in Houston's West End area. But the place was not comfortable to work in, so I did a couple of projections and stopped. The few pictures and videos I was able to project at that time, though, were enough for me to see the beauty of it and showed me I had only touched the tip of the iceberg. I saw immediately how much "terrain" I had in store, in artistic terms. In 2009, after losing my job due to the economic downturn, I decided to restart the project. I already had a place in mind, so I asked for permission to plug in my equipment by a warehouse located by the rail, in the Willowbend area. The place was absolutely perfect. During 2009 and 2010 I worked hard at it, learning by trial and error about the many aspects involved, like projection distances, angles, light, size of the text and my position in relation to the train - all in order to shoot the photos and the video. It helped me communicate with myself in that particular moment, a time in which I was out of a job and my self esteem needed a boost. It made me feel extremely happy.

The large-scale words or literary passages and poems that you project onto moving trains end up into a very poetic and exquisite work. With these images, the reflection does not only rely on how the passing train constitutes a metaphor of life, but on how the urban landscape can also become part of that poetic environment.

This is what interested me the most in the beginning; the idea of projecting onto moving objects. First it was the train.  Then last year I started experimenting the opposite way, which is projecting from a moving car onto the environment; houses, trees, buildings, freeways, fences, etc. This is much more complicated to do, but it is really worth the effort. While the train is very powerful in itself, the environment becomes a very interesting alternative for the projections, as it is always changing and provides a different "moving screen"; trees, cars, houses, plants, poles, streetlights, illuminated windows, street signs, people, etc. And, unlike with the train, everything moves, so it acquires a different dynamic. With the train, everything but the train is still. So each way offers many different nuances, enriching the experimentation, enhancing the experience and providing more possibilities in artistic terms. The interaction of text over the train and the environment becomes something more like an ephemeral or "harmless" graffiti, which only exist for fractions of a second. The words literally "travel" over the projected surface, and the viewer travels along, in some degree becoming part of it, and to some extent; of its meaning. There is a dialogue between the viewer and the environment or the train. This dialogue is possible through the words.

Paul Recoeur used to say that each person reads their own novel. You are opening the gate for each observer to read his/her own life. Would you say that your oeuvre needs the spectator to become alive?

I think it is very easy to fall into a routine. Modern life, with consumerism, mass media and the internet weaves us a ìcontainment net.î So we wake up every day and follow some sort of path, which is almost the same day by day. We may think we are doing something different every day but as a whole, days go by with us being the same on and on. Art is the opportunity to break out of this net that makes us feel safe, disabling this routine, so when feeling, in some way, unprotected, we feel the urge to reassess ourselves. Art provides us with a chance for self-detachment, so after that process of taking distance from ourselves we return with a different point of view about our position in the world, our purpose in life, questioning; what are we doing? Where are we heading ? Are we satisfied? It is a possibility for a new reality, closer to or in real tune with our inner self, with our soul; making us more us.

You are also dealing with movement and a material so heavy, that only speed can make it ethereal, almost transparent. However, the only element of the image that seems to have a characteristic of permanence despite of its less stable meanings is the word. Can you elaborate on that?

I believe in the power of words as vehicles of communication, as pieces of a message. Words can mean different things depending on the other words that "live" in a statement. They have some kind of genetic meaning. They pulsate; they can make us feel things. You can kill someone with words, and you can cure someone with words, and in between both, you can provoke an infinity of emotions. When I project words onto these moving surfaces and see them move, mutate, disappear, fragment, multiply, and duplicate, I truly see them live, like I live, and they make me live, they add life to me. I think that if I can make the viewer feel a small part of this I will attain something important, since I believe art is a provider of answers, a provider of life. (  So the "living stillness" of the words over the moving things constitutes a whole, and that speed you mentioned, is a consequence of the passage of time, our own dynamic through life. Regarding the literary passages, many of the poems, etc., are from my great grandfather, Paul Groussac, who was French by birth and who emigrated to Argentina in his twenties. He was a writer, critic, poet, historian, director of the National Library for more that four decades, and an important personality in the culture of Argentina during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and he is a huge influence for me. Other projected poems are from authors from many parts of the world and they add their rich experience as they provide different points of view. Each of them has a unique way to manage language and to express ideas. Three of them are from Argentina, one is from the Dominican Republic, one from France and the latest that's providing me with poems is from Russia and lives in Argentina. I project poems in English, Spanish, and Russian mixed with Spanish. Not all the poets I work with write in Spanish, so I also work with a translator from Argentina who helps me with this difficult task and also with a close friend from Houston who help me to adjust and gird the English to mean with precision what was originally wrote in Spanish in order to not lose a bit of the inflexion and nuances of the words, the sentences and the poem as a whole.  It is very hard to translate from one language to another without affecting the meaning, and this process is a very rich experience too.

