The customs of the Congo are quite different from those of Nigeria there is no direct relation between the Yoruba and Yombe. Ngobudi is the name of the diviner’s Mask . Once he wears the mask the powers of the diviner are active. A nganga is a soothsayer or traditional healer. The diviner can explain the past and give advice about the future. Nganga masks are owned by the healer or diviner.
The Yombe don’t have the traditions, like the Yoruba that are more related to the Voodoo…and Congo is difficult to explain there are so many different tribes. But the main activities are about the passage to adulthood, honoring ancestors and telling the old stories when they are royal kingdoms. In Nigeria like Benin brass pieces are more to tell and illustrate the conquest of the kingdom and decorate their palace.
In the past a lot of colonials where going to Congo, since it was a Belgian colony. That specific Yombe mask was brought back between 1920-1935 by a Belgian colonial administrator, François Restiau, Mons. He was working for the railroad company in Congo. He found that mask in Congo when the “Ocean Railway” was built between 1921 and 1934. It is a bit of a sad story when you know that to build the railway from Pointe-Noire to Brazzaville between 15,000 and 20,000 Africans died. Today the Yombe people has a small population of 15,000 and the culture is still active, but it’s not exactly the same as 100 years ago.
I have been dealing African art since 1993, before I was a professional photographer. I am specialized in African art coming from old collections mainly, so I do not import my pieces directly from Africa. My mother Nadya Levi was a sculptor and she collected African Art. My father Herman Norden was an antique dealer, and he had a room with African Art in his house. The African Art world is quite small I guess there are less than 200 serious specialized dealers in this field in the world. It is not so easy, because there are a lot of fakes that have been produced, some of them very well done, and you need to have seen a lot of pieces to be able to tell the differences.
written by David Norden
Sint Katelijnevest 27/B2000 Antwerpen/Belgium+32 3 227.35.40/david.norden@telenet.be
Listen to the mysterious, revealing and fierce voices within you.
And if you are caught up by fear of doing so, remember that it is wrong for the senses to belong to the everyday, lived world.
For me any discovery that changes the nature or direction or a phenomenon constitutes
of something or is a surrealist /poetic truth.
Objective chance , the subtlety of the intuition of the expectation, and the constant search for its flash .
Going without a destination, the poet has an unknown encounter with the word, freed from any linguistic logic.
In poetry the mind blows out of the mind. It aims at the spontaneous reclassification of things into a deeper and freer order, which is impossible to explain by the means of the ordinary mind.
The poet alternately is a deadwood pruner, a transformer, and a thunderbolt.
Silence is a complete poetic and surrealist work.
The word must be left in suspense for a moment before it is transferred to a physical state on paper. At dawn or dusk, we walk down the road and sometimes come across the silhouette of a silent fairy woman, whose silence is the most comprehensive concept of poetry, and surrealism.
an absolutely possessed throat, echoing between howls and silence.
the secrets of the world created, within the poetic mystery, darkness unfolds while questioning is stripped.
Earthly legend and mystery doors open to infinity.
The poet is an enemy of the Sufist .
The poet is not bound by a vision or a superior authority.
Poetry is a momentary extraction of the unknown from the veins of every language.
If the poem does not have a chaotic body that smells of demolition, negation and destruction of all existing literary forms, genres,
Then what is living poetry?
Poetry should be the color of dried blood
The poem is the beginning and end of the world, it revives the world and its death, dismantles all self- and collective censorship, esoteric and physical, and drops every daily living dictionary.
The poem is an arena for the execution of all linguistic paralysis by burning with the napalm of the lust.
Poetry is not a linguistic expression, but a visual, physical and perhaps biological expression as well.
Real poetry employs itself to monitor a waking dream which is resentful of its fate, re-sculpting it with dough baked by chaos inside the bone furnace called the human head.
I believe that enhancing poetic esoteric awareness does not come only by enhancing the possession of language or general cognitive awareness, but by developing and training the eye on scenes of logic disintegration always, whether they are daily or artistic works.
Even with everyday mind games
Thus, the magnetic linguistic ability self-develops and expands not only through the subconscious mind, but also through the nerves of the eye’s practice of strenuous imaginative sports to extract the faculties of impossible earthy miracles in all its forms and templates.
