WITCH HUNT
CAUTION: this article contains
mentions of abuse
I) Allez mon voisin à la crèche
Two
months after getting
chickenpox, 11 years old Jason Wilsher-Mills – the youngest of eight
children from a working-class family in Wakefield, UK - was still ill and weak.
In June 1980, his worrying mother was told by the family GP she was
being hysterical...
Eventually, her son was admitted to hospital. On 1 August 1980,
the day Siouxsie and The Banshees
released both their Kaleidoscope
album and Red Light single, at 2.54PM while watching TV opposite his hospital bed the
athlete 254 Sebastian
Coe won a Gold Medal in Moscow... Jason’s parents learned their
son’s diagnostic: he will be lucky to live up to his 16th birthday. 254 played magic number, as De
La Soul put it, despite the now 56 years
old artist being wheelchair bound ever since.
45 years later, women inhabiting Earth in Western countries are less frequently called hysterical but psychotic or other psychiatric terms are so ravaging our planet, it causes a wild climate catastrophe between the happy few in power and the high number of living beings suffering degradation!
If
patriarchy was all the rage from the cradle of Jesus until he walked on a salty red sea, its ripple effect has
persisted in many forms: sexism and misogyny are the most enduring terms in
place nowadays gangrening the globe.
Once
Gutenberg invented the first major
print works in the mid XV Century, early
Modern Europe went on flame about witches via journalists on broadsheets, art
works, books in Latin. By late XV Century, a
Catholic clergyman wrote The Hammer of
Witches aka Malleus Maleficarum proposing
straight forwardly the extermination of women then referred to as witches for
their supposedly pact with the devil. Within 300 years, from pre-print in
post-medieval period to the Industrial / French Revolution, around 45000 people
were exterminated as they were thought to practice magic / witchcraft and have a so-called
evil pact: 80% were women. 80 PER CENT. Executions were by
burning or hanging, except in England where they were mainly drowned on ducking
stools. No wonder Brexit occurred eventually! Caroline Woodley, Kingess of Hackney is entertaining herself with
its residents! Meanwhile, across lands and oceans Indonesian Kamasan painting was strictly practiced by men. They sexualised
women, reduced them to a reproduction purpose solely or cast them as evil. Until 25 April 2025, Citra
Sasmita’s Into Eternal Land reclaims an ancestral tradition, while also
challenging a colonial narrative, that honours the history of female herbalists
where they are depicting as powerful women inhabiting a post patriarchal world at The Barbican, London.
%20Jo%20Underhill%20and%20Barbican%20(7).jpg)
Citra Sasmita Into Eternal Land Installation view 2025
(c) Jo Underhill and Barbican
Back in Medieval Europe, witch trials stopped due to lack of scientific evidence as proofs were based on oral testimony and superstition. Also, intellectuals in the Enlightenment era took their distance from popular belief. According to French political scientist Armelle Le Bras Chopard (from 19·43 in French), the law stepped in and women were put into a captive mode. In France, the 1804 Code Civil limited the autonomy of women establishing that she was under the guardianship of a man, her husband for example, and treated as a minor. But “From the early XIII Century until 1870, English Common law held that most of the property that a wife had owned as a feme sole came under the control of the husband at the time of the marriage”. The Married Women's Property Act passed in 1870... Ironically, a century later, a single woman in the 1970’s Britain still needed a male guarantor for a loan or credit card; in 1975, 10 years after France, women gained the right to open a bank account in their own name... yet they had been voting since 1918, 26 years before their Bleu Blanc Rouge neighbours. It’s been so back and forth for European women that we, as a collective, need to have some thoughts to the ones suffering a disease called male toxicity: so much power transitioning over the centuries, it might have been hard work to adapt!
How
cynical women were the epicentre of a – still ongoing – genocide for holding on
to their belief in herbal concoctions and were proof-free executed some 500
years ago when today men are spared condemnation over rape because, caricaturally,
their sperm vanishes!
A
century after Germany gave birth to letters on paper that helped spread a
European genocide on women, the empowered men of the Tudor era of England went
after homosexuals: sodomy between men was a capital offense under the Buggery Act
of 1533
– a law which remained in some form in England and Wales until 1967. Across the pond, in New York and around USA where
homosexuality was also a criminal act, 36 years old gay photographer Peter Hujar shot / designed a poster for the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, a
movement led by his boyfriend Jim
Fouratt. Between Stonewall and Aids, a brand new world was shaking up the
planet through Reggae to Punk to Sinead
O’Connor. 11 months after being diagnosed with AIDS, Hujar died in November 1987 in the
same Medical Centre room, number 1423, where he had photographed transgender
actress Candy Darling, best known
as Warhol Superstar, while she was
dying 14 years earlier. 1423, a magic number flying high on the wild side. Over
100 photographs in fine prints depicting the queer scene of New York, portraits
of known (Susan Sontag, William S Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz) and
unknowns, animals in farms etc as well as some short films of Peter Hujar by Andy Warhol are displayed in Eyes
Open in the Dark at Raven Row until 6 April 2025.
,%201974%20peter%20hujar.jpg)
John Flowers (Backstage, Palm Casino Review),
1974 © Peter Hujar
[UPDATE: until 8 March 2025,
Alice Neel in the Queer World exhibits a
photograph of Candy Darling,
upstairs the wooden staircase at Victoria
Miro Gallery]
The
burning question here is what were women doing in Tudor era when not being exterminated?
Staying
under Henry VIII, privileged women
painted, did art but most of their work vanished like sperm because they were deemed
as immature amateurs. However, some Flemish women Susanna Horenbout and Levina
Teerlinc, who moved to England, were admired by its King and Albrecht Dürer would purchase their
work. Despite being difficult to trace their art ownership, they were part of
400 years of female artists in Britain up to 1920 in 2024 in
Now You See Us exhibition at
Tate Britain. Had they known
they would be exhibited centuries later, would they have thought of it as a
science fiction act?
[Highly recommended: Wiener Holocaust Library and Gallery https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/exhibitions/
Fred Kormis: Sculpting
the Twentieth Century until 6 February 2025. If unable
to make it, Kormis’ sculptures
are viewable in Gladstone Park, north-west London]
II) Yes I’m a Witch
Because
of the brutal “professional manual for witch hunters” Malleus Maleficarum (1486) and De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus (1489), a sufficiently high number of re-prints up until 1669 helped the propagation and proliferation of women
hatred / ongoing mental and physical degradation. These “avant-garde”
trailblazers for Mein Kampf were
largely known by the White male population in power whether lawyers,
intellectuals, Catholics or artists. But the earliest known image of witches on brooms, from Martin Le Franc’s Champion
des dames Vaudoises poem, dates back to 1451.
From mid XV Century to the official end of Witch
Hunting, a myriad of male artists indulged on their darkest imaginations, thus
participating through visual culture to the witch obsession: Albrecht
Dürer,
Hans
Mielich, Agostino
Veneziano,
Melchior
Küsel, Hans
Baldung Grien,
Jacques
de Ghein, Salvator
Rosa,
Claude
Gillot,
Francesco
Maria Guazzo and so many others.
Despite being involved in XVI Century
humanist circles in Strasbourg, a town at times in Germany at times in East of
France but definitely the official seat of the European Parliament in XXI Century, Hans
Baldung Grien and Albrecht Dürer took to the imagery of witches for pleasure dome. Shaping
women as wicked creatures jeopardising their family nest allowed them to pursue
irrationality in a pre-nascent rational burgeoning Enlightment context of the
next century. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes might have been more
concerned in women’s fate as he seemed to be questioning what were the Woke of
that era doing in his 1799 Si amanece; nos vamos’s etching. However
defying Catholic psyche as well as being critical over Spanish Inquisition
(persecution of female herbalists, Jewish or Muslim people), his numerous
paintings on witches with a medieval soupçon still triggered horror rather than
appeasement!