 Have you projected onto other surfaces? What are the results and the idea behind other surfaces?

As I said in a previous question I like projecting mainly onto moving surfaces. In addition to what I mentioned Iím also projecting onto trees, plants and grass moved by the wind, onto water moved by the wind and by rain, onto moving people, crowds, traffic, etc.

What are your projects for the future?

I plan to elaborate this project to the limit. I think I still have a lot to learn from it. I feel I can work for years on this project. It may seem strange that I'm saying this, since nowadays art has become more a commodity, and art pieces are created and sold almost like products. So artists are asked to have new projects each season. I see art as a way to find meaning in life, and you never finish the process of understanding it. It is a lifelong process. That's why I think I will work on each of my projects my whole life. They are a means to understand myself and even life itself. How can I stop that? I want to understand, not in quantitative terms, but in qualitative terms, especially knowing that one day we die and everything is over all at once. I would like to narrow down all I learned through life to a point in which I don't need to think anymore. To a point in which I just feel things without the need to rationalize them. I would like to reach that point. At least I would like to get closer to this each day.

The other project I'm working on is called "Around the Infinite". This project consists of animations of photo sequences, and I feel this project has achieved the same level of maturity as "Meaning in Motion". It provides me with another field of experimentation, which is time, and the illusion of the infinite. These animations are built in a way that makes them seem  endless. I experiment with the speed of them, some are very slow and some very fast, they all loop but, as I said, they seem to never end.

In the last nine years I have shot almost 100,000 photos (as of today 98944). Of course not all of them are good pictures, but many are good enough to create many bodies of work. Sometimes I think I can stop shooting and work with them for the rest of my life without the need to shoot anymore. But, how can I stop doing what gives me life? I like shooting streets, streetlights, trees, the sea, the sky, water, rain, leaves, shadows, reflections, raindrops, moving things, blurred things, among many others. I have at least ten other projects in process, but none are mature enough to be shown yet. All of them provide me with totally different fields for experimentation and I am certain that they will reach a satisfactory artistic level. I will need to work very, very hard for that, as I do now.

Yoko Ono's Billboard IMAGINE PEACE Enlightens the Houston Skyline

On the 5th of September in anticipation of the 10th anniversary of 9-11 and the opening of Positive Perceptions exhibition at Colton & Farb Gallery plus right before the first Houston Fine Arts Fair ten days later, the provocative artwork IMAGINE PEACE was unveiled on a commercial billboard along highway I-45 and I-10 East going into downtown Houston.

The Billboard is sponsored by Deborah M. Colton of Colton & Farb Gallery in Houston in conjunction with their Positive Perceptions exhibition that Yoko Ono is included in. With a size of 14 by 48 feet, the starkly visible billboard will be seen by thousands of commuters everyday bringing and unexpected art experience to the daily commercial environment.

Yoko Ono produced IMAGINE PEACE for New York City in 2001, responding to September 11th World Trade Center tragedy. Deceptively simple with its basic black and white palette the billboard engages the thoughts of the viewer on an almost subliminal level, inevitably provoking discussion of current events. At a time now when the news, movies and videogames often draw audiences into seductive worlds of warfare, Ono offers us a refreshing reversal of perspective.

Ono created her first billboard piece, WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT, with her husband John Lennon in 1969 and posted it in 12 cities worldwide to protest the war on Vietnam. The concurrent Bed-In for Peace events where John and Yoko received visitors while lying in bed during their honeymoon took place in Amsterdam and again in Montreal, making their wedding a celebration of hope for peace throughout the world.  Since then Yoko Ono has been a leader in the PEACE movement through her art and music in all continents, with many important projects about to unfold this fall also.

Deborah M. Colton had brought the IMAGINE PEACE billboard first to Houston at the same location September of 2006 at the time of the Gallery's WORD show.  "We are delighted to be working with Yoko One and bringing the IMAGINE PEACE billboard to the city of Houston again... the fourth largest in the country where the arts are strong and in the State of Texas that is  dynamic, entrepreneurial and vibrant,says Deborah Colton, founder of the Deborah Colton Gallery, now Colton & Farb Gallery in Texas.   "Ono's ability to subvert advertising for the purposes of art demonstrates the power that conceptual art can have.