I treat the Arabic language rules as a relationship between oppression and freedom; understand it
As a repressive social specter that must be removed and rebuilt anew every moment with vast doors to spend the free desire.
Poetry is the chaotic condensation of the inner momentary realization, but the seer poet must tame the tools of this condensation towards a permanent quest for the human interior, a quest fertilized by doubts in everything outside the individual.
Every human being has a poetic companion who lives behind his eye, the cunning poet who makes him constantly jump like a kangaroo and always seeks to protect this kangaroo from drowning in the prior cement lakes and to teach this kangaroo that there is no limit to what is called verbal maturity,
poetry is a permanent electrical revolution inside the mind It is not controlled by something imaginary or even social.
The chief function of poetry is to impart sharp disturbances to language and to overthrow every possible holiness it bears. For me grammarians and academics of language are the social police of the imagination.
I despise even the inherited Arab aspirations to rebel against the Arabic language, except of course à few poets I see the deceptive horizon of most Arab poets now that they throw themselves in the recycling factories of closed poetic ambitions.
Surrealism relates to expressing «the real functioning of thought […] in the absence of any control exercised by reason and apart from any aesthetic or moral concern ».
– We think that not only language, but the whole world in all its aspects, was given to humanity to make surrealist use of it.
“All things are called to other uses than those generally attributed to them.” – André Breton, Le Point du Jour.
– We think that surrealists should make use of whatever materials and tools that they find attractive. Whether a feather, a cloud or a computer, any single object in this world becomes a surrealist object as soon as surrealist use is made of it.
– We think that the results of surrealist activities do not have to conform to any type of listed art form, nor even to whatever is considered art.
– Restrictions regarding materials and tools, as well as compliance with traditional artistic categories are views that were already considered and experienced as obsolete by most artists of the Renaissance period. We think that an attempt to liberate the human mind may in no way be successfully achieved on the basis of a narrower scope of practices and intellectual freedom than that which was already acquired by artists at that time.
-‘we are interested in how surrealism appears in everyday life, whether it’s from surrealists or not, but we understand this is not the same as a surrealist movement.”
-“We are interested in certain parallel currents that might overlap with surrealism. Surrealism may -appear- or be present- within avant garde or popular art but it’s not necessarily the same thing.”
– We categorically reject mixing surrealism with whatever form of religion, and we reject the presence of any religious persons within the group.
– We reject any aesthetic attribute that directly or indirectly integrates into the life of this society or that would tend to reconcile with it.
– Realistic daily life erases the perception of the unique characteristics of objects. We will always seek to break this mechanism and its dynamics by means of words, plastic art, music and cinema or any other means.
– Collective automatism is self-contained in everyday life. It floats in the air, dissolving every entrenched and worn-out intellectual authority.
– The poem is a collective work, even if it is from one’s individual imagination.
– We have nothing but contempt for the guardians of grammar because they are the protectors of the heavy legacy of linguistic dependence that erases the ecstasy of all free desire.
– We support every creative act that contributes to the wondrous conquest of everyday life and the conquest of mad love. Everything that has been physically neglected in the city, and every sexual explosion that social fascism hides, is for us the dough with which we form our written and visual poems.
written by Mohsen Elbelasy
Mohsen Elbelasy Egyptian surrealist artist and poet and researcher and editor in chief of the Room surrealist Magazine and sulfur-surrealist-jungle.com and the co manager of the international exhibition of surrealism Cairo Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism Exhibition. And co-founder of the Middle East and North Africa Surrealist Group. (MENA) and He also worked as a translator, cultural journalist and organizer of cultural and artistic events in Egypt and internationally. Chrysopoeia Surrealist union /Cooperative. In 2022, his book The Trip of Kamel Al Tilmissany won the Sawiris Grand Prize of Literary Criticism
The cruelty of life is only equaled by art… I used to search a lot in the paths of art for what could express what was going on inside me and my view of the world, but I was always faced with unfree spaces, spaces depicted by religion or what is connected with it..
My imagination was always trapped. When I dive into the past with deep sadness..
I did not know that imagination can lead us to a better future until I became acquainted with surrealism.
Closed areas of my subconscious began to open up to me.