In Medieval Women: In
Their Own Words at British
Library until 2 March 2025, women testimonies spoke of the
power of the female body, and the skill of female medical practitioners in a
society in which healthcare provision was generally informal and domestic.
Through a combination of the nature world, ancient Greek and Roman medicine, the
influence of ingredients from the Arabic world and herbal recipes from Muslim
women’s beauty routines – a large population living in sorority side-by-side
with Christians and Jewish in southern Italy at the time – women exchanged tips
and passed them on in between them as mentioned on BBC Radio 4 from 44.37.
The opening from De Ornatu Mulierum (On Women’s Cosmetics)
© British
Library Board
The
medical sector was dominated by university-trained male physicians, yet women
performed many different medical functions, as healers, midwives and even
surgeons. The quiet blockbuster exhibition shows further the power of women,
however erased it has been so far and is still being unearthed, in politics,
art, religion or even writing with audacity and candid eroticism odes to the
vagina as well as music composing.
Gwerful
Mechain Poem to the Vagina
© British
Library Board
When Madonna
reclaimed Disco dance floor via Hung Up from John Travolta in Staying Alive, some five centuries
earlier the Catholic’s fever was setting the Old Europe ablaze, she visually replaced
women as a point of reference showing off her / their ability to flirt around
in the unsafe dark streets. The Church was at war against women practicing the
dark art while the male-dominated art world provided a visual impact on the
population: in lieu of a mass within god-fearing societies, naked women would
gather around Satan to celebrate the beast. These art scenes would portray the
inversion of god via a priest being worshipped by his fully dressed obedient followers.
Women were perceived and depicted in art with dual visions:
vulnerable, therefore more prone to be tempted and lured by an evil monster but
also powerful due to their knowledge of herbs and nature for cooking and
healing purposes; ugly and unfertile old crones would factually indicate
malevolence versus young and beautiful temptresses leading pious men to their dooms.
Five centuries later, film director Coralie
Fargeat would give spinal birth to the phenomenal The Substance: a beautiful
menopaused Demi Moore would switch, thanks
to a magical potion’s injection, to a young beautiful sexually active inner
self leading herself eventually to a decaying old hag. Defying old age is what
our global societies have been expecting of women since early XX Century! We have now become our own slaughterers. In her
acceptance Golden Globe speech as Best Female
Actor for her role, the North American actress revealed that in her 45 years
career it was the first time she ever won an award... the Law of Universe stepped
in to ward off any captivity curse... Moore’s
testimony was sadly echoing 65 years old French actress Annie Girardot in 1996 for her Best Supporting
Actress award at the César cérémonie!
Though she won a César for Best
Actress in 1977, her film career faded drastically from the
following decade. The pressing question here is what did these actresses do or
say right for them to be discarded from the misogynistic film industry family nest?
Apart from Switzerland (that gave women the right to vote in 1971), European countries had decriminalised witchcraft by 1750. By the XIX Century, female artists reclaimed their visions of magical women, slightly humanising them not only via traditional art forms but through a nascent medium, photography. From a long history of horror, witches switched to fairy tales for children or even became a direct link to the dead at séance sessions like Victoria Woodhull did, who happened to be also the first woman running for USA president in 1872. In 1985, photographer Cindy Sherman, in her Fairy Tales series, selfied herself with huge prosthetic chin and nose covered with warts. Inspired by films, exaggerating the concept of visual witches allowed her to toy around with stereotypes and artificiality... distorting somehow the truth. Could /can an ugly and old woman /have/ possibly be.en malicious? Can the female body indicate how a woman thinks?
Until 23 February 2025, The
Photographer’s Gallery celebrates the work of
Italian female photojournalist Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love
and Death in Sicily. She stated she wanted to express herself in a (toxic) masculine
society where women were expected to be silent and well behaved. She regretted,
in an interview shown in the exhibition, how she sometimes had to shout at men
to get respected; she hated shouting and hated having to behave like a man! To
her, photography was a mean to tell a tale though within a violence system,
photography doesn’t change anything.
Letizia Battaglia
La bambina con il pallone. Palermo,
quartiere La Cala, 1980
Until the 6 February 2025,
Bolivian born Paris based Kenia Alamaraz
Murillo explored her lineage of weaving through Andean tradition, Catholic
legacy from colonialism and slavery in Andean
Cosmovision at
Waddington Custot in London. From Andean mythologies to
urban found objects, she pieces together her fragmented memory of her Indigenous
identity while stitching her energy onto the fibre spirit displaying a
kaleidoscopic perspective woven into her rich ser y estar self.
Los Urus, 2024
woven threads, Bolivian carnival costume embroidery
and LED
lights on stainless steel frame
If textile belongs to the banality of our everyday life, yet The Devil Wears Prada proves otherwise, it
has been a recurrent artistic (and protest) force since the 1960’s all over the world. The use of fibre, cotton, wool,
crochet, knitting and so on has been overlooked and undervalued in Western
societies as it was a woman’s occupation. Upon the Pinochet military coup in Chile in 1973, Cecilia Vicuña started to create quipus
– knots in Quechua language that are a memory device – as a mark of socialism
and “magically, they help the liberation struggle”.
Following the (mainly) Spanish colonisation in Latin America and enforcing
Christianity on the Inca in the XV Century, quipus, like
witches, were burned!
Feminist and Marxist Silvia
Federici has studied how the Witch Hunt phenomenon was a catalyst to
annihilate women inner power in Western societies that forced them into being
financially captive in a capitalist and pre-colonial contexts. “Capitalism
was born from the separation of people from the land and its first task was to
make work independent of the seasons and to lengthen the workday beyond the
limits of our endurance”. If women were accused of flying or speaking
with animals to inhabit their powers, as in the impressive Laura Baumeister’s La hija de
todas las rabias, Federici
believes these powers were not imaginary because women were in constant contact
with nature for medicinal and spiritual knowledge.
III) Hold Up
In Jennifer Binnie’s
Forest Visions, at Richard Saltoun until 1 March 2025, the artist merges myth, ritual in the cycle of
nature as if becoming or being an ‘invisible’ magical woman... in
forests where unseen energies break down hierarchies between the human and
non-human. Animals are guides helping transformation, knowledge and reclaim
power from the wild within the ecological web.
At night, enslaved people
in Louisiana would secretly go to the forest to perform rituals of their magical
ancestors, often of Yoruba descent, perpetuating a legacy of their then faraway
lands due to deportation / forced immigration. Today, pollutants classified as acute toxics
and environmental hazards pervade the air above the majority
Black communities in the US Deep South State: a toxic legacy has taken over a
reconstructed magical legacy. All along the Mississippi river, preserved for
tourism purpose, lie slave owners luxurious mansions while their ‘savages’, as
they used to call them among other offences, and dehumanised people cemeteries
are lost in hostile landscape. At times, these makeshifts cemeteries are found
when industry breaks grounds over the footprints of what was once upon a time
plantations of sugar cane – sugar already generated cash flow when French
Jesuit priests first introduced the cane in New Orleans in 1751.
These industries, producing the most toxic air in the USA and highest risks of
cancer, are implanted over death camps lying along a corridor known as Death Alley. Air
quality equals to a perennial climate of racism. Usually, memorials are built
over a site / or left intact and empty when Human Rights have been sabotaged!