  

The Positive Perceptions exhibition runs from September 10th to November 5th.  The Billboard and the exhibition reveal that art is free for those who will engage with it in the minds and their hearts.  Positive Perceptions, featuring such artists as Robert Indiana, Ultra Violet, Jonas Mekas and Texas artists McKay Otto, JD Miller and Philip J. Romano also, is about HOPE, LIGHT, LOVE...  and bringing more positive connectivity into our world's human condition.

As Colton states, "Yoko Ono's IMAGINE PEACE speaks on so many levels: peace in your own being, peace in your relationships or global peace. It comes back to John Lennon's song IMAGINE.  It's simple but powerful. It's not confrontational but it's about promoting positive change  This art piece like the others in this Positive Perceptions exhibition reveal that through our having the right perspective, we CAN all make a positive difference in the world, just by relating to each other in the right perspective."

Deborah Colton Gallery, which is the Colton Farb Gallery in Texas, is founded on being an innovation showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists world-wide whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, and conceptual future media installations. The gallery aspires to provide a forum through connecting Texas, national and international artists to make positive change.

Generación espontánea , El arte de Mauricio Sandoval

Quizá la historia universal es la historia de unas cuantas metáforas. Bosquejar un capítulo de esa historia es el fin de esta nota.

Seis siglos antes de la era cristiana, el rapsoda Jenófanes de Colofón, harto de los versos homéricos que recitaba de ciudad en ciudad, fustigó a los poetas que atribuyeron rasgos antropomórficos a los dioses y propuso a los griegos un solo Dios, que era una esfera eterna. En el Timeo, de Platón, se lee que la esfera es la figura más perfecta y más uniforme, porque todos los puntos de la superficie equidistan del centro; Olaf Gigon (Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, 183) entiende que Jenófanes habló analógicamente; el Dios era esferoide, porque esa forma es la mejor, o la menos mala, para representar la divinidad. Parménides, cuarenta años después, repitió la imagen ("el Ser es semejante a la masa de una esfera bien redondeada, cuya fuerza es constante desde el centro en cualquier dirección"); Calogero y Mondolfo razonan que intuyó una esfera infinita, o infinitamente creciente, y que las palabras que acabo de transcribir tienen un sentido dinámico (Albertelli: Gli Eleati, 148). Parménides enseñó en Italia; a pocos años de su muerte, el siciliano Empédocles de Agrigento urdió una laboriosa cosmogonía; hay una etapa en que las partículas de tierra, de agua, de aire y de fuego, integran una esfera sin fin, "el Sphairos redondo, que exulta en su soledad circular".

La historia universal continuó su curso, los dioses demasiado humanos que Jenófanes atacó fueron rebajados a ficciones poéticas o a demonios, pero se dijo que uno, Hermes Trismegisto, había dictado un número variable de libros (42, según Clemente de Alejandría; 20.000, según Jámblico; 36.525, según los sacerdotes de Thoth, que también es Hermes), en cuyas páginas estaban escritas todas las cosas. Fragmentos de esa biblioteca ilusoria, compilados o fraguados desde el siglo lll, forman lo que se llama el Corpus Hermeticum; en alguno de ellos, o en el Asclepio, que también se atribuyó a Trismegisto, el teólogo francés Alain de Lille -Alanus de Insulis- descubrió a fines del siglo Xll esta fórmula, que las edades venideras no olvidarían: "Dios es una esfera inteligible, cuyo centro está en todas partes y su circunferencia en ninguna". Los presocráticos hablaron de una esfera sin fin; Albertelli (como antes, Aristóteles) piensa que hablar así es cometer una contradictio in adjecto, porque sujeto y predicado se anulan; ello bien puede ser verdad, pero la fórmula de los libros herméticos nos deja, casi, intuir esa esfera. En el siglo Xlll, la imagen reapareció en el simbólico Roman de la Rose, que la da como de Platón, y en la enciclopedia Speculum Triplex; en el XVl, el último capítulo del último libro de Pantagruel se refirió a "esa esfera intelectual, cuyo centro está en todas partes y la circunferencia en ninguna, que llamamos Dios". Para la mente medieval, el sentido era claro: Dios está en cada una de sus criaturas, pero ninguna Lo limita. "El cielo, el cielo de los cielos, no te contiene", dijo Salomón (1 Reyes, 8, 27); la metáfora geométrica de la esfera hubo de parecer una glosa de esas palabras.

