278

Drawing (278) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"An African whose cheeks are pierced by two sharpened wooden poles has his head inside a plastic model of an oversize ribcage. Before him is a half-naked worker in Baku, in the USSR of the 1930s, who is wearing a scarf over his head as he shovels oily sludge. Both of them have reached a dead end, but the accentuation of the former via medieval semantic perspective speaks for itself. A white man in black skin and a black man in white skin, things become people. To the Wretched of the Earth, internationalism passed automatically, if it hadn’t already been cast out of them beforehand. The fight for liberation and the victim became the rule, from fire to fire. The uniformity within the skeleton in which our hearts beat is a given and cannot be overlooked. Desperate attempts to purge, compulsive cleaning as the last vestige of genocide. What shines through is the Sisyphean organization of society’s work, which expels the biographies of its members as waste, in all regimes." (Aus: arsenal, november 15).

(1999)

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