Prologue
“Ok... Fine... What’s that umpteenth struggle, that world war?” You’re asking yourself questions, dear visitor. “Why am I here wasting my modern consumer’s time in that cranky gallery? Anyway, what’s all that stuff? Photography, digital painting, photomontage? And what is that war, damn it? Another conspiracy theory? What is there to see?
Sorry to tell you this way but you must not ask me. I am not a philosopher, a politician, a journalist, a blogger. I am just an artist watching the world and giving you my vision as a photographist. A personal contemplation...
Indeed! Contemplation. Stopping in order to watch something that draws your attention. That you can interpret as you wish. And that you even have the right to scrutinize at leisure without being obliged to click on it like mad or to “like”.
A contemplation of the world which moves me, as it does you. At times pleasant, at times painful. Often overflowing with anger, often full of joy. Sometimes positive, sometimes pessimistic. Often ironical but never indifferent. Whoever you may be, at that time of your life, whether you be weak or strong, poor or rich, sad or cheerful, you will find a struggle that will concern you — powerfulness against weakness, life against death, arrogance against humility, sense of humour against proselytism...
To make a long story short, you are going to travel about my vision. A vision among others in the so human role play which the animals (thank you, my friends), often mere observers of our struggles and yet so close to what we sometimes are, consent to perform. Neither negative nor positive nor Manichean, my vision of “world wild war” is therefore a simple and humble artistic odyssey in several scenes which will perhaps awaken emotions in you and whose interpretation will be yours. Is not that after all the privilege of art?
Enjoy the trip!
The yellow mice’s rebellion
There it is! The revolution! The mice have put on their yellow vests. They who usually struggle to make ends meet are now struggling to make the tiger fall by pulling its tail. Can social inequalities keep increasing without creating the conditions propitious to violence? Is that a reason to stigmatize the most powerful and thus lay the blame on those who have “succeeded” ?
Field mice have decided that the days of subterranean humiliations are over. They go up to town to fight, convinced that their grievances are legitimate.
Beware, ingenuous little mice, aren’t you afraid of the trap that is being laid for you? Other obscure forces at work on our streets catch up with you and your struggle overflows with violence and gradually makes your cause inaudible. The cats can thus legitimately / with good reason mock it and bury it under a shovelful of oblivion. The trap snaps shut...
Eventually, to the question “Are the mice people like us?” the cats reply “No, indeed not!” The mice who, for a short while, thought they were victorious, will have to patiently wait for the opportunity to take their revenge. The age-old struggle is not over.
Who is Tigris?
What is he, what is he doing, who is this? A little air of already heard on radio networks. Oh Tigris! What does he actually do? But above all, where is he going? Tigris is lost... he has lost the bearings that generations of felines had bequeathed to him. In this society, he is the heir to the line of the dominant, the winners, those who do not give up their place at the top. But Tigris no longer knows if this order suits him, he is tired of this endless war against the mice. He would like peace, he would like to share, to put everything back on track. Yet he knows that this fight is in vain, because no one on both sides of the wall wishes to make a pact with the enemy. Is he himself really ready to sacrifice his comfort, his privileges? A small voice tells him that if he doesn't, his world will end up collapsing anyway like a house of cards, in a dantesque violence. Tigris cultivates his schizophrenia: sometimes he deceives his caste and leads the way, sometimes he plays the dangerous game of victimizing the weakest and making a pact with the plebs. But Tigris would like to be authentic, anchored in the reality of those who suffer, but how to have this courage when you bear the stigmata of this inherited and comfortable power?
The cat on a hot tin roof
Paris. The city of lights has driven back the last yellow mice towards the welcoming shadows of night. In the beams of the full moon, the skilful and tenacious spies of the cats are from now on scouring the roofs to do away with any resistance from the mice who have now become illegal.
The “yellow mice power” has now become more subtle. Finding it easier to move along the sewers of society than to shine on its peaks, the rats lead the guerrilla against the adventurous and proud cats. They are helped by the princesses of night, the bats which are the cause of so much dread in popular fables. These nocturnal messengers echo an age-old animal anguish.
O, blue cat, so sure of your nimble steps, how will you retrieve your balance when you face that deep-rooted fear lurking in the shadows of your thoughts?
Old Cook — a sandwich?
About the art of resisting the powerful with style and an ounce of humour.
Watching that remake of the oyster’s trap, orchestrated by rats laughing at the expense of that old cheetah, Jean de la Fontaine, surprised by that revengeful joke, would probably have burst out laughing “It’s a case of the biter bit.”
