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| Golden Shower - Metal thread and cotton embroidery on silk, with permission of artist Georgie Tier to use her 'Trixie' design. |
Well OK. This week was a terrible one. It started wonderfully with Mr. X Stitch praising my squirrel study piece and making my day.
Then the next day in the morning, a bunch of heavily armed and totally brainwashed fanatic assholes slaughtered 12 people in the Paris building of Charlie Hebdo, including Cabu and Wolinski, two famous French cartoonists whom I admire immensely.
Cabu, he was a dreamer. He drew the end credits of my childhood's kids TV broadcast. They called him "Le Grand Duduche" - the approximate translation of which comes to my mind as "Big Forrest Gump" (mine is not a literal translation obviously, but that's what Grand Duduche calls up to me). So you can figure out how little harmful Cabu was.
Wolinski, he was a genius. He drew fantastic satirical stuff about sex and I just LOVE his humor. He even published Paulette in collaboration with Georges Pichard, another cartoonist whose works are in due place on my personal book shelves. Not only his drawings were Grand Art, but also his texts. His work was awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 2005.
I was devastated when I heard the news, very early after the attack (I'm a highly connected person, having no TV I rely on the Internet 24/7). 'How could this be true ?' I thought, just before being sucked up by the same nightmarish twister than the 9/11 one. To me, both horrors blend. I felt exactly the same on both days, and went through the same process of disbelief to nausea to bursting into tears. You people in the U.S. must know that we Europeans are physically much closer to radical Islam than you are. It's literally next door. Guantanamo is unthinkable here, it would immediately start a massive chain reaction leading right up to a global civil war. When I get out to the market on Saturday, I sometimes happen to see little toddler girls wearing the equivalent of a burqa. You must figure it out to understand how and why artists were slaughtered in cold blood in the heart of Paris. Me personally I don't give a shit about what people believe in or what they eat or the way they dress. But when they enforce their beliefs onto others, or when they kill people just because they don't agree with them, I get quite mad I confess.
Today I'm really really really mad. I've been relaying a lot of things yesterday and today from my main accounts in the social media. It was the first time I relayed so much messages and press articles in public since I started using Facebook, Twitter or Google (I usually am a very responsible user, and a very positive one most of the time). But here, but now, this can't be the answer. You cannot just pretend it's not serious. It is serious. It was my civic duty yesterday to spread the word about art, about freedom, about human rights, about tolerance. It is my artistic duty from now on to draw a line (-> 'OVER THE LIIIIINE') and to start acting up like Charlie Hebdo's team was. No more politically correct B.S., sorry folks. No more self-censorship.
Now let me talk a little about what I stitch. I'm able to work on projects like the raised work squirrel one, for sure. But my core business is not Mrs Burr's beautiful birds or Mrs Paris' magnificent wood fauna. My core business up till now was plain pornography, preferably a sadomasochistic one. Now you must understand why, because my reasons and Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists ones are probably very similar (or at least that's what I believe).
I don't wish to encourage torture or degradation of human dignity. I just want people to think about an extremely shocking truth : the only difference between treating others like shit in SM or in real life is that in SM we just PLAY; it's only a GAME, with RULES and LIMITS that were NEGOTIATED beforehand and an END to the play WHENEVER ANYONE uses their safe word. In real life, none of the SM ethics exist. In real life, there's no game. In real life, treating others like shit is a fucked up power freak abuse, period. And there's a whole bloody lot of occasions in modern life when people, you, me, get treated like shit. Or worse, don't get treated like shit because they, we, were so afraid that they, we, finally crawled like animals just to (hopefully) avoid punishment or abuse. Now this is not acceptable. No one should tolerate this, turn their heads, tone down their voices or resentment, act 'as if it was not serious' to avoid head on confrontation. Because when a woman gets slaughtered through stoning it is serious. When a child gets sexually abused by a Catholic priest, it is serious. When 12 innocent people get shot in cold blood for drawing cartoons (or just being the wrong person in the wrong place, or just being on duty), it is serious.
When anyone in the world gets killed or wounded or life-traumatized by the armed hand / penis / weapon of any authoritarian full of shit bible- / quran- / torah- / Mein Kampf- / Little Red Book- / Marx's Das Kapital- / whatever the fuck ever- basher, we are all responsible, it is our collective human duty to stop it. With our true weapons, eg democracy, tolerance, dignity, but also provocative humor, artistic irreverence, political debate, compared philosophy, scientific knowledge, satirical columns. These are our safe words. These are our ever negotiable limits. These are the only grounds on which we can all live TOGETHER AS ONE. 'cause if we can't find common grounds, we're heading straight to getting the next extinct species on this earth. Not because we'd finally have had the nuclear holocaust happen (hopefully not...) but because the only people that will remain in this instance won't be human anymore.
