Yesterday morning, at the orthopedist who was giving me a shot of cortisone for a bad shoulder pain, I had time to read – in the Diplo’s review of books, under the ‘Asia’ chapter – about a most famous Japanese thinker, sociologist – Mita Munesake. I am unable to find an English translation of the title of the book in question. Very unfortunate. The French title is almost untranslatable: l’Enfer du Regard.

I really like what I read around his pun on the consumption society which he calls the consummation society ! A society which he sees as the inextricable interlacing of relationships between individuals. He calls the whole thing an EXISTENTIAL EFFERVESCENCE.

When I uttered this phrase at the Creative Sync, later on, Victoria got interested enough to write it down with the name of its author.

Indeed, these words are highly descriptive of the achy fever we all suffer from, when confronted with the despicable violence deployed everywhere in the Palestine-Israel conflict and the published condemnation of the Hamas. Which makes Israel the victim. Literally an unbearable paranoid split from the basic societal expectation that violence calls for the condemnation of its perpetrators, whoever they are and without exception. Paranoid the split, because (1) there are, at the moment, so many other sources of violence around us that doom seams to be closing in. And (2) there is, in reality, an immense flow of empathy from every continent, but mostly unheeded, unpublished. Besides, this gap between events on the ground and their representations is so vast that it can only generate deep anxiety at best, hallucinations and loss of basic intelligence at worst!

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In the middle of this existential effervescence, Gwylène is asking me to write a text backing ‘ENSEMBLE 15′ of her present work: YOU COMIN’ TOO, a monumental artistic experiment in praise of the highly coherent purpose of ART IN/WITH COMMUNITY despite its apparent formal heterogeneity, and of all those who collaborated with her (and me) since we started our common, collaborative, art carriers! Such a brouhaha is not a metaphor, however. Nor is YOU COMIN’ TOO a retrospective. It is art alive, live. A life of art-making, as it still presently unrolls and as we reflect on its collective history.

All this seems to parallel Munesake’s purpose! … Both, him and Gwylène are intent on bringing meaning to the jungle of their realities. Yet, where sociologist Munesake reveals how a saturated world brings saturated perceptions and mental blindness and writes books with untranslatable titles [maybe ‘the hell of what we see’ or ‘the hell of gazing’], artist Gwylène’s own intent is to handle her art as a tool for emulating Munesake’s ‘Existential Effervescence’ as the terrain of her liberated perception.