I had never known these closed areas of my subconscious mind before.
I did not have complete freedom of expression with my body, and now I do.
Surrealism is a systematic breaking of the boundaries of reality, the body, society and religion.
Also, I was afraid to delve into fields that I had not studied or practiced, such as drawing, photography and cinema, but Surrealism turned me into an active person who thirsted for all kinds of arts.
I am not only a surrealist artist, I also owe a lot to surrealism… Reconciliation with the unconscious mind can change the world for the better… and it can be an iron wall stands against all life’s difficulties.
Linking and developing science and keeping pace with technological development and the subconscious freedom are able to create a better world.
This is surrealism for me
written by Ghadah Kamal
Ghadah Kamal is a surrealist visual artist, writer, and poet…Coordinator of performances and workshops and cinema screenings of The international exhibition of surrealism Cairo Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism Exhibition / Alexandria and founding member of the Middle East and North Africa Surrealist Group..Founding member of the Chrysopoeia surrealist union. Editor of the Surrealist Cities section of the Room surrealist magazine and editor at Sulfur Surrealist Jungle.
“Ifá tells us that when he is enraged, Obaluaiye [Babalú Ayé] takes [his] special broom and spreads sesame seeds (yamoti) on the earth before him, then sweeps the seeds before him, in ever-widening circles. As the broom begins to touch the dust and the dust begins to rise, the seeds, like miniature pockmarks, ride the wind with their annihilating powers: the force of a smallpox epidemic is thereby unleashed.”
—Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, p. 63 (Vintage Books. New York, NY. 1984.)
Babalú gettin’ me up in the mornin’ I believe I’ll dust my broom Babalú gettin’ me up in the mornin’ I believe I’ll dust my broom I get to sweepin’ this sesame, baby Babalú pox gon’ be ya doom
And you won’t get better—ya whole body covered in sores No, you won’t get better—ya whole body be covered in sores Be nothin’ but dogs a-lickin’ you, baby Once these bristles start sweepin’ the floors
Lazy Pushin’ Daisy
I know that there’s a man Who in Bethany stays Erbody like to call him Lazy Cause he lay still four days
Talkin’ bout that Lazy I’d swear he pushin’ up daisy
I know that there’s a man Who sleep like the dead Only the power of the good lord Rouse him out of his bed
Talkin’ bout that Lazy I’d swear he pushin’ up daisy
I know a man name Lazy Always got that bed breath Got a twisted mouth so sour Breathe out the smell of death
Talkin’ bout that Lazy I’d swear he pushin’ up daisy
I know a man name Lazy Who stink to his core Body raw as his mouth And dogs licking’ his sores
Talkin’ bout that Lazy I’d swear he pushin’ up daisy
written by P.D. Newman
P.D. Newman is an independent researcher located in the southern US, specializing in the history of the use of entheogenic substances in religious rituals and initiatory rites. He is the author of the books, Alchemically Stoned: The Psychedelic Secret of Freemasonry, Angels in Vermilion: The Philosophers’ Stone from Dee to DMT, and the forthcoming title, Day Trips and Night Flights: Anabasis, Katabasis, and Entheogenic Ekstasis in Myth and Rite. The Secret Teachings of All Ages (TV Series documentary) 2023.
People often imbue their surroundings, including tools, with a “life essence” that makes them active objects. A growing number of archaeologists are beginning to study how such “living” beings impact human behavior. These archaeologists use the term “object agency,” but employ many different ontological approaches. We explore this variation, and present a framework comparing different ontological models archaeologists use. We adopt an animistic perspective, and evaluate its applicability to the Southwest using ethnographic and archaeological data. We further propose that it is applicable through out the New World. Puebloan potters consider pots living beings with a spiritual essence that is affected by and that impacts humans. Pottery manufacture is a mutual negotiation between the potter and the clay to create a “Made Being” with its own spiritual and material aspects. We conclude that a similar ontology is reflected in effigy pots and globular jars from the Casas Grandes region. Ultimately we conclude that this perspective provides useful insights into the placement, decoration, and discard of many vessels that have puzzled Southwestern archaeologists for decades.
