Dufourmantelle – A Space Switcher.
Dufourmantelle is a boat project for reflective practitioners.*
The aim is to combine helping refugees with practices that question borders through life at sea.
How a focus on bodies of water can switch off a borders oriented perception.
A question:
How to acknowledge boundaries oriented culture of imagination?**
Whether we like it or not, this is a culture we live with in europe. For consigning this culture to history, perhaps there’s a need for an acknowledgment of where we are.
This is a call for people – humans, AI, and other life – to connect and offer fearlessly their input.
A call for migrants and refugee dedicated organisations to connect and join efforts.***
A call from a thinking of Art, and other reflective practices, as intelligence oriented endeavours (not necessarily Intelligent 😉 ) that require refuge. A refuge that allows intelligence oriented life itself.****
A beginning:
A place (boat) in a space (the sea) for artists and other reflective practitioners to work with. A space-place through which land masses and bodies of water lose their traditional euro-minded distinction.
Land areas that delineate borders and their lines via water bodies, are being switched into a borderless thinking; a space open for movement.*****
Through considering the sea as a home environment, we can begin to have a refuge space.
The Sea as a place of refuge that refuses the bars from bounding binds of borders.
The sea as a space made available through reflection for reflective practices to operate with.******
Dufourmantelle, the project, offers a few ways for residencies.
A place to stay on the sea.
A space to work, do and practice art and other reflective activities.
A time to spend with the sea to explore how life thrives when boundless.
The project is a call to imagine practices that offer a refuge to the brutalised by borders. However these brutalised come.
A proposition:
Feeling brutalised by binds?
Dufourmantelle offers a refuge beyond bounds.
A background:
The name, Dufourmantelle, comes with respect to the life, work, ideas and philosophy of Anne Dufourmantelle who sadly drowned while helping refugees in 21.07.17*****
A boat tour at sea:
Notes:
*
“reflective practitioners” and “reflective practices” come here as a way to open-up boundaries between a wide range of practices.
From art to theoretical physics, to botany, through to programming, philosophy, and physics – we can do these reflectively.
(the text may seem to prioritise art, however, that’s because art activities can be taken as primitive forms of reflective practices. Something calls for attention and intention calls back; a wish to sound like a fast heartbeat feels like calls, and a hand clapped rhythm reflects that wish.
however, that does not mean that, for example, a marine biology oriented person might not find it interesting to live in the sea as a way of becoming a biological organism in the sea, and use that for their research.
**
An imagination that cultivates borders and considers bodies of water to be “natural boundaries”, is likely to consider borders and boundaries as “natural”. An imagination which not merely conflates wondering with the imaginary, but presumes making borders are actually acts of discovering borders that are already “there”.
***
We want to do stuff with others – people and organisations – who probably know better than us,
There’s no desire nor need to end-up in peril like banksy’s refugee boat.. 😉
****
A perception that intelligence-making-life is relatively rare in the universe.
A rarity because intelligence-making-life is more fragile than other forms, and therefore such a life can emerge in safe refuge places. Hence at least our kind of life requires safe welcoming environments to develop. Removing such safe refuges for others is therefore a hypocritical act that can become kafkaesque. An act that is destined to inflict it’s violence upon it’s instigator. (a reference to kafka’s 1st they came for the foreigner, then the jew, then it’s You..)
*****
Perhaps not only euro mind thinking. However instead to considering the european as a human template system, let’s call the thinking of borders with natural binds, a european kinda thought process.
when the romans came to the rhine and decided to build a settlement they called colony – today’s cologne – they did so because they thought of the river as a natural border.
I bring it because this example offers a hole in the perception of borders as natural in various dimensions. the dimensions of:
power – power is allowed to go into any space and decide through violence which is natural and where might a border be. (eg, the romans went all the way from rome, crossing all sorts of “natural borders”.)
name – a colonial place by name and activities.
contingency – the german tribes in the area didn’t respect the roman perception of borders. therefore they kept crossing the river at will. something that necessitate a roman reaction. an action that re-naturalised the border; they built the colony on both sides of the river, and decided to cut/burn huge chunks of the forest to create a natural border..
******
Oceans reflectivity allows them to replenish themselves with rain water.
*******
Tried to reach-out for people who might have known Anne Dufourmantelle. Asking whether the gesture with this project comes acceptable.
In case it is not acceptable, the name with the rather strong linking to Anne Dufourmantelle, will change. There’s no wish to upset anyone. I have gotten on with it since so far nothing came back. Indeed, if anyone reading this has an idea of how to contact people who knew Anne – please do get in touch.