Journalist at RFI (ex-DW, BBC, CBC, F24...), writer (on art, music, culture...), I work in radio, podcasting, online, on films.
As a writer, I also contributed to the New Arab, Art UK, Byline Times, the i Paper...
Born in Paris, I was based in Prague, Miami, London, Nairobi (covering East Africa), Bangui, and in Bristol, UK. I also reported from Italy, Germany, Haiti, Tunisia, Liberia, Senegal, India, Mexico, Iraq, South Africa...
This blog is to share my work, news and cultural discoveries.
My recent contribution to this great European newsletter:
Good morning,
From ever-increasing outrage about French President Macron to a flopping four-day workweek in Belgium, this week has been a ride for Western Europe.
Meanwhile, Biden is being blamed for anti-UK sentiments after a visit to Ireland, while British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been probed over failure to declare a financial conflict of interest.
But while Paris still burns, the city is hosting two major Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibitions, focusing on music and his collaboration with Andy Warhol – something to look forward to.
Editor's note Belle de Jong, Brussels
French union leaders outraged as Macron signs pension reform into law
French President Emmanuel Macron signed his controversial pension reform into law on Saturday, prompting angry reactions from unions. They are now calling for a 'tidal wave' of protests on 1 May.
Melissa Chemam Paris, France
Union leaders described the hurried promulgation of the law as "provocation", adding that the president had 15 days to validate it but chose to do it immediately.
Two Basquiat exhibitions in Paris shine light on art superstar
American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is the subject of two major exhibitions in Paris this spring, one focusing on music, the other on his collaboration with Andy Warhol.
African music and art had a key influence on Basquiat, from his Haitian roots to his deep interest in diverse African-American and African cultures, as shown in these exhibitions.
France joins world leaders in voicing concern over fighting in Sudan
Violence erupted on Saturday morning in Sudan after weeks of deepening tensions between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commander of the heavily-armed paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
France has joined the US and the UN in voicing "deep concern" and called on military factions "to do everything to stop" the violence.
Free Assange has been released on the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, as part of States of Violence, a collaboration between a/political, WikiLeaks and the Wau Holland Foundation.
States of Violence brings together artists, agitators and icons such as Ai Weiwei, Dread Scott and The Vivienne Foundation to unveil and oppose techniques of government oppression, from war and torture to police brutality and surveillance. The world’s most outspoken individuals turn the spotlight on global power structures, releasing material which lays bare the darkest truths of our contemporary reality. This is presented alongside “SECRET+NOFORN” (2022), a body of work by the Institute for Dissent & Datalove, which comprises the highest classification of cables, SECRET and NOFORN (meaning no foreign nationals), from the 2010 WikiLeaks Cablegate publication of U.S. diplomatic cables. It is the largest-ever physical publication of top secret government cables, never before available in the UK in hardcopy.
The video features a clip from 'Collateral Murder' released by WikiLeaks on the 5th of April 2010. It shows a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
States of Violence
24 March - 08 April, 2023
a/political, 6 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AA
Tues - Sun, 10am - 6pm
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American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is the subject of two major exhibitions in Paris this spring, one focusing on music, the other on his collaboration with Andy Warhol.
As short as it was, the life of Basquiat (1960-1988) produced an incredible number of creative periods, styles and artworks.
Covering the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, two new exhibitions at the Philharmonie de Paris and the Louis Vuitton Foundation offer fresh insight into how music, pop art and his Afro-Caribbean heritage informed the artist's work.
From sound to sight
Music was a key influence on Basquiat, from the songs his Haitian father played him, to his formative years in a band, and his deep interest in diverse African-American and African genres.
With its show "Basquiat Soundtracks", the Philharmonie delves into the relationship between Basquiat's keen interest in music and his visual art.
From bebop to jazz and later hip-hop, music from Black Atlantic culture – comprising African, American, British and Caribbean influences – were especially key in the painter's life and work.
The Philharmonie describes the exhibition as “a feast for the ears as well as the eyes”, presenting Basquiat's artworks alongside musical instruments and audiovisual media.
Basquiat emerged as a self-proclaimed poet, musician, DJ and artist in late-1970s New York, using the street as a canvas for his words.