Here each plantation has at least one cemetery; they are over 500 plantations
across Death Alley! Under Louisiana Law, cemeteries have perpetual protected
status but if not located (purposely) or not well researched, industrial
companies settle on their site.
Within half a century of the Salem Witch trials in Massachusetts and within indigenous territory
space, Christian colonists prefigured their genocidal dispossession: their
lands became plantations where slaves would overwork in designed death camps
for capitalism purpose: maximise productivity and profit. Around Mabon (Autumn Equinox), enslaved people would work between 18 to 20 hours
daily to harvest sugar cane before the arrival of frost. Erased cemeteries are
the results of persistent racist imaginary: they are unworthy of preservations
as well as being regarded as threats to industrial development. This represents
centuries of dehumanisation, degradation, humiliation. Human and ecological
reparations are at stake as seen presently at Wellcome Collection until 27 April 2025.
In the cinematic masterpiece Nickel
Boys
directed by RaMell Ross in 2024, based on Colson Whitehead’s North American
historical drama novel, the film retraces through candid and poetical furtive
moments the brutal and racial reality of 1960’s Florida. The
purposely disorientating gaze as a continuous point of view induces seasickness
at first, but it eventually vanishes to leave place to a much more nauseating
statement. Also located in the South of the United States as in Louisiana, the
State was home to a real reform school from 1900 to 2011
called Florida School for Boys: a juvenile detention institution where three
times as many black as white students died and were buried in high number of
unmarked graves. “Despite periodic investigations, changes of leadership, and
promises to improve, the allegations of cruelty and abuse continued” until a
forensic anthropology survey was granted allowing Erin Kimmerle of the University of South Florida in 2012 to investigate independently. “In 2008, in response to allegations of the
extreme beatings and torture that took place there, state officials sealed the
building in a public ceremony, leaving a memorial plaque. It has remained empty
since.” Upon years of investigation, 27 suspected graves were identified by
ground-penetrating radar in 2019; in 2024, Florida agreed to provide compensation to victims and
possibly their descendants.
In
that same corridor of horror, Sugarcane’s documentary - on the disappearance of magical children
and women abused by Catholic priests who forced the Indigenous to abandon their
faith in nature - is a 2024 shocking account
where ground-penetrating radar was also used to uncover bodies. Resonating both
film and documentary is Phillip Noyce’
Rabbit-Proof Fence, a 2002 Australian film
depicting Aboriginal children taken away from their magical families,
depriving them from their contact with nature, forcing them into a Catholic
monotheistic faith.
From all corners of Earth
and for centuries, magical beings have been submitted to the White man’s
fantasy of eradicating their multiple faiths, possessing their territories, displacing
them while depriving them from their spiritual artefacts... in the name of god
and capitalism, they erased their memories! What if nature and stolen precious objects
stagnating in dormant museums are calling ancestors’ children to visit them... who
sadly perish at seas or at best live in sordid conditions! Brunei Gallery SOAS: Stories of
migration until 22 March 2025 uncovers
“The story of migration never truly ends.
There are always new voices to amplify, new challenges to highlight and new
solutions to seek.”
Born
in Saigon following the end of the Vietnam War, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn had a Buddhist upbringing in USA where he
immigrated in 1979 aged three. His films weave the
power of memory and lack of historical memory, an exploration of remembering
and remembrance as a form of resistance and healing.
In
both his short films Above the Sea,
Against the Sky and When Water
Embraces Empty Space exhibited at
Showroom
until 5 April 2025, a lament soundscape waves
through the room. Will the Luf boat from Papua New Guinea in Oceania remember
its way home? Will it help restore lost songs, lost language, lost rituals that
were taken away with it around 1882.The boat serves
as a bridge between past and future, the makers and the keepers, the dominant
narrative of German colonialism and the erased stories of the Luf people. Can
the boat heal past collective trauma and restore the memory of its
construction?
Injustice, unfairness, shame intertwine our emotions: we are
connected to ourselves when faced with stories from afar. Can we really project
pain of the other when our own pain lies from another horizon? The 72 minutes
documented film The Encounter shows
with no artifice the reconnection of three of boat builders’ magical descendants
from the island of Luf. They encounter their vessel for the first time in a 2024 trip to Berlin Humboldt Forum. The
whole experience reveals a true empathy in the way they approach and touch shyly
for real a tale they heard of when children.
Mati Diop’s Dahomey offers a philosophical and
poetical hymn to restitution where a statue talks
in their own (lost?) language, longing to be back in their land expressing some
form of anxiety about changes of landscape and culture. So many looted objects
from the colonial era are waiting impatiently in Western Countries dark
corridors for a wake-up call: will the children of colonised magical ancestors
reconnect with their belief in plants, animals, nature, objects?
In his assertion “We don’t inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children” Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn evokes his Buddhist Indigenous cosmovision that gives a soul to all existing creatures including mountains.
IV) Too
Sick to Pray
In
1856, a century away from the official end of Witch Hunt and 22 years into the Slavery Abolition Act in Britain, the
Great Trigonometric Survey established that Peak XV Mountain (named by the White British male population) was
the highest in the world. Peak XV
would later be named Mount Everest.
In
a rush for competition to reach and own each corner of Earth, the British
Empire was both at lost and at a loose end when failing to be the first to
access the North Pole in 1909 and the South
Pole in 1911. In desperate need to restore their credibility
on exploring the planet’s extremities, they ambitioned the “Third Pole” soon
after the horror of trenches ended with WWI.
To the magical Indigenous population, the Himalayan
Mountain has been known locally as Sagarmatha
or Chomolangma ‘Mother Goddess of the World’: she was a highly spiritual place that was not meant to be climbed;
Tibetan language didn’t even have a word for “summit”! We are half a century
away from the White male conquerors preparing their ascension to the Moon and all her phases worshiped by
witches and other magical beings...
In
1919, the Royal
Geography Society (RGS) and Alpine Club jointly set up the Mount Everest Committee. 100 years
later, RGS re-examines a behind the
scenes story through film, photography and other documents related to the
expeditions in 1921, 1922 and 1924 in an attempt to reveal enduring damages done to a Buddhist
population. The 2022-3 re-run Everest
Through the Lens exhibition takes place until 15 April 2025. A tragic narrative unrolls right before our
eyes filled with twinkle little stars: power, racial and geopolitical dynamics
are at serious play...
The
viewer is welcomed by a question: “Should
we Climb?”
Through
the lens of an Army Officer’s film and photography, Mount Everest and its surrounding is magnificent, elegantly dressed
in pure white ‘fur’, ecologically serene and of breath-taking beauty. But it
soon appears that the imperial ambition to reach the highest summit of Earth switched to a marketing adventure:
the image maker Army officer deposited £8000 towards the expeditions, allowing
him to retain the rights to all photographic and film documentation.
By
sensationalising Tibetan culture and spicing up ethno-anthropology with
entertainment, he expected a decent return on his investment. Identical to the
medieval times with the witch obsession images which helped the propagation and
proliferation of women hatred, the image maker Army officer’s moving images provided
a Western population with a distorted vision on far away ways of living.