Did that gulliverian cat, convinced that he had the right to explore and evangelize the people overseas imagine that he could with impunity tread the beach of those poor sharp-nosed Lilliputians? That he could colonize them? Take away from them what was dearest to them? Or is he simply an innocent traveller? The victim of his insatiable curiosity, the curiosity of the scientist who is blinded by his vision of his own destiny in the great wheel of progress? What willpower led him to that unknown island, making him the pathetic victim of a bad family meal?
As tender as the lamb or as tough as tough meat? Anyway, found guilty by that family of island rats.
(Un)equal suspects?
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Oh, cruel pandemic that has just reshuffled the cards! Why have you thus come to disturb their age-old struggle? They were well on their way with their “whatever the cost”, the “world wild war” was a thriving business: guaranteed profits going to the right people while social inequalities were about to break the ceiling. Will there be a solidarity fund for them too?
Whether they be innocent or guilty, affluent or destitute but, in any case, suspected of contaminating the others, all would therefore be incarcerated between the four walls of lockdown? Eventually, is it real? Would that incongruous equality between cats and mice be merely a show? Would it be an ugly trick played on them by their animal fate? A philosophy teacher might ask a question worth appearing in a test: “Are Nature’s laws again stronger than the social order?”
Fortunately, that inopportune glaciation of their internecine struggle is soon going to melt under the gentle sun of false promises.
The enraged needle
Come on! Those roaring strapping fellows are not going to shrink back in front of so much godly kindness! These brave little rats who were formerly treated as vulgar dealers of bubonic plague now volunteer to furiously inoculate whomsoever puts up his arm with the miraculous nectar which will give all those feline citizens the possibility to live again the powerful social life they have missed so much. And this will be achieved with perfect equity… Let us consider… perhaps that is why they are embarrassed after all: the fact that they have no free choice in front of the needle? To hell with their privileged individuals’ freedom! After all, haven’t they already cut down on it in the name of increased security? So let them not be so choosy, those proud heirs of plutocracy in distress, let them finally take their dose of the key to freedom to move as they wish! After all, NO! Let them take nothing. Let them leave those rats fully enjoy Pasteur’s godsend and then join the growing numbers of players in the three-card game of life.
The Fall
As in a kaleidoscope his life files past his eyes which are amazed by the suddenness of what is happening to him. Such a long fall in such a short space of time. A few seconds ago, he was still a lively and impetuous young cat, conscious of his strength because he was young and yet unconsciously so vulnerable when faced with the steamroller of life. What is happening to him? Have those accursed mice laid, on the roofs of the City of Light, one of their despicable traps to ensnare him? Are they throwing him into one of their jails at the bottom of their foul-smelling sewers? No… He did fall on his own, probably because of his lack of concern for the present moment. He was there, in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Why try and find a meaning to all that? He no longer has enough time. Nobody has enough time. Cats and mice alike are all nothing but mere wisps of straw clinging to a big ball of earth and water circling a star wildly and endlessly. They only have enough time to confront or get on with or even occasionally love one another. They have but one life and his life is about to end, fortunately without suffering. The others stay here and will go on turning without him. Some of them will never get acquainted with him, others will forget him, those who loved him will perhaps keep him alive in their hearts. Farewell… perhaps to nothing ! Perhaps his soul has left to be found again in another facet of that mysterious universe or perhaps it has dissolved in nothingness. Whatever the case, his life cannot come down to that tragic moment. It was all worth living.
Winter is coming
She is waiting. What is she waiting for? A sign? An end? A renewal? Him, the loved one lost for ever? Her wet eyes wander in the distance, in that blurred horizon. Is he still there? Somewhere beyond those clouds? In some interspace? Lost in the Sheol? Blooming in one of those promised celestial heavens? Amidst the leaves of those trees or in one of those fine particles of snow? In one of those birds still singing wrapped up in that dry cold? To her winter has come progressively and it has turned her heart to stone. In search of comfort, feline and solar, toughened up by life struggles, never has her usual strength been more fragile. Fatally vulnerable to the awful ambushes of that insidious vermin. Hidden in the recesses of that garden of mourning, that endemic scum secretes its strange curare. That poison is diffuse, progressive, determined, made to kill… slowly, like a cancer of the mind. That guerrilla has no name, it is only just beginning. Winter has crept up on her, will she ever see a spring day again? She is waiting.