At the time, the city was the hotbed for two surging musical movements: avant-garde "no wave" and soon-to-explode hip-hop.
'Basquiat Soundtracks', Philharmonie de Paris
Basquiat was then the unofficial leader of the underground band Gray. He frequented New York’s downtown clubs, sharing stages and dancefloors with a generation of punk-influenced artists experimenting with new forms of performance and expression.
At the same time, Basquiat embraced emerging hip-hop culture, inspired by Black history and struggles. He even teamed up with rapper friends to produce a 1983 single, "Beat Bop", complete with original cover art.
Jazz and especially the music of Charlie Parker also had a key place in Basquiat’s paintings, used as references in many of his early paintings.
Basquiat meets Warhol
At the Louis Vuitton Foundation, it is Basquiat’s work with pop art pioneer Andy Warhol that takes pride of place in "Basquiat x Warhol. Painting four hands".
Between 1984 and 1985 especially, Basquiat and Warhol created around 160 paintings together, including some of the largest works of their respective careers.
Fellow New York artist Keith Haring, who witnessed their collaboration, described a “conversation occurring through painting, instead of words”.
"Andy would start one [painting] and put something very recognisable on it, or a product logo, and I would sort of deface it," Basquiat said of their creative process.
"Then I would try to get him to work some more on it."
The exhibition also features are individual works by Basquiat and Warhol, as well as other artists from the downtown New York art scene of the mid-1980s.
African energy
Some of Basquiat's most powerful work relates deeply to his Haitian origins and African inspiration.
At the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the large sculpture "Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper)" and the 8-metre canvas "African Mask" particularly stand out.
Produced between 1985 and 1986 but never exhibited while neither Basquiat or Warhol were alive, "Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper)" evokes the lynchings of African-Americans.
"African Masks" is the most monumental work in the exhibition. While Warhol described it as “a masterpiece of African art”, Olivier Michelon, one of the co-curators of the exhibition, told RFI: "It is not an African masterpiece, it is a painting made in New York, in 1984, by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with African iconography."
Basquiat visited the African continent just once, after his collaboration with Warhol. But according to Michelon: "As an African-American, with origins in Haiti and the Caribbean, it's clearly something that interested him. He also worked quite a bit on myths and rites from West Africa, notably Yoruba legends."
At the Philharmonie, Basquiat’s work is placed in the context of the Black Atlantic: “the intangible, diasporic continent where music is a place of memory”, as the curators describe it.
His work bears witness to “a spiritual continuum” from the Mississippi Delta, birthplace of the blues, to the coasts of Africa and the Caribbean, to which Basquiat was linked by Haitian and Puerto Rican ancestry.
One country in particular held a powerful appeal for the artist: Côte d'Ivoire.
Basquiat went there in 1986, exhibited in Abidjan, and planned to visit the country again in August 1988. But he would pass away of a heroin overdose, aged 27, a few days before his flight.
Reading this revealing interview; may have found a name for a certain form of pain...
Guardian Interview
Extraordinarily stressed and vigilant? How racism makes people physically ill
Arline Geronimus was once called the biggest threat to youth in the US. But her theory of how injustice affects our health is more influential than ever
by Nesrine Malik, a Guardian columnist and the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
Extract:
After decades of research into public health, Geronimus is an expert in what she calls “weathering”, a term she coined: “the physiological effects of living in communities that bear the brunt of racial, ethnic, religious and class discrimination”.
Weathering, she adds, “is critical to understanding and eliminating population health inequity” and involves not just the physical and environmental stressors of being marginalised, but the “psychosocial” ones as well – high stress, constant vigilance, a lack of trust that things will be OK.
The process, she has observed in her research, leads to premature ageing, chronic conditions and early death.
In her new book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress on the Body of an Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society, the pandemic seems to vindicate her thesis.
It wasn’t just a person’s age that made them vulnerable to the virus, it was also their weathering.
It was already established that Covid killed people in racialised communities at a much higher rate than white ones, but that, according to Geronimus’s research, was because they had higher rates of heart diseases, diabetes and inflammation; all risk factors that made Covid more deadly.
