The title reads “Suitcase or Coffin”. These were the options faced by the Pieds Noirs (the European settlers), the Harkis (the Arab collaborators) and the Jews in Algeria in 1962, after France retreated from its former colony and Algeria was granted independence. More or less what Arabs are planning for Israelis Jews, and later on to the west if their abominable way won't be taken as the only way to exist. I've chosen this art project of Mona Hatoum, whom I adore.

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1952. She has lived in England since the outbreak of civil war in Beirut in 1975. After graduating from the Slade School of Art in 1981, Hatoum embarked on a career as a performance artist.

"Inspired as much by her exile from war-torn Beirut as by her sensitivity to contemporary racial and gender issues, Hatoum's works are both deeply personal and quietly political. Without being didactic, she invites viewers to see the world through her eyes while also encouraging them to trust their own reactions to her evocative works"

This work represent many symbols, and above all these very days it represent for me how we are all entwined. yet, no solution is out there, before Terror will be eliminated, we will be all it's refuges.

 
Mona Hatoum, Traffic, 2002
Suitcases, metal, plastic, human hair

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor form other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

You are made in the image of what you desire.

   -  Thomas Merton

via wood_s_lot

"Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity". -Friedrich Nietzsche. via thenonist

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium -

  "Civilizations are creatures. They are organisms that live very long and that spread very wide over the surface of the earth. Civilizations are beings that consume energy and produce ideas. These ideas materialize as cities, institutions, laws, art, books, and memories. A civilization may persist for thousands of years, evolving constantly. Compared to fleshy animals, or even the wet tissue of the human mind, civilizations are the fastest changing organisms on the planet...Today’s civilizations differ from those in the past by their greater degrees of complexity and their greater speed of transformation. ..Western civilization today possess an embryonic memory. It is called a library..For a civilization to survive ten thousand years requires a ten thousand year storage function -- a ten thousand year library. This is not the only thing a ten thousand year civilization needs, but it is a vital need. ..

Until recently a library seemed more dead than alive. Between rock-hard walls it housed old books, often ones that few people read, written by authors long dead...

Life, big and small, is distinguished in part by its ability to carry the past forward, to currently represent what happened before, in order to make advantageous responses about what will happen next. ..Biological creatures have memories of genes and memories of past stimuli. Civilizations have libraries. A library stuffed with tablets and scrolls of ideas and expressions from the past is an elementary memory, but it is an amazing improvement upon earlier methods of oral tales, narratives, and proverbs...

This memory is not static. The connections and associations between ideas/files are in constant flux. Books are updated, documents revised, ideas improved or discredited. The entire library is like one very large wikipedia article.

Finally, the mark of success for this library – for this memory of this organism called civilization – is the production of new ideas and new ways of knowing. What this means is that new levels of memory will arise. The organism may know and recall in ways we humans – mere nodes in the tissue – may find perplexing."

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"Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream." - Chuang-Tzu, The Wandering Dance via huge-entity

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

–William Dement via

Surely you're aware that there are dreams all around you.

You're moving through them everywhere you go. They're on every block and corner of the city you live in, and flickering behind the curtains and shades up and down every street. Open the Yellow Pages of your local phone book --what is that if not a catalog of dreams?

And beyond or behind all of those dreams just blooming or being born are millions --tens of millions-- of dreams that have not yet been recognized or realized, and dreams that are withering from neglect....

 Brad Zellar, This Planet of Dreams

via wordshadows

"We crave even what we realize we cannot fully live through, and we are willing to accept a diluted version of it, just as long as it meets our media-driven perceptions of it...
Apparently contradicting the former point people seem increasingly obsessed with the ability to capture and keep track all they experience, often making it available to the public.
From weblogs to moblogs to Tivos the availability of cheap mass-storage devices to be filled with text, pictures, videos and audios is changing the way we relate to reality and memory.
Are we nearing a time when people will not be able to forget?" via freegorifero

"It is to remember that all art is magical in origin - music sculpture writing painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more that Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end by itself. Like all formulae, art was originally functional, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formula. Take a porcelain stove and disconnect it and put it in your living room with ivy growing over it... it may be a good-looking corpse but it isn't functional anymore. Or take a voodoo doll full of pins - authentic West African, $500 on the 57^th Street - and hang it on the wall of your duplex loft. It isn't killing enemies anymore. Writing and painting were one in cave paintings, which were formulae to ensure good hunting"...Brion Gysin

Memory is dialectical. It suffers at the rejection of its own distance. Yet distance is its natural habitat. Memory traces. The ruins of memory...The “no longer” might well have never existed. Even the most “insignificant present” has a certain power of the full present, since it exists as the real. Yet the moment is gone: “Every evening we are poorer by a day.”

 

 

 ...A continuous identity, flourishing, reaching a peak, and then falling into irreversible decline. Memory, it seems, falls under the same delusion. Conferring a presence on the un-recollected past, we take it that memory guides itself in the dark, navigating itself toward the terrain of remembrance. The motion of memory, instead, reveals itself to be going astray, neither motionless in Bachelard’s term, not progressive in the Hegelian sense. Going astray means it runs off, beneath the threshold of recollection...."

via side-effects.blogspot

The body doesn't lie … Maps whose territories are named in languages which are no longer understood show where the passions are hidden.

-- Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity 6