Note:
Siren is an intimate multi-media Objet d’Art. It is a journey of the senses, a glimpse into the multiverses of my veiled, proud, and deliberate, artistic existence in the borderlands of mainstream religion, culture, and society. It represents my freedom of choice to explore the farthest edges of my gender, indigeneity, and difference from a place of silent socio-cultural separatism, juxtaposed with short bursts of intense global cultural activity, disruption, and visibility; my own oceanic ebb and flow of “culture as ritual of care.” This embodied public expression of art and culture as care, in deeply intersubjective, numinous, encounters with my audiences (whether it be in the intimacy of a handful of ‘Parthenopean’ intellectuals in a Sirenland reading, a Gypsy ‘tablao,’ a museum exhibit, or amidst of hundreds of thousands in collective ecstasy in North African music festivals, or even in the audience of millions in Rio’s carnival), has been deeply shaped by periods of necessary retreat from androcentric awareness and into progressively greater intimacies with zoe.
What if Wisdom can not be achieved without Wisdom’s Monster Dance? A Monster Dance of radical, moral, relational improvisation in ontology and agency. An indigene (Latin indi- within, gene- born) dance of self-recognition and self-determination. Lest we be inclined by the continued epistemic colonialist violence of modernism & rationalism to undermine the genius of process, movement, synthesis, metaphor and meaning in the name of reductionist analysis, the intent of my art ultimately becomes dignifying epistemologies and ontologies of care for said monstrous, taboo, ‘mysterium tremendum,’ lurking in the shadows of culture, art, reason, and society. To treat it as Beloved, dignifying the numinous dance with difference, with the Mysterium Tremendum, as the ultimate quest for wisdom, and as ultimate art. |