El poema de Dante ha preservado la astronomía ptolemaica, que durante mil cuatrocientos años rigió la imaginación de los hombres. La tierra ocupa el centro del universo. Es una esfera inmóvil; en torno giran nueve esferas concéntricas. Las siete primeras son los cielos planetarios (cielos de la Luna, de Mercurio, de Venus, del Sol, de Marte, de Júpiter, de Saturno); la octava, el cielo de las estrellas fijas; la novena, el cielo cristalino llamado también Primer Móvil. A éste lo rodea el Empíreo, que está hecho de luz. .Todo este laborioso aparato de esferas huecas, trasparentes y giratorias (algún sistema requería cincuenta y cinco), había llegado a ser una necesidad mental; De hipothesibus motuum coelestium commentariolus es el tímido título que Copérnico, negador de Aristóteles, puso al manuscrito que trasformó nuestra visión del cosmos. Para un hombre, para Giordano Bruno, la rotura de las bóvedas estelares fue una liberación. Proclamó, en la Cena de las cenizas, que el mundo es efecto infinito de una causa infinita y que la divinidad está cerca, "pues está dentro de nosotros más aun de lo que nosotros mismos estamos dentro de nosotros". Buscó palabras para declarar a los hombres el espacio copernicano y en una página famosa estampó: "Podemos afirmar con certidumbre que el universo es todo centro, o que el centro del universo está en todas partes y la circunferencia en ninguna" (De la causa, principio de uno, V).

Esto se escribió con exultación, en 1584, todavía en la luz del Renacimiento; setenta años después, no quedaba un reflejo de ese fervor y los hombres se sintieron perdidos en el tiempo y en el espacio. En el tiempo, porque si el futuro y el pasado son infinitos, no habrá realmente un cuándo; en el espacio, porque si todo ser equidista de lo infinito y de lo infinitesimal, tampoco habrá un dónde. Nadie está en algún día, en algún lugar; nadie sabe el tamaño de su cara. En el Renacimiento, la humanidad creyó haber alcanzado la edad viril, y así lo declaró por boca de Bruno, de Campanella y de Bacon. En el siglo XVII la acobardó una sensación de vejez; para justificarse, exhumó la creencia de una lenta y fatal degeneración de todas las criaturas, por obra del pecado de Adán. (En el quinto capítulo del Génesis consta que "todos los días de Matusalén fueron novecientos setenta y nueve años"; en el sexto, que "había gigantes en la tierra en aquellos días".) El primer aniversario de la elegía Anatomy of the World, de John Donne, lamentó la vida brevísima y la estatura mínima de los hombres contemporáneos, que son como las hadas y los pigmeos; Milton, según la biografía de Johnson, temió que ya fuera imposible en la tierra el género épico; Glanvill juzgó que Adán, "medalla de Dios", gozó de una visión telescópica y microscópica; Robert South famosamente escribió:

"Un Aristóteles no fue sino los escombros de Adán, y Atenas, los rudimentos del Paraíso". En aquel siglo desanimado, el espacio absoluto que inspiró los hexámetros de Lucrecio, el espacio absoluto que había sido una liberación para Bruno, fue un laberinto y un abismo para Pascal. Éste aborrecía el universo y hubiera querido adorar a Dios, pero Dios, para él, era menos real que el aborrecido universo. Deploró que no hablara el firmamento, comparó nuestra vida con la de náufragos en una isla desierta. Sintió el peso incesante del mundo físico, sintió vértigo, miedo y soledad, y los puso en otras palabras: "La naturaleza es una esfera infinita, cuyo centro está en todas partes y la circunferencia en ninguna." Así publica Brunschvicg el texto, pero la edición crítica de Tourneur (París, 1941), que reproduce las tachaduras y vacilaciones del manuscrito, revela que Pascal empezó a escribir effroyable: "Una esfera espantosa, cuyo centro está en todas partes y la circunferencia en ninguna."

Quizá la historia universal es la historia de la diversa entonación de algunas metáforas.

Jorge Luis Borges, "La esfera de Pascal" 

(Otras Inquisiciones, 1952)


Mauricio Sandoval estará en la Galería Laboratoire a partir del 11 de octubre 2011

Los últimos editores jóvenes hablan sobre revistas culturales culturales

Esta es la última serie de conversaciones con los editores jóvenes que estuvieron presentes en el El Primer Encuentro de Revistas Culturales  organizado por   Miguel Ángel Quemain . Las conversaciones con los demás editores. Sus respuestas aparecen aquí. Las conversaciones con las editoras se pueden ver aquí

Carlos Vicente Castro . Director de la revista Metrópolis

No estuve presente en el encuentro más que los dos primeros días. En el primer día, dos ponencias me parecieron particularmente valiosas dada la experiencia de sus exponentes: José María Espinasa y Jorge Ruiz Dueñas. 