A Female Casas Grandes effigy jar. Photo Christine S. VanPool 1999. Used with Permission
Author(s): Christine S. VanPool and Elizabeth Newsome
Duplicated and Intended for Art Educational Purposes Only
THE SPIRIT IN THE MATERIAL: A CASE STUDY OF ANIMISM IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST Author(s): Christine S. VanPool and Elizabeth Newsome Source: American Antiquity, Vol. 77, No. 2 (April 2012), pp. 243-262 Published by: Society for American Archaeology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23486060 Accessed: 02-03-2015 22:47 UTC
Featured image: Fully formed Human Effigy Vessel. Courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles. Photographed by Chris Coleman.
I am a multidisciplinary visual artist interested in painting, alternative sculpting, photography, digital art, collage and mixed media arts. I held my first solo painting exhibition at the age of 14 at Al Gezira Arts Center and have since participated in multiple art workshops and collaborations. I recently graduated from MSA University faculty of Arts & Design majoring in Cinema and Theatre.
Most of my work explores the theme of ‘play’ as a form of resistance. Further expanding and searching how the visual identities of my various roots all meet in a space that feeds on contemporary imagery and ideals.
Coming from a culturally rich background I am drawn to the visual richness of my city Cairo, particularly the slums where street art happens accidentally as a coincidence unravelling the many great textures and layers of the city, as well as having family roots in Upper Egypt and Delta, I began exploring the relationship between the urban and rural space and how it can be visually contextualized.
My inner child holds the pencils, untangling all the fears that have accumulated within my head and sarcastically mocks them. My inner child giggles and makes all the decisions now. I can only contemplate from afar ,a foreign spectator, as I watch dreams from my subconscious unfold and my inner child continues to laugh at me.
The Human world intersects with those of animals, plants and the spirit world which is gestured towards. There are also beings halfway between these worlds—transitional beings with the ability to move through these different worlds with ease. Multiple time periods intersect & the world of myth and the past blends with the present-day time of contemporary reality.
Erik Volet
Reclining nude
Beggars Banquet
Woman in Blue Shawl and Poet’s Dream
Language of the Birds
Erik Volet (b. 1980) is a painter & illustrator from Canada who has exhibited in Canada, the US & Europe. As well as producing paintings he has published art books, made zines, illustrated books, and maintained a consistent involvement with painting murals on the street and in the public sphere. Influences, which continue to be important to his art practice are comic book art, graffiti, hip hop culture as well as surrealist theory and practice.
Disclaimer. This is a work of fiction, any resemblance to Actual persons or events is Purely coincidental.
I took Maryellen, a lady of leisure, to every expensive restaurant and high end bar, indulged her with gourmet food, fine wine and droll conversation. I spent a lot of $ on her, as a gentleman always pays for a lady. It was my intention to wear down her defenses and inhibitions, to spend a day and night with her, warming her up to strip naked in a luxurious hotel room with a heart shaped Jacuzzi.
Maryellen was a glamorous, statuesque beauty, with creamy platinum blonde shoulder length hair, pale pink lipstick and nail polish. She wore a demure antique white designer dress, shimmering nude nylon stockings, and strappy high heels. Her ample breasts, curvaceous shape and nice ass, were her most noticeable feminine assets.
Maryellen was the kept woman of a film producer who was her sugar daddy. She was useful as eye candy at public events, and made the producer look good. She lived rent free and got a generous allowance for other “services” too shadowy to mention.
Maryellen was a precocious sugar baby, adept at sucking the blood of men with deep pockets. I was also friendly with the film producer who owned two summer homes and drove a Jaguar and a Mercedes. I had business dealings with the film producer of an artistic nature. But having no loyalty to him, I jumped at the opportunity to get his girl if I was lucky.
By chance, I met up with Maryellen, while passing through the producer’s neighborhood, and it was then that she went on several surreptitious dinner dates with me. She welcomed time away from her master who was overbearing, controlling and played power games with money. Threatening to withhold funds from her when he didn’t feel sexually satisfied. But Maryellen was successful at twisting the producer’s arm to buy her a new high end designer purse, not some cheap fake discount.
