"MOUSSE #87" (2024) by MOUSSE MGAGZINE.
Mousse is a bimonthly Italian contemporary art magazine launched in 2006 that features interviews, dialogues and essays by important figures in the fields of international criticism, visual arts and curation, as well as a series of articles written in a typical tabloid format.
Let us think of reading as a way to add more words to our vocabulary and more worlds to our imagination; as a tool to salvage and restore stories in perpetuity; and as an opportunity to reclaim time, space, silence, and critical distance, to consider how language can hold a multiverse beyond the dualisms that violence enforces.
Language, otherness, hope, desire, and exile are recurring themes in this issue. In her essay, "Writing in a Foreign Language," Etel Adnan reflects on her experience as a child trying to learn Arabic by copying exercises from old grammar books. Although she did not always understand the meaning of some of the terms, she enjoyed the act of drawing each letter. She felt that through this magical act, she was able to master and recreate her father's language. This is something that the adult artist Lin May Saeed (featured in this issue) also does, using letters to form a more-than-human conversation. The act of turning prescribed symbols and forms into "something else," of not conforming to discipline and form, of evoking new possibilities, is similar to what poet Simone White describes in her column as "the refusal of compulsory service."
Years later, Adnan found the freedom she was looking for in two new languages: painting and poetry, which she describes as "an open brotherhood, open to women, men, trees and mountains." In one pithy passage, she writes, "Do I feel in exile? Yes, I do. But it is so ancient, so long-lasting, that it is no longer my nature, and I don't really feel like I am suffering. Sometimes I even rejoice in it. The poet is above all pure human nature. Therefore, he is human, just as a cat is a cat, and a cherry tree is a cherry tree. Everything else comes 'later.' It's all important, but sometimes it's not. The poet is deeply rooted in language and transcends it."
You could read Resistance as a poem.