Se centraron en la labor editorial de Víctor Sandoval, y al mismo tiempo pusieron de relieve sus propias peripecias y perspectivas como editores y promotores culturales.
Los tópicos más importantes abordados en los dos primeros días, planeados o no, fueron la solvencia económica de las revistas, su creatividad y una recurrente perspectiva centralista de las instituciones de gobierno y editores del DF. Conté las veces que mencionaban la palabra “provincia”: 16 en tan solo dos días.

 En mi caso, consideré que la creatividad es hija de la necesidad, la generación de lectores o su permanencia, una idea aplicada a Metrópolis a lo largo de los años.
En general, mi percepción fue que se habló mucho y se dijo muy poco. No se llegó -–que yo sepa-- a ningún acuerdo interesante. Pero estar, expresarse y conocerse es un buen principio.

Julio César Félix Lerma. Director de la revista Acequias

En el pasado encuentro de revistas culturales, en la ciudad de Querétaro, se plantearon varios puntos en común y poco menos, ideas divergentes sobre la edición de este tipo de publicaciones periódicas: las que dependen de una institución para seguir imprimiéndola en papel, las que dependen del patrocinio de sus anunciantes y, las que tienen algún tipo de beca o estímulo para seguir trabajando. Me llamó la atención, para bien, la diversidad de las revistas participantes, y a pesar de que sé que es complicado me hubiera gustado ver a revistas como La humildad premiada, de la carrera de letras españolas de la Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila (UAdeC), Estepa del Nazas, del patronato del teatro Isauro Martínez, de Torreón y donde dicho sea de paso han publicado, si no todos, el 90% de los autores laguneros (Comarca Lagunera de Coahuila y Durango); La casa del tiempo, Cultura de Veracruz, entre otras.

La revista Acequias que edito y dirijo en y desde la Universidad Iberoamericana Torreón se encuentra sin presupuesto para imprimirla en papel, por lo que tiene dos números, de 55 existentes, que ha salido únicamente en soporte digital. 

¿Qué usaré de las ideas vertidas en el encuentro para Acequias?

Las bondades de la alternativa del soporte electrónico, aprovechar los contactos para apoyarnos en la promoción de las revistas y sus contenidos.

Nosotros estamos armando el blog de Acequias para interactuar más con lectores y colaboradores (escritores, periodistas e ilustradores), así como vía twitter, queremos que en el mismo blog se pueda leer el número más reciente de la revista, así como entrar en comunicación con los  autores y editores; crear en el mismo espacio foros de discusión y promocionar también otras publicaciones culturales.

En este encuentro nos dimos cuenta que no estamos solos y me parece muy importante darle seguimiento a la creación de la Red de revistas culturales en México, así como al encuentro mismo de revistas y editores.

La revista diecisiete fue una gratísima sopresa, como conocer en físico las revistas Clarimonda, Revés, Va de nuez y Los perros del alba.

La organización por parte del Instituto Queretano de Cultura fue muy eficiente e influyó para que las mesas, como la logística del evento en general, se llevara de la manera más fluida.

Quizás me hubiera gustado interactuar más con público queretano y con los mismos editores asistentes.

La trascendencia del encuentro radicaría en que continuemos con nuestro trabajo, llámese necio o heroico, y aprovecháramos esta Red para difundir a un mayor número de lectores nuestras publicaciones, sean éstas impresas en papel, en soporte digital o en ambas.

En mi ponencia traté sobre el estado actual de Acequias, que de ser una revista de 14 años de edad y 55 números ininterrumpidos. El pasado invierno le llegó el recorte presupuestal y apareció solo en línea y  nos vimos justo en el momento de echar mano de las bondades del soporte digital o virtual, aprovecharlo y seguir editando y promoviendo desde este Norte (Torreón, Coahuila) a autores locales, nacionales e internacionales. Nos interesa mucho ese diálogo.

También tenemos la alternativa de vender espacios publicitarios para financiarla.

Comentaba que lo virtual no ha desbancado al papel, pues ha habido colaboradores que no les da igual estar en uno u otro soporte, así que algunos mejor optan por publicar sólo en publicaciones que conservan las dos formas (la electrónica y el papel).

Acequias mantiene intercambio con varias publicaciones académicas y culturales del país y fuera de él. Nosotros hemos aprovechado las redes de distribución jesuitas para llegar a distintas latitudes del país y fuera de éste.