A giant alligator sex toy swallowed Maryellen whole and pooped her out its butt into the Florida heat, designer handbag and all. A giant alligator sex toy swallowed Maryellen whole pooping her out its butt, soiling her designer clothes, making her sad. A giant alligator sex toy swallowed Maryellen whole, she found spiritual enlightenment in the alligator’s digestive tract, emerging naked from the reptiles’ butt, and in her nakedness, she was most comfortable in the Florida heat.
All erotic, exotic and grotesque epiphanies aside, after many expensive dinner and bar dates, I finally got Maryellen to spend a day and night with me in a luxurious hotel room with a heart shaped Jacuzzi. After she took off her demure designer dress, stockings and heels, I helped her out of her panties and unhooked her brassiere, then she lay naked on the bed and I rubbed eucalyptus oil on her body. Then we entered the Jacuzzi together, in the warm water she blissfully felt my stiff erect phallus entering the prime real estate between her legs.
“Reptile Fling” (C) 2023 by Richard Gessner
Richard Gessner’s work is published in Black Scat Review 24, Sulfur Surreal Jungle, Fiction International, Skidrow Penthouse, Seinundwerden, Another Chicago Magazine, Air Fish et al.
Confío más en tus huesos que en tu carne, por las noches sigo amando tu fantasma que huele a tierra infiel, confío más en tu bufanda roja detenida en el tiempo, el pasillo de nuestra casa gime llanto muerto, flota mi cuerpo en la tina, agua de árbol con espinas. Recogí mi pelo mojado en tu vieja toalla de mi melancolía, arrojé todos tus libros por la ventana.
Imperfecto
El hombre frente a la tumba desprende de su boca su prótesis dental, la envuelve en un pañuelo blanco, la oculta entre el pasto y la tierra de tumba, solo frente a sus muertos puede ser él, así de imperfecto. Ahí descansa su llanto desdentado, se sienta sobre la piedra, saca de una bolsa de papel café una lata de cerveza y bebe deseosamente el sorbo de vida a su garganta de flores mareadas que iluminan su rostro, suenan campanas a los lejos. Allí, frente a sus ancestros sonríe a carcajadas recordando alguna anécdota pasada, nadie lo juzga ni lo critica, allí frente a sus antepasados puede revelar su sonrisa imperfecta.
Tierra seca y olvidada (desierto)
El cerebro atormentado resuena en el grito del árbol abandonado en tierra antigua de la cuál brota maleza de llanto. El sol neurálgico y odiado nos quema la piel y el sudor es el brillo de su reflejo que nos tortura y nos humilla en esta hermosa y vacía tierra donde los hombres caminamos sobre arena hirviendo. El único árbol sobreviviente no tiene hojas ni semillas, es un muerto de pie frente al inmenso viento de arena en la boca y los ojos. Ahí, cuelgo mis pertenecías, en sus ramas de volcán. Mancho mis dedos y pinto mi cara de maquillaje negro, dispongo mi improvisado refugio, mi instinto animal es más poderoso que mi humanidad inservible en esta atmosfera.
Pan y caldo con arena refuerzan mi sacrificio.
El florero de tu madre
Visito tu sepulcro con una sonrisa camuflada, retiro minuciosamente pétalos muertos, (flores que dejan tus viudas amantes), uno a uno recolecto en mi bolsillo de lana hojas secas en distintos tonos, agua limpia dejo caer en el florero de tu madre; flores frescas para ti, leo tus poemas para recordarte. -Ya no vengo a llorarte al campo santo- a veces cuando se hace de noche, descanso sobre tu tierra de muerto, hago el amor contigo.
Abril y mayo
Dos retratos en dos marcos diferentes, dos fechas de nacimiento, dos nacionalidades, dos identidades. Ella no abraza a los árboles, los besa apasionadamente, la sangre que brota de su boca rota es savia dulce. No es blanca ni negra, ni adinerada ni necesitada, ni culta pero tampoco ignorante, educada y también puede llegar a ser una marginal. Por las noches se acuesta en su tina caliente, los cabellos que flotan en el agua talvez pertenecen a esa mujer que no existe. Dos retratos en dos marcos diferentes; la adolescente que escribe poemas de amor aullándole a la luna, el otro, la belleza de una anciana de ciento veinte años moribunda, declamando sus últimas palabras a la muerte.