Promoting his venture for pure publicity stunt, he had a troupe of seven Tibetan
dancers advertising them as lamas (Buddhist teachers) when the majority were
novice monks. His work talked of fantastic dances, clothing made from human
skin, people being hacked to pieces in death rituals. Though the White male
climbers might not have reached the peak, the expeditions were portrayed as
glorious trekkings and enhanced with patriotic fervour; though the two White
male climbers died near the peak – on their way up or down – their deaths were
seen as heroic men making sacrifice to the imperial cause; national mourning at
St Paul Cathedral was attended by Queen Elisabeth II’s grandfather King
George V. Further fuelling the Western population’s imagination with an ingrained
gothic image, the final stunt went “If
you had lived, as they had lived and died in the heart of nature, would you,
yourself, wish for any better grave than a grave of pure white snow?”
Meanwhile,
the local population received a condescending treatment all along. They were
termed as unwashed, strange and weird; Sherpa and Bhotiya porters who made the
film possible were nicknamed ‘tigers’
as well as being described as ‘children
in [White male climbers] care’ or
‘coolies’ if on low pay. A magical population
who performed ‘devil dances’...
A
base camp was set up as a busy temporary village to prepare for the big climb:
a handful of White male British climbers, around 150 Tibetan and Nepalese
expedition members whose names were mostly not even recorded and horses,
donkeys, yaks! The White male climbers ran the camp according to colonialist
attitude: social, racial and class hierarchies were in place.
When
one of the main male climbers decided to go ahead with climbing on a particular
treacherous weather condition in 1922, seven
high-altitude porters died in an avalanche: six Sherpa men – Thankay, Sangay,
Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgya, Pema and one Bhotiya man – Norbu. Their death was
edited out of the film, erased from public record and handled bureaucratically
and procedurally. Their families were ‘compensated’...
On
13 Sept 2013, London based journalists
received a BFI’s invite to a press
screening as The Epic of Everest was
part of the BFI
National Archive Restoration undertaken in collaboration with Sandra Noel, the image maker Army
officer’s daughter. The press release celebrated the exploits of the climbers
and film director in dithyrambic circumvolutions: “Filming
in brutally harsh conditions”; “... few
images in cinema are as epic – or moving – as the final shots of a blood red
sunset over the Himalayas”; the film director “was a heroic, pioneering explorer”; “The film is also among the earliest filmed records of life in Tibet and
features sequences at Phari Dzong (Pagri), Shekar Dzong (Xegar) and Rongbuk
monastery”.
After
seeing the exhibition on 14 February 2025,
this specific press release’s excerpt is of excruciating discomfort: “But what resonates so deeply is [film
director]’s ability to frame the
vulnerability, isolation and courage of people persevering...”
Having
participated to this masquerade 12 years ago out of ignorance, I contacted RGS’s press office 18 February 2025:
“... Would it be possible to know what
motivated RGS to show the behind the scenes? 10 years ago I was invited by the BFI
when they restored the film and I don't remember any notice of the behind the
scene.”
[Communication officer had no idea what I meant by ‘behind the scenes’;
patronised me about the exhibition “Everest
through the lens... explores the roles of a range of people from India, Nepal
and Tibet who supported the European
(the British Empire was run by
British men! They were the only Europeans) expeditions to Everest in the 1920s, including high altitude porters,
translators, photographic assistants etc.”; she assumed I didn’t see the
exhibition and invited me to see it online: https://www.rgs.org/our-collections/stories-from-our-collections/online-exhibitions/everest-through-the-lens
I emailed a
board screening I took indicating RGS‘s
own words "The exhibition goes
behind the scenes..." asking: I)
"Would it be possible to know what
motivated RGS to show the behind the scenes?" II) “Were these behind the
scenes shown before at RGS? III) Was the BFI aware of Noel "treatment
of Tibetan culture remains especially unnerving; the condescension of Noel’s
narration smacks not only of cultural insensitivity..."?
This time,
she decided to be condescending: I misunderstood “behind the scenes”; she then explained the exhibition assuming I
didn’t understand it “... [Film Director] was
telling a very specific story as he wanted/needed to sell tickets.”; she
managed to respond to my second question but slightly misled about its date
“... yes,
it was first on display in 2022 and this is a rerun” adding “There is no great reveal in the exhibition,
and it is not an attempt to catch anyone out. The exhibition is a way of the [RGS]
telling a much richer story than the simple one often told... But
again, it has been understood widely in the academic community for many years”
– How stupid of me for not belonging to the Elite! Is incompetent press woman
aware that in April 2024 academic Jamie Owen of RGS said disgracefully to the academic The Guardian’s journalist “It is
a remarkable story... It represents human struggle against the elements; it
means teamwork; working with and understanding other cultures, and it means
showing respect for the mountain and the environment, which, I am afraid to
say, we have sorely lost touch with today.” (How
about a similar narrative: Academic film maker drugged and raped 13 years old Samantha
G in 1977 but he did so with great respect)
Regarding
the BFI, RGS’s fraudulent press woman had no idea if they knew anything and
suggested I checked with their film curator – I would have assumed the BFI to be quite academic - Then she
suggested I checked “Dr Jan Faull, who previously worked as a film
curator at the BFI”... who also worked for RGS]
Back
in 2013,
Jan Faull introduced The Epic of Everest at BFI
fully aware of the abusive
narrative surrounding the film but chose, for marketing purpose, to tone it down!
Still
wondering what motivated RGS to
exhibit unseen documents they had in their archive, I turned my research on Sandra Noel, who was involved in her
father’s film restoration for the BFI.
If she had died, I thought it might be easier to reveal to the general public abuse
towards a magical population. She passed away in February 2018
as Kent
Online revealed in August 2018!
Another
factor that might ‘force’ RGS to
reveal the expeditions’ behind the scenes archive is how influential such films
play in tourism, creating human traffic jam on far away high altitude soils! Everest faces the challenge of rising
temperature
and more climbers – “Since 1953,
Everest’s summit has been reached more than 11,000 times by more than 6,000
people” – The waste produced by tourists pollutes these sacred lands! “The
highest-ever recorded sample of microplastics was found on the “Balcony” of Mt.
Everest at 8,440 m, one of the last resting spots before reaching the summit.
This microplastic is likely coming from the clothing and equipment worn by
climbers”
The
pristine environment on Earth
highest peaks have darkened from white to black: in the past 30 years, the Mother
Goddess of the World has lost 2000 years of ice... in the name of capitalism!
When
the Frères Lumière introduced their
motion picture cameras in the last years of XIX Century, image makers went
around the globe to produce a blend of ethno-anthropological-entertaining
films. Not yet called documentaries, the silent era showed the first world the
extreme worlds. Not yet called Cinéma
vérité, a term coined in the late 50’s early 60’s by Jean Rouch, a North American film maker shot Nanook of the North in the Canadian Arctic, living for a year and
half with an Inuit magical population. An international commercial success in 1922, the film was a foundation for many film makers to come
in that era.
Eventually criticised for producing fake news on the Inuit life and forging a legacy in popular culture of sordid fascination for human zoos, film maker defended his work stating: "One often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit"
V) Nouar
As
far as distortion is concerned, Leigh
Bowery, 30 years after departing Earth
is absolutely fabulous alive again at Tate Modern until 31 August 2025, declared about his work on his own life and body “Flesh is the most fabulous fabric, I like to
camouflage my body because by concealing you can reveal, but you can also do
the reverse”.
By
the 1920’s, Hollywood had constructed a cinematic
language where art and publicity were intertwined; fairy tales were adapted; Disney indulged on opposing young
fertile beauties versus nasty witches: the witch as an old crook, a long
fingered woman wearing pointed hats and dark cloaks. Strange and weird, as
women and otherness have been portrayed, indigenous female characters entered
the ‘competition’ in fiction films. All these ‘nasty women’ have been ingrained
into our Western collective imagination from childhood.