Even before the pandemic, people in these communities scored high on the “allostatic load score” – the presence of stress hormones such as cortisol along with inflammation, their belly fat distribution linked to stress, and high blood pressure – leading her to conclude that “if you have a weathered body, you’re more likely to die of infection at a younger age”. That, tragically, has turned out to be consistent with the patterns of death in the pandemic.
(...)
Geronimus has always faced fierce resistance. “That’s why I wrote the book,” she says. “Earlier in my career, people were very cold. There were headlines in books and newspapers like: ‘Research queen says: let them have babies’. This was the early 90s, the height of neoliberalism and underclass rhetoric. I had no constituency. It wasn’t just that I ran up against more rightwing or neoliberal people. In the popular press, I was a heretic. I got death threats. It was all ideological.”
(...)
She doesn’t receive nearly as much vitriol as she used to, but she still thinks that we’re not there yet. People are so brainwashed by the myths of the American dream, social mobility and self-improvement that they are led to believe that one way or another it’s minorities’ own fault for not thriving.
In the US, Gerominus says, the belief is that “black Americans are not working hard enough” or are fatalistic and “stress-eating, lying on the couch”. The truth she has seen is that they are in fact constantly resourceful, pulling together as a community and “solving the unsolvable” in the face of daily, structural challenges.
To this day, only “part of the idea” of weathering has been incorporated into mainstream public-health consciousness. “There’s language to talk about it that we didn’t have 30 years ago, of structural racism or systemic racism, social determinants of health – everybody’s now conversant in these concepts.” This covers the part “where your body is eroded by the corrosive effects of being a part of an exploited, oppressed group”.
But the other part of weathering is still not widely grasped: the coping part, the part where the people being weathered “stand up, try to be resilient, and try to withstand all the structural barricades and the exposure or the exhaustion. Weathering means both things – it is both shelter and storm.”
This second part is often ignored, reducing community or group-based dynamics and demands to identity politics positions in a culture war. “What we misread as selfish competitive identity politics is about social identities that have been imposed on groups. But many of the hardships and adversities they face are because they’ve been racialised.”
(...)
Her biggest hope is that people start to think about things in terms of weathering and that it leads them in different directions, away from the same old failed policies. She hopes that solutions are offered for public-health crises outside the usual ones relating to urban development and lifestyle improvements.
(...)
“We tend to think of social mobility as moving up to something better,” she says. “But whatever moves you to opportunity also moves you away from things that give your life purpose and meaning, and people who validate your view of the world and don’t just assume what your moral fibre is or your intellectual abilities are just because of what social identity has been imposed on you.” There are, she says, “real minuses to social mobility and even the pluses don’t get you out of weathering. If we really think that being socially mobile is a sign of good character then we need to make sure that persistence and tenaciousness and sacrifice doesn’t make you sick or disabled or die young. We shouldn’t stand for that.”
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Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of an Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society is published by Little, Brown (£25)
The Head of the broadcasting body in the DR Congo, Christian Bosembe, was attacked in Paris while on a tour to meet with European media and francophone institutions.The Congolese authorities want the perpetrators caught.
Christian Bosembe, president of the audiovisual authority in the DRC (CSAC), was attacked in Paris on Saturday night, 1 April, by members of the Congolese diaspora.
Speaking to RFI on Monday, Bosembe denounced an "attempted kidnapping and assassination" and said he was waiting for French justice to do its job.
“The attack was filmed by the attackers, the perpetrators are known. They must be arrested and prosecuted," he added.
Verbal attack
He said he was returning with his adviser to his hotel in Argenteuil, a town located about ten kilometers north-west of Paris when he was attacked in the parking lot of the establishment by several men, who first shouted at him in the Congelese language of Lingala.
The people who beat him up described themselves to him as “fighters” (combattants), a term that refers to violent militants, opposed to the current Congolese government.
During the assault, they insulted him and called him a “collabo”, the name frequently used for those working with the Congolese regime.
A video recording of the attacks has gone viral on social media and shows Christian Bosembe fighting back. Most of those involved in the attack appear to be Congolese.
Bosembe has been on an official visit of Schengen countries since Friday, 31 March, which started in Paris.
The visit aims to reinforce the relations between the Congolese CSAC with broadcasting bodies and the French-speaking community representative bodies including Canal +, Radio France Internationale (RFI), France 24, and l'Organisation internationale de la francophonie.
