Silence — back to Earth
[Autumn 2018]
It has been a while since I posted here. But it's time to spread some new news. Right? News,.. do we need any more of that? What I need is to touch, feel and smell things more than being hit with more News. I often wonder when public advertisement, news-broadcasts and information circulation itself will become part of the consent debate. I, for one, never asked to become addicted to information, text-based or image-based. I have not been able to manage my information-intake properly — limit my Instagram use and Facebook scrolling successfully. My new phone even has these News pop-ups that I haven't been able to shut down.
Did I sign up to fall prey to an engineered mind-hack, penetrating my days with un-asked for News? Where am I? Where am I heading? All this News brings about massive unrootedness, feelings of being dis-located and the false idea of being part of a Global Community, while it becomes increasingly harder to trust regional movements, responsibilities and contexts. Tell me, who knows more about USA 'politics' than they do about the rules and regulations of their own local environment? Who else feels sucked into what the News wants us to be sucked into? I want to break out of this whirlpool and find myself again in a place with tangible realness and intimacy. Sometimes I wonder if my search for community and an out-of-town alternative living space really is about finding place again - as opposed to the more conceptual notion of 'space', in which I feel I'm floating lately. I speak of a place - a time-space locale, with specifics, an inherent logic and clock, organic circumstances, a smallness perhaps akin to the vibe of a village.
A place of orientation — a home. Faced with daily waves of international (mostly white-centered) News I have begun to feel extraordinarily un-home. I wonder, is my longing for a more natural earthy life simply pointing at exactly the notion of place ? Is the current trend to get away from it all not simply a reaction the News, our smartphones and social-media? Perhaps we do not need to give up cities and civilisation, but rather re-invent them so they again provide us intimate place. For how can we have place when we are thought to be exuberantly flexible, international, up-to-date, aware and articulated, opinionated and political about every bit of News. How are we ever in a place when we are aware and in contact with everything happening elsewhere?
To end a self-fulfilling prophecy we need a re-invention of media and news platforms [...]. The reinvention of our info-stream (=the nutrition of the probability of potential realities) is the only thing we can do to not turn our life here into a continuum of fear, anger or disassociation - led by corporately owned 'sources of the real' we call newspapers and television. The distorted reports on what is happening in 'the world’ is like a type of information-glue that holds people’s ability to conceive of a real world of abundance down to a mediocre, if not nearly absent level. The panorama on our terra-formed landscape [...] and [the] wild connected horses that wave their tails from left to right and up and down, provide me with the real news of the planet.' (source)
This quote is from two years back, when I spent a great deal of time outside of conventional city life. Back when I started this blog you're on right now. But recently I've magnetized back into mainstream News, rather than uplinking my psyche with the intelligence of trees and wind. I heard myself make cynical jokes referring to social processes happening in the world, and I felt great about being so 'Woke' while on another level I felt gross. As if I wasn't living my own life but instead became a conduit of News. I haven't been using my voice to speak for eternal solids like the soul of our planet. I didn't jump fully into the unknown that borders the infinate creative potential within my being. And yes, admittedly, it isn't easy to re-root oneself in ancient wisdom when the world aloud screams of things that seem more important than going slow and deeper within.
Politically this brings me to a paradox: is connecting with nature on a spiritual level a cop-out in regards to the many people movements and social-struggles our world faces today? Or is this green path compatible with these humanitarian journeys? Is my work proficient in regards to the needs of the Earth? Am I doing what I intent to be doing?I do not know and to hold space for this not-knowing I turn to silence and it's awkward depths. Silence as the inability to answer the deepening wound that our environment is currently sustaining, honoring a moment in time where humanity does not have clarity of conduct. Silence as the voice for things that can't be accessed by words. In a culture that lost access to its Oral Cultures, which lost its Pagan roots and saw its earthly magic eradicated, Silence lets the wind in to circle over feelings, soothe thoughts and concepts until our abdomen again pulsates with the Earth itself, the very place where all reasoning subsides and renews itself.
With love,
Jasper
Recent Work — A summery
Gratitude — Watering the Woodlands (2017)
Outdoor Installation & Group Performance
Brief Encounters '17, Fundament Foundation
Silent Bard (treehugger) (2018)
Performance & Video
Echoes of Shamanism (PAE)
Echoes of Shamanism
— de kunstenaar als sjamaan,
Review in Metropolis M (NL)
Talks of Treehuggin’
Artist Talk (audio) on the
"death of the goddess"
Ultra Ecosexual Polyamory […] (2017)
Performance Video & Publication
Onomatopee, Eindhoven
We Are The Market - Achievement #14
Short-text (.pdf) on Political Druidry,
Publication by Onomatopee (2018)
L0ve ya,