By
the mid 1920’s, apart from cartoons, the witch
almost totally disappeared from the North American screen. A new independent
female character ‘invaded’ film scenes in a male dominated world of fiction,
horror, cowboys or science fiction movies. The gender shift corresponded to a
growth of consumer culture within a middle class society. In short, women had
more time to explore a life outside their home, freed themselves from being
obedient wives or daughters. They were independent, single, dancing, going
places, boozing and smoking as well as leading an active sexual life. Under racial segregation, jazz age was all the
rage and flapper women were visible and loud.
By
the 1930’s the
talkies were a global phenomenon: silent era switched to sound and women
had a voice on screens. Louise Brooks
had already harboured a garçonne haircut; in 1930, Marlene Dietrich revealed her partly
undressed body in Josef von Sternberg Blue
Angel or
kissed a woman in tuxedo in Morocco; Coco Channel
had dropped the corset in France over a decade ago; in 1933, Greta Garbo kissed a woman in Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina. These films received
positive reviews and were box-office triumphs. Women took decisions in
décolleté! If the Betty Boop cartoons
were created by an only-male studio surfing on their wild imagination about
sexualising a teenage female body, women raved on her vamp looks.
Embodying
freedom, Dietrich arrived in
trousers at the premiere of the ‘wickedest
film in the world’ from Cecil B. De Mille’s The Sign of the Cross. These two events
at once were the pivotal hot warning shot! DeMille
refused to cut its so-called ‘lesbian dance’ aka the Naked Moon dance but the scene was removed under an upcoming
Code…
Numerous
complaints about depravity ensued while the Great Depression took its toll and
the fantasy of Nazism rose in Europe. The New Woman switched to the True Woman.
The blurred vision of patriarchy loomed at a distant background due to
dominating the film industry at all stages but digging the real cause, a much
more hardcore reality came to the surface: Catholic men and women were outraged
about women decadence in films… and what they perceived as immoral! National
Legion of Decency
otherwise known as the Catholic of Legion of Decency was a North American
Catholic group founded in 1934 that threatened
to boycott films attendance: 20 millions of Catholics plus their Protestant
allies would diminish a film’s success...
Their multiple complaints led to a sinister era of re-addressing
‘unchecked feminity’!
A
US born journalist nicknamed the ‘tough Irish Catholic’ was appointed in 1934 as censor for
Production Code Administration (PCA)
aka Production Code or Hays Code censorship, a new department
of Motion Picture Producers and
Distributor of America (MPPDA).
He took great zeal to enforce censorship in Hollywood films while standardising
a mode of thinking. Gender roles were sacred: women talked, behaved and were
dressed in proper manners. All details were under strict scrutiny, profanity
was banned and so was vulgarity. Incidentally, PCA censor was aligned with fascist ideas like loving Planet Venus would trine auspiciously
with communication Planet Mercury (towered
above by war Planet Mars though): he
was hand in hand collaborating with the Nazi representative in Hollywood. [On
his retirement, censor was presented with an honorary Academy Award for "his conscientious, open-minded and dignified
management of the Motion Picture Production Code"]
What
if feminists in the XXI Century
worshipped the Golden Age era from PCA’s time? What if censors loathed Coco Chanel for liberating women’s
body, yet she
collaborated with the Nazis? How about Arletty’s
franc-parler and crude way of talking
about sex
in Marcel Carné’s Hotel du Nord in 1938 whose
lover was a German Nazi?
Incidentally,
1934 is the year the witch made a shy comeback
on US screens. Witches were not on PCA’s
agenda; they had no set codes. When “tough Irish Catholic”’s censor retired, the witch entered the horror
genre in the 1950’s.
By 1935, Jewish people in Germany had
already been stripped of citizenship under the Nuremberg Race Laws; in 1936, chancellor of Germany used the Olympics Games they were hosting as a visual propaganda showcase
for the “master race.” Meanwhile high profile left wing or
suffragette women were getting into British Union of Fascism in
Britain 1930’s.
Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford
and Mae West were labelled as Box Office Poison in 1938.
While WWII
gangrened Europe, the US made a brilliant, and sadly still of resonance in 2025, anti-fascist propaganda film in 1943, Don’t be a Sucker.
From Malleus Maleficarum to Mein Kampf: in the space of 300 years in medieval era, around 45000 people were exterminated as they were thought to practice magic / witchcraft and have a so-called evil pact: 80% were women. Between 1933 and 1945, a new target of strange and weird people with their own language and practice took place – people became numbers: the Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered six million Jewish people in a genocide now known as the Holocaust: many died in designed death camps; millions of non-Jewish people were also executed including 500,000 Romani and Sinti (known as the forgotten Holocaust) men, women, and children and other people derogatorily labelled as "Gypsies"; 250,000–300,000 including at least 10,000 children with disabilities living in institutions and care facilities; hundreds, possibly thousands Gay men, bisexual men, and other men accused of homosexuality; perhaps hundreds Black people in Germany; animals.
250000 Rohingya refugees were already parked in Cox’s Bazar
in Bangladesh when Myanmar military started attacks in 2017.
Following decades of abuse and being denied the right to citizenship, rights to
freedom, movement and livelihood, a small group of men and boys rebelled
against police in response of oppression, as exhibited at
Wiener Holocaust Library until 3 April 2025. Predominantly Muslims, 700000 had to escape
massacres and live in sordid climate hazards conditions due to ongoing genocide...
VI) Rhiannon
Located
in a remote Italian Alps village, Maura
Delpero’s Vermiglio snow burdened gem follows
the life of a Catholic family of 10 children across Chopin reprazent within the four seasons preceding the end of WWII.
The
rhythm of a pristine pastoral vast landscape, where the intimate restraint of The White Ribbon seems to be lurking,
lodges between quiet female pagan rituals and the father acting as a moral
bearer; in the symphony of nature and rural daily tasks that are more sonic
than the minimalist austere dialogues; in crowded shared beds; frugal meals
thanking the Almighty and a single class for the village children.
The
nuclear family with obedient children and constructed soft spoken female clan
reveal their own deviant complex dynamics: the youngest daughter finds out her
father’s secret drawer of naked women photographs; the teenager discovers her
sinful attraction to women and masturbates behind a wardrobe mirrored door; the
adult daughter has sex with a deserter before marrying him; the adult son drinks
out of frustration.
The
news of the war ending explodes the silent rebellious lives: the now married
deserter leaves his pregnant wife to visit his mother. Mother and daughter give
birth, the deserter won’t come back, dishonour falls on the family. Similar to
the Middle Age when young women didn’t want to follow the dictated path of
marriage, the lesbian teenager joins a nearby orphanage convent where she looks
after her newborn nephew... is the father despotic or does he care for his
family?
Being
a single woman or a widow was no good news in the turmoil of Witch Hunt within the dictate context
to proper manners women were (and still have been) expected to follow. Women
have been the primary brewers since ancient times in all corners of Earth. Fountains provided drinking
water in some parts of Europe but fresh water was rather scarce in the medieval
era. Ale was the only source of hydration available to adults and children.
