1.
One day I stopped loving it

I felt being its only representation, representative and a uniformed statue. I was the only replica of my own insane creation, I became a dated caricature of my old powerful but degenerated self, a piece of Débris art admired by the connoisseurs of the Abject long ago.

I knew death was around the corner, now that I had almost 75 to 80 percent of my friends’ names and references crossed out in my telephone book. I did not complain though and accepted begrudgingly this fact, shrugged my shoulders with a long “sooo what…”

I find myself presently on a bus rushing from Beograd to Paris (the Easter vacation’s over and lots of children, kids of the forlorn Serbs and Gypsies living in Diaspora are eager to get back home–although, very few of them knew exactly where their home was).

To be honest, the same goes for me: I’ve had a vague idea where I was heading to–I was heading to the place where I would see, once upon a time–lots of art…heading to a place where I was watching a lot of good movies with my kid… Or was that place an epitome of laughter, soft evenings, sweet gatherings with like-minded friends–where we, armed with gin and absinthe, shared our latest verses, news, gossip?

No point of return there… With a certain geometrical progression in their mad speed of disappearance–my buddies left the battlefield and in Paris I dwelled all alone. The morning television program from Chanel ARTE would vaguely disperse the deadly silence which reigned over my apartment… And the monotonous sound of the cell phone would sort of start bleeping on its own, urging me to dial one or two numbers which were still left intact in my book, I mean they remained uncrossed on the page, shining through… But who were those people anyway?

Certainly, they were not my buddies, the folks whose brilliance marked my existence and whose presence in art and science–as much as in my life–meant so much to me–alas! Such rare treasures in my life tended to disappear in huge lumps, they all oozed down the drain… And first of all–they were replaced by those aforementioned dummies… who did not qualify as real partners in my scholarly meditations and then… Slowly but surely those disappeared from my horizon as well–one thing for sure–among all imitative qualities in life–real affection and camaraderie cannot be invoked and faked easily on a daily basis

You call people and you see one another, but you both know that it’s a fake… Like a fake fur or a plastic cake–you have a taste of the real thing, you still remember its original shape and size but sadly enough you attest to the fact that this encounter between you two IS NOT IT, not the real thing you treasured so much and remembered.

So that’s how I found myself in the utmost loneliness in the most solitary town on Earth and that was Paris. Oh, the loneliness of the long distance runner, the film by Lindsay Anderson, how I knew you well!

But perhaps never did it strike me with such clarity, with such desperate unforgiving clarity as it did this morning, while riding on this quiet bus with the spring breakers munching their forlorn sandwiches–I was under the special sepulchral impression that my life was this time, definitively over. I finished it, ruined by my utmost speed–like I was running somewhere–could not determine exactly where. But I was rushing to get over there and I was burnt out in my own endeavour

Burnt by my own speed which propelled me to get there, anywhere–AHEAD of my own time!

This discovery almost made me laugh–and I rushed to call that special friend, confidant to my lonely efforts–but hmmm–there was no one to reach out for. I was heading to my own dystopian nest in the heart of Montmartre, but I dreaded opening its doors of perception, at that particular place where my physical home was, where I dwelled in Paris, in the 17th arrondissement where also my very heart of hearts and my memories were locked, but I lost the key to that door and was never happy while sleeping, eating or working in it (the existential dread…)

2.
Although Andrzej Wajda says in his last great film Blue Flowers that the frontier between politics and art should not be erased, we feel that the world we live in forbids its citizens to ignore the effects of global political and ecological issues. The face of Art(s) becomes dirty and ugly to those who tend to its overwhelming neoliberal and commercial Endeavours  and who ignore the burning issues of humanity. Oliver Ressler’s work, especially the documentaries of this contemporary Austrian filmmaker cum activist and performance artist reveal his humanist obsession with

Human misery and hardship.

Artur Zmijewski is another responsible filmmaker–he filmed the now burned “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais…otherwise known as the shame on the face of France, and shame on the face of greedy England.

The question which another one, Le Grice, asks in his book Shoot Shoot Shoot: the First Decade of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative 1966-76, for example, is “whether any aspect of illusion or sequential narrational structure can be made compatible with the anti-illusionist materialistic aesthetics”? In other words, how can we watch Cloud(s), talk about clouds, film them and at the same time, not pay for them, not worry about them being polluted, not disappear inside of them for a lot of money etc. etc.
Yes, how can we…

3.
Concentration camp resembles a Grand Hotel (Alain Resnais)
But does a grand hotel resemble a camp or a jail of a sort?
For us to discover…