Cama de hoja
Cuando lloro por los vivos, son mis muertos quienes me consuelan, no los veo, conozco sus nombres, su edad los huelo, susurran delicias a mi oído de hierba fresca. Florencia es la mujer fantasma y ciega que toca el piano entre ramas del bosque. Mi cuerpo pequeño cubierto de hojas secas; he descubierto que a los árboles también le gustan las melodías de cuna.
Herencia de lo mágico
Tengo el don de la sensibilidad, ver, oír con gran sutileza lo que nadie, y los fantasmas recorren el bosque conmigo; placentero como fumar a escondidas sobre enormes arboles retorcidos en donde reposa mi silueta delgada, hija del hombre, herencia de lo mágico, el humo se cuela por las hojas, canta la rama, silenciosa raíz mágica, dulces espinas te embellecen.
Victoria Morrison, Chile 1977, Trabajadora social, escritora de poesía y cuento. Miembro actual y activa de SECH (Sociedad de escritores de Chile) P.E.N Chile (Poetas, ensayistas y novelistas) Su poema Ñamku fue premiado con el segundo lugar del “Concurso poesía Indígena”, realizado por el “Museo de la memoria y los derechos humanos” en Chile el año 2020. Libros publicados: Una habitación en el infierno (2016) Ediciones La Horca. Poemas desahuciados (2017) Editorial Ovejas Negras. Pupilas de loco (2020) Rumbos Editores Sus escritos se caracterizan por evocar temáticas psicológicas. Amante de la naturaleza, la autora explica que en cada palabra existe sanación; si asimilamos esa palabra a las raíces de cada planta pues, así como existen semillas imperfectas, también hay humanos imperfectos; no son acaso los bienes llamados “árboles torcidos” los que, sin agua, sombra, ni tierra fértil continúan respirando en la tierra. (Si la frágil planta resiste el frio, la intemperie, la carne humana cobijada en lana y bufanda debería agradecer y callar, oír en silencio, el congelado y valiente canto de la hora escarchada).
Richard Gessner’s fiction has been published in Air Fish: an anthology of speculative work, Rampike, Ice River, Coe Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Happy, The Act, Sein und Werden, Skidrow Penthouse, The Pannus Index, Fiction International and many other magazines. A collection, Excerpts from the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante & The Man in the Couch was published by Bomb Shelter Props. Gessner’s drawings and paintings have appeared in Raw Vision, Courier News, Asbury Park Press, Rampike, Skidrow Penthouse, and exhibited at Pleiades Gallery, Hamilton Street Gallery, Cry Baby Gallery, The Court Gallery and the Donald B. Palmer Museum. Richard wrote The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing Whimsy. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing WhimsyAudible
self fee of a phantom self. oil/collage Mitchell Pluto
Afterword
We believe we are conscious but we are continuously unconscious.
The eye is the window to the brain and there sits the optic chiasm. A cross current chessboard of visual information. In ancient China, King Wen changed three lines into six lines to form 64 hexagrams in his book called The Book of Changes. Ironically there are 64 arrangements in DNA and 64 squares on the chessboard.
Synchronicity?
Jesus, all the time I spent believing in a historical Laoz and come to find out there’s no historical race either.
these our the last days of being a primate. Don’t worry we still have cuspids
Everything must be uploaded|
…creating a record print of a finger swipe from phone screen| CHECK
…the gesticulation wavelengths of our voice from phone calls| CHECK
…iris scan captured from viewing screen| CHECK
tell us what’s on your mind| CHECK
This device and artificial Intelligence will marginalize the future of man’s ego. After all man is an animal guided by objects, why not be a primate whose experience is organized and interrupted by the phone?
isn’t it working already?
Who is on the other side of the screen?
A narcissistic shark that feeds remotely on a colony of brains and uses the appearance of a woman as a lure
Now A Word From Our Sponsor
We would like to salute our patron Walt and his 1958 Disney film White Wilderness who graciously staged and contrived the impression of a massive lemming suicide. Now back to our show.
(C) April 8, 2023 written by Mitchell Pluto
I would like to thank my friend, Richard Gessner for collaborating and creating some writing to interpret my painting
Mitchell Pluto 