Women brewed the low content of alcohol in early XIV Century
and were known as Alewives, dominating the homemade industry making decent money
out of ale sales. A wife would supplement her husband income; it would provide
an essential source of earning to single or widow women. Eventually, men found
ways to impoverish them while the law forced husbands to be made liable for the
brew’s quality in case their wives would poison clients! By the XV Century, women started abandoning the trade apart from
those who inherited their husband’s ale business. Mid XVI Century, female teenagers up to women aged 40 were banned to sell ale as they
could potentially use their sexual desirability and spread immorality. The
Church was against women being in that brewing trade, so spreading rumours and
reporting them as Unchristian for whatever they said or did was enough to rule
them out of business: prejudice prevailed. If single women or widows dared
refuse sex with strangers, they were demonised or blackmailed. Satire, songs
and plays compared Alewives with prostitutes who were depicted as morally and
hygienically unclean. Our ingrained collective memory visualise witches with
specific attires as Samantha reminds viewers in Bewitched. At the time, female brewers would display
a broomstick outside their home signalling the brew was available for purchase;
tall black hats would stand out in crowded market places as a uniform
indicating an ale sale point; cauldrons were recipients they served the brew
from; (black) cats would keep mice away. Yet it is debated whether alewives
were portrayed as witches. From a small scale home-made industry to factories
run by wealthy businessmen, women were discarded from a rooting misogynistic trade. Their main duties
were relocated to household tasks and caring for children, prostitution for
some, as documented in the mighty Chantal
Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai
du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
A
homosexual – bi – transwoman / transvestite was no good news either... working
in the sex trade was luck-pushing: a woman called Eleanor
Rykener was charged
with immorality
in 1394 for ‘that
detestable, unmentionable, and ignominious vice’... meaning sodomy as she
was called John at birth but dressed in women clothes and was an experienced
sex worker. No trace of her fate following her arrest has been recorded.
A
woman with disability was definitely no good news. Disability was then termed
as deformity and regarded as god’s punishment - in today’s Western countries,
those practising Buddhism, yoga, tantra etc will talk about reincarnation /
karma as a way to pay back their struggling lives: a debt to being nasty in
past lives... - The story of Bess, who had a leg amputation at some point
in her life, is a wobbly one because women could be known by different surnames
according to whom they lived with... Her mother had been sentenced to death
after being accused of witchcraft, so malice was obviously in her genes... From
Bradfield in Essex, in the middle of a Civil War in England between 1642 and 1645, Bess was accused of witchcraft in 1643 by a neighbour John
Rivet whose wife had strong fits. After consulting a female healer for his
wife, she said his spouse was cursed by a neighbour up the hill. From Bess’s landlord to the son of a
clergymen and a collection of other men who were improvised investigators, Bess was imprisoned, sleep deprived and
subjected to close scrutiny by her Watchers until she ‘confessed’... She was
hung in 1645.
Being
a Black woman in a plague-stricken Medieval Europe was a catastrophe. The Black
Death outbreak killed millions across Asia and Europe between 1348 and 1350; 40% to 60% were swept by the disease in
Europe; more than 50% of 70000 to 80000 London population died. Authorities
created emergencies cemeteries at East Smithfield and West Smithfield to bury
the bodies of thousands of plague victims. “Social
and religious divisions based on
origin, skin colour and appearance were present in both medieval England and
Europe.” Following
a bio-archaeological study in three of London plague burials including East
Smithfield, Black women of African descent were the most affected by the
bubonic plague. They were most likely exposed to famine, hardship and racism
prior to the pandemic: “...race is a
social classification and is not based in biological reality, but it does have
biological consequences”. Biological anthropologist Prof Sharon DeWitte, said: "Not only does this research add to our
knowledge about the biosocial factors that affected risks of mortality during
medieval plague epidemics, it also shows that there is a deep history of social
marginalisation shaping health and vulnerability to disease in human
populations."
"My reality is not the same as that which
often presented to us in western photography. As an African working in a
western medium, I try to bring out the spiritual dimensions in my pictures so
that concepts of reality become ambiguous and are opened to re-interpretation.
This requires what Yoruba priests and artists call a technique of ecstasy."
— Rotimi Fani-Kayode, 1988. The artist’s work is showing presently in Shoreditch, Rotimi Fani-Kayode: The Studio – Staging Desire at
Autograph Gallery until 22 Mar 2025.
I have been promised press pictures
and credits by press office, so I stole one!
Born
into a prominent Yoruba family before moving to Brighton, aged
11, following the 1966 outbreak of
Biafran / civil war in Nigeria, he then studied in the US from 1976 to 1983 – befriending Robert Mapplethorpe en route. Back in UK, he settled in Brixton, London,
where he lived and worked until his death from AIDS-related complications on 21 December 1989, aged 34.
Fani-Kayode celebrated his sense of
otherness: Christian faith erased the Yoruba tradition and brought disease with
it during colonialism while constructing harmful notions of black masculinity, a
persisting notion demonstrated in Jordan Peel’s
Get Out... cancelling queerness!
Reclaiming
his magical identity at the core of his practice, he fused religious eroticism from
Yoruba and Western ideals like Christianity, racism, colonialism and the
tensions and conflicts between his homosexuality and his faith upbringing. A
spirited exploration of desire and pain. Through gesture, movements or striking
a pose, Fani-Kayode broke codes between
reality and fantasy producing a cosmos of signs and symbols.
The
ground floor exhibition is also a must-see: Abi
Morocco Photos: Spirit of Lagos until 22 March 2025.
Funmilayo Abe and her husband John Abe’s studio thrived from 1970 to 2006 in Lagos, capturing the joyous and Yoruba
spirit of Nigeria’s large city. Mrs Abe
specialised in portraiture and street photography while also enjoying her time
printing her images in the darkroom.
VII) African Reggae
Born
in 1964 in Brooklyn, US, artist, writer,
performer and AIDS activist Gregg
Bordowitz presents his first major institutional transdisciplinary project
in London – There: a Feeling at
Camden Arts Centre until 23 March 2025 – a
second chapter of a partner exhibition in Germany.
The
1980’s were engulfed in a never ending virus
fear spreading globally: AIDS. Western politicians didn’t seem to care much...
a worldwide community of gay guys dropped dead by the minute due to their social
marginalisation. Women and non gay men were also infected by the virus.
Activism was essential in TV, museums, schools and community centres. Bordowitz had been a prolific AIDS
activist before being tested positive for HIV in 1988.
His
37 years fragmented existence as a survivor propels his singular self within a
multiple selves frame navigating between Moments In Love and What
Time Is Love.
A life spent in restraint, the artist is grateful to minor cuts that heal,
though taking longer than his mortal’s cohorts. The multi disciplinary
exhibition takes the name of a Paul
Celan’s poem Homecoming.
Installation views of Gregg Bordowitz, 'There: a Feeling'
at Camden
Art Centre, 2025.
Photo: Luke Walker
Lodged between Baroque clouds that could be emojis or
cells evolving on walls and prints on installations, a grainy video dating back
from 1993 is looping. Insecurity and struggle related to the disease punctuates lapses
of happiness. Filming his friends living on medical pills wrecking their
bodies, they devoured life as if on a permanent rollercoaster journey enjoying
tunes by Janis Joplins’s Summertime, Patti Smith’s Privilege, Jimi Hendrix’s Castles made of Sand and REM’s
Shiny Happy People. Deploring stigma
they were facing in the 80’s - early 90’s society, they reminded their mortal
counterparts that same sex lovers are present at each corner of life on Earth as invisible as they are. Part of
the fabric of society, they hoped art could contribute to social change. One of
the striking instant within the video installations is Bordowitz’s approach to freedom. He considers that freedom is
always too often linked to tyranny or oppression, but he finds freedom in
duration, in the lack of preoccupation of time passing.
In
the song The River, the late Geoffrey Oryema’s starts with a line “Paint
me a picture of a river, And let it flow, Just let it flow, It will flow and
wash away our differences”.
In
her new body of work presently at
South London Gallery until 11 May 2025, the paintings of Christina Kimeze: Between Wood and Wheel explore a sense of otherness, freedom, flight.