Demand for 'clarifications'
In the DRC, the news has been met with dismay and anger.
On Sunday, the CSAC met and issued a statement calling on the French authorities for “clarifications” about the incident.
Serge Ndjibu, of the CSAC, denounced an “attempted murder” and called for investigation.
Speaking to RFI’s correspondent in Kinshasa, Pascal Mulegwa, Ndjibu said:
"That a president of an institution supporting democracy was brutally and cowardly attacked, without any intervention, while President Christian Bosembe is on an official mission, in consultation with the French authorities, is shocking.
“It was an attempted murder on an official of the DRC [...]
“The CSAC demands clarifications from the French was well as the arrest, judgement and condemnation of the perpetrators of these crimes.”
The attack was also condemned by the Congolese Minister of Communication, Patrick Muyaya, who said the DRC authorities would work with France to get justice.
At AFLAM film festival, Marseille, cinema Les Variétés, March 2023
The feature film DIRTY DIFFICULT DANGEROUS directed by Wissam Charaf, has won the Europa Cinemas Label as Best European film at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, as it was announced today by a Jury of four Europa Cinemas Network exhibitors.
The jury issued the following statement: “Wissam Charaf’s DIRTY DIFFICULT DANGEROUS is a delight – a very original and surprisingly uplifting film, and our unanimous choice as the winner of the Europa Cinemas Label here in Venice. Yes it deals with many of the tragic issues that confront us all – war, refugees, trafficking – but Charaf comes up with a love story that even has strong fairy tale elements. Set in Beirut and on the Lebanese/Syrian border, we follow the heartening relationship between an Ethiopian girl and a Syrian man. There is a lightness of touch here – a pleasing lack of lecturing and some darkly funny moments. The film will give audiences a real sense of hope born from courage, and we feel strongly that it will appeal well beyond arthouse audiences across Europe.”
Synopsis: Beirut, Lebanon, the present. Ahmed, a Syrian refugee, and Mehdia, an Ethiopian migrant domestic worker, are living an impossible love of stolen kisses on street corners. While Mehdia tries to free herself from her employers, Ahmed struggles to survive by selling scrap metal, while affected by a mysterious disease. The two lovers may have no future, but they also have nothing to lose. One day, they seize their chance and flee Beirut, in a desperate attempt to start over elsewhere, as Ahmed’s physical condition starts to gets worse.
Wissam Charaf is a Lebanese/French director, cameraman and editor. In 1998 he began to work with the French/German channel ARTE as a news cameraman, editor and journalist, covering major political hotspots. He has directed six shorts: HIZZ YA WIZZ, A HERO NEVER DIES, AN ARMY OF ANTS, AFTER, UNFORGETTABLE MEMORY OF A FRIEND and DON'T PANIC as well as the documentary IT'S ALL IN LEBANON. His first feature film HEAVEN SENT premiered at the ACID section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. DIRTY DIFFICULT DANGEROUS is his second feature film.
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'Dirty, Difficult, Dangerous'
Wissam Charaf
With Clara Couturet, Ziad Jallad, Darina Al Joundi, Rifaat Tarabay
Provided to YouTube by Reservoir Media Management, Inc.
Restless Leg · 3D · Euan Dickinson
Music From The Motion Picture: Akilla’s Escape
℗ 2019 Robert Del Naja and Euan Dickinson
Released on: 2023-03-31
Producer: Robert Del Naja
Producer: Euan Dickinson
Chaos Coaltition
Provided to YouTube by Reservoir Media Management, Inc.
Chaos Coaltition · 3D · Euan Dickinson
Music From The Motion Picture: Akilla’s Escape
℗ 2019 Robert Del Naja and Euan Dickinson
Released on: 2023-03-31
Composer: Robert Del Naja
Composer: Euan Dickinson
Auto-generated by YouTube
We Get What You Deserve · 3D · Euan Dickinson · Saul Williams
Music From The Motion Picture: Akilla’s Escape
℗ 2019 Robert Del Naja and Euan Dickinson
Released on: 2023-03-31
Composer: Robert Del Naja
Composer: Euan Dickinson
Auto-generated by YouTube.