From
a female perspective, Kimeze invites
a reflexion on duality: a dichotomy mood between solid and static, and
elevation as in January Gill O’Neil’s Night at the Roller Palace poem which
inspired her exhibition title “wood”
and “wheel”: a mental and physical
voyage that we share, on different levels, but still unify us; a feeling of
self-loss as if levitating from roller skating or being in a flight state.
The
artist reclaims a sense of belonging in a city where the Black community in
London, identical to cities in US, grabbing concrete on wheels, grounding a
body in movement. She is also letting her mind take off in folkloric stories of
magical women or feminists in films and in literature.
Her
rich palette of colours might evoke her souvenirs of her father’s homeland,
Uganda.
A
prominent figure in British culture, curator and writer Ekow Eshun is interested in representation or absence of Black
people in Western history. Writing an essay for Christina Kimeze’ exhibition catalogue, he notes “Maybe the woman who stands with arms raised
in a glade of purple and orange-leaved matoke trees in Soaring (I) (2024),
holding space in communion with the environment, is illustrative of the form a
Black relationship with nature might take when it’s not predicated on legacies
of colonial power, a relationship founded instead on kinship and connection and
a belief in the worth and wonder of people and place. So that to walk on the
land is to walk with the land. It is to raise your hands up into a canopy of
purple and orange leaves and feel a kind of soaring as you do so”.
Christina Kimeze
Soaring (I) (2024)
Cuban
American artist Ana Mendieta, best
known for her Earth Body artwork
was on a permanent quest of belonging, making sense of past and present,
challenging race and gender in male dominated societies. Displaced at 12 from a
middle class Catholic upbringing in her native Cuba in 1961
through a US program and Catholic Charities, she spent time in a refugee camp,
Catholic institutions and foster families. In 1966
she was reunited with her mother – her father was in a political Cuban jail up
to 1979. Studying art in early 70’s, Mendieta focused on violence towards
women, starting with a static solo performance Rape Scene. She developed an interest in primitive and magical
rituals, identity, death using blood as a tool to convey a connection between
her body and Mother / Goddess Earth to become one whole entity. Raising her
arms up as an act of female force, she also damned how the female body had been
a colonised object submitted to misogyny.
[UPDATE: Tate Press Office on 24 March 2025 - TATE ANNOUNCES 2026 HIGHLIGHTS “Tate will show works by Ana Mendieta that have never been seen in the UK”]
On
a similar path, nominated for the Deutsche
Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025 and exhibited until 15 June 2025 at the Photographers Gallery, Peruvian American artist Tarrah Krajnak explores her body and Earth to make sense of her identity as
a transracial adoptee through place / forced displacement and her use of body /
photography. In Melina Léon’s Song
Without a Name film, an Indigenous woman gives
birth but the clinic helping the mother to be disappears selling her newborn
child to a (North American?) family. Separating children from their Indigenous
mothers was a method used to maintain social control and alienate women at a
time when rape was also normalised under the Shining Path brutal group. Catholic
nuns - also ‘magically’ present with Mother
Teresa herself in Bangladesh where designed rape camps took place early
70’s
- who looked after Krajnak from her birth
in 1979 until her adoption wrote her Indigenous
mother might have been raped; she was then sent to a US family with no
possibility to trace her biological mother. Reclaiming her own story across
magazines and newspapers back dated from her birth year in Peru, she uses
photography as a mean to make contact / to connect with the dead but she also
stages her naked Indigenous body questioning the violence of ‘perfect’ naked
female bodies through the photographers male gaze lens. Her experience as a
permanent exilada / foreigner in her birth country explores erased stories
emphasising on roots, land and language.
Self-Portrait as Weston / as Bertha
Wardell, 1927/2020
© Tarrah Krajnak
How
cynical! Alienating magical women – mainly in the Andes – through rape and / or
stealing their newborn children for adoption purposes; then, in the 90’s under a US / Peruvian dictator
agreement
(an existing program in the US), mainly Indigenous women
were forced into sterilisation for health and education
issues... when no cure was found to keep North American gay community alive! Was
a cure ever searched? Dallas Buyers Club film shows the struggle
for medicine as well as how all infected humans become reluctant delinquents!
Also
nominated for the Deutsche Börse
Photography Foundation Prize 2025 and exhibited until 15 June 2025
at the Photographers Gallery Cristina De Middel follows people’s journey from the
border of Mexico with Guatemala to the Centre of the World, a small Californian
town called Felicity. Blending photojournalism, conceptual photography and
archival material, De Middel
questions the medium relation to truth as well as reviewing human migration as daring, heroic and fearlessly forging their
own path rather than describing their crossing as a mere escape.
Inocente
Pobre Amigo
from the series Journey to the Center,
2021
© Cristina De
Middel / Magnum Photo
The
two other nominees, Rahim Fortune
and Lindokuhle Sobekwa tackle the
enduring nature of Black culture and tradition in US; poverty, Apartheid,
memory and colonialism in South Africa.
VIII)
Sonegaly
Mid or late 90’s, most likely in the French newspaper Libération, I read an article written
by Didier Lestrade, a French prominent
AIDS activist. He was advocating a reclaim of the word PD, a derogatory and twisted term for PéDéraste (paedophile) used for gay men in France and possibly its
former colony. PD never came alone.
It was always juxtaposed with an adjective like sale (dirty). Dirty faggot I heard my family saying it in the 80’s, at school, in the streets, at Les Inrocks in the 90’s... PD was and still is insulting; homosexuel is not. So when Lestrade reclaimed that ignominious
degrading word, I was shocked. Back then, Quentin
Tarantino had just entered the film world and nigga became an instant mantra in his films, a term Black people
reclaimed. Not a Black man, Tarantino
was not using nigga or negro out of disdain, he was given a
pass to bead the japamala infinitely.
20 years ago, I was sitting
in the crowded communist bar Juanito
in Barranco, Lima, Peru discussing about a topic I don’t recall. When I said
something involving emerging countries,
someone at the table asked me if I was using the term emerging countries instead of third
world because it was politically correct. Taken aback, I replied that third world was an old fashion degrading
old term. The table smiled, I felt humiliated and I was further challenged.
Nothing aggressive or passive aggressive but they explained that whether third world or any terms used until emerging countries became the new trend,
they were designed by the rich emerged world! Peru was still part, however
extremely rich some were, of a poor and oppressed country which existence
depended on the filthy, however extremely poor some were, rich and privileged
world... losing my words and my world I asked how I should refer to their country
/ world. They reclaimed third world
because the term was filthy and undermining and lacked hypocrisy!
Witch and ecofeminist Starhawk writes that reclaiming the
word witch is to reclaim women’s
right to be powerful. In identical veins, reclaiming denigratory terms, like dyke
– queer - magical women - intuitive
women – jezebel – feminist – suffragette – crone – slut – cockroaches - inferiors and so many on, has been a device to
overthrow white male rules. When those in power label their fellow humans with
such inhuman and nebulous brandings
adding dirty rumours, hoping to convince whoever is at the ready to be
manipulated, they commit atrocities: physically, psychologically, emotionally,
economically! Reclaiming is removing dark oppression!
Reclaiming erased history
of herbal medicine from witches / magical people in Western countries at the
time of Witch Hunt or from colonialism is an ongoing act of resistance. Food
knowledge and ancestral herbal medicine were crucial for healing and spiritual
practice.
Some Westerners like German
naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian - as
seen in Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights
at Wellcome Collection until 27 April 2025
- used the knowledge of enslaved women in Suriname – South America - a Dutch
colony in XVII Century. In 1699,
aged 52, she was given permission to travel and stay a few years to study and
illustrate some insects species. Disagreeing with the poor treatment enslaved
people were subjected to, she interacted with Indigenous and African slaves who
helped with her plants and animals research. Compiling the country’s abundant
flora and fauna, she published one of the first botanical books in 1705, Metamorphosis
Insectorum Surinamensium, made by a woman. The showcased pages show a peacock
flower used by enslaved women to abort unwanted pregnancies. David Attenborough regards Merian as a significant contributor to
entomology.
Nearby, a despicable book
was published in 1803 by a white male Dr: Practical rules for the management and medical treatment of
Negro slaves. 450 pages “advising” plantation owners to invest on medical
treatment to keep slaves healthy in order to increase production; how to treat
“negro slaves” by “... the necessity of terror to coerce his
obedience”, how to punish them, feed them, dress them... as if they were
cattle in overcrowded farms!
Due to the ongoing abuse,
occasionally, enslaved people escaped. Another racist Dr found a scientific
name for what he described as “mental illness”: drapetomania. In their new
found “freedom”, Indigenous and African found solace in shared spaces where they
grew food as well as revived their spiritual practices for healing mind-body
and spirit.
Also part of the Wellcome Collection exhibition are The Book of Landscape by Maria Floriza Veríssimo and Charmaine Watkiss artworks. Veríssimo lives in a Brazilian
Quilombos’ settlement that was constructed by marooned Indigenous and African
people who escaped from slavery. Her installation displays plants that grow in
communal creole garden and demonstrate resilience as a symbol of freedom.
Watkiss investigates and
celebrates the legacy and significance of ancestral herbal and edible plants of
the Caribbean. She has a keen interest in healing traditions within the wide
African diaspora that has been passed down through women lineage. Her work
channels a cosmos of signs and symbols that are tattooed on women’ body to regain
power.
© Charmaine Watkiss, 2023
Hard Graft Gallery Photo, Wellcome Collection
Steven Pocock 2024
The warrior builds strength from all who came before,
Charmaine Watkiss, 2023. © Charmaine Watkiss.
All rights
reserved, DACS 2024
If visual language
contributed to discredit women and hunt them, the way their tongues spoke was
also controlled!
A witches of Salem trials supporter,
a man wrote in
1692 about how proper women should be soft
spoken / hold their tongue. Still valid in XXI Century, women
are expected to watch their language. If not, they are described as immature or get threatened!
In Spring 2015, 10 YEARS AGO, I wrote “Le Diable Ecoute les Smiths” (reference to The Devil Wears Prada) about humiliation and sexual oppression I suffered in journalism at Les Inrocks between 1991-1992. 30 months before # Me Too. I asked for a job: out of the hundreds journalists I contacted, no one replied.
All French journalists have mocked me – last time was 12 March 2025; Franck Annese, Thomas Andrei’s boss, sent threatening emails and insulted me on Twitter!
have been backing up my aggressor.s ever since! I HAVE BEEN DEHUMANISED SHAMELESSLY ONLINE AND PHYSICALLY! I had
haircut at the RIO Cinema for years until
I decided to stop going in March 2023 because I
could no longer take it (I still have length differences); Sid – as seen in “Published on Twitter / X 20 July 2024” on my article A
Cluster of Pervert Narcissists – has thrown some stone (?)
at my leg when I left my building in February 2025! I am
daily stalked physically and online! Why don’t I go to the police? Because my Labour ward CLLR Margaret Gordon and Labour
Mayor of Hackney Caroline Woodley have labelled me as
psychotic... “thanks to” my GP, in 2022, and Abi Hopkins, in 2023,
Chair of RobinHood
Community Garden
where Woodley banned me in 2024!
Back in 2019, Christophe
Conte, former colleague at Les Inrocks and very good friend of my
aggressor, labelled me as psychotic, paranoid,
having delusion of persecutions and psychokiller!
severely backing up my agressors for years!
Bayrou : analyse d'une bienveillance médiatique - Par La rédaction | Arrêt sur images
El Moaddem talks to Bourmeau, my aggressors friend
.JPG)
From
2019, each time, I tweeted about Guillaume Auda stealing my
entire piece on Allen Jones for
TV Production Bangumi – as seen at
the bottom of A
Cluster of Pervert Narcissists, El
Moaddem showed her love for him – she stalks my tweets and blogs like a
vampire on life blood support! When I dared criticise Romain
Jeanticou for supporting Thomas Andrei
on “Published on Twitter / X 19
October 2024” and 22 October 2024 for supporting my aggressor
at Les Inrocks / his colleague at Telerama on my article A
Cluster of Pervert Narcissists, within
seconds she showed him support!
In the week of 3 to 9 March 2025, I wrote in VI) Rhiannon “Prof Sharon DeWitte, said: "Not
only does this research add to our knowledge about the biosocial factors that
affected risks of mortality during medieval plague epidemics, it also shows
that there is a deep history of social marginalisation shaping health and
vulnerability to disease in human populations." 29 March 2025
EL Moaddem wrote “Bravo @shema_miguel
! Lisez son essai "La santé est politique" pour comprendre comment
les biais sociaux et raciaux ont des conséquences sur la pratique médicale et
donc sur notre santé”
On 20 March 2025, I wrote VIII) Sonegaly (a 1997 album by Tarika, Malagasy female singer Hanitra – seen her a few times on stage and at parties - united her musicians from Madagascar with Senegalese musicians to ward off what French colonialists did to the uprising in her island country using Senegalese and other African people against her country in 1947- 1949) it was a subtle nod to JM Apathie. El Moaddem reposted on 22 or 23 March 2025 “La France n'a pas colonisé que l'Algérie ! On a essayé de faire la synthèse la plus complète de l'insurrection à #Madagascar en 1947 donc partagez massivement, il est temps de regarder notre histoire en face.”
I
– news from Bangumi via French
feminist Valérie Rey Robert (VRR): VRR also features on A
Cluster of Pervert Narcissists at the bottom: “VULGARITY”.
Early March 2025, she’s
off to
Les Inrocks Festival for International Women's Days “rencontre
au @104paris avec @manon_garcia interrogée par @jean_marie_durand pour le 8
mars”. This alone is questionable! But Jean-Marie
Durand is far from being a feminist “Le titre est un
néologisme tiré du terme « les incorruptibles » inventé par Jean-Marie Durand”...
Either
VRR is ignorant or she plays games. On
1 February 2017, Les Inrocks via their then Director Pierre Siankowski front covered Medhi Meklat and co. Meklat
created a Tweeter character called Marcelin
Deschamps that wrote misogynist, anti-Semitic / homophobic tweets which came to the surface.
When Bangumi investigated on whether Pierre Siankowski was aware about Meklat’s fictive character, Jean-Marie Durand pretended Les
Inrocks had no idea, yet Bangumi
showed Tweets from Siankowski
inviting people to follow Marcelin
Deschamps! Video of program unavailable! Later in the year,
randomly aligning with # Me Too
birth online, Siankowski front
covered the French singer - interviewed by Jean-Daniel
Beauvallet - who
killed French actress Marie Trintignant.
[UPDATE: a Netflilx documentary is coming out retracing how the clan Cantat was well prepared to accuse Marie Trintignant of being a nasty woman: she smoked spliffs, drank sometimes alcohol and had four children with four different men! It also reveals the French mentality toward femicide: playing down the murder due to a passionate love story
UPDATE II: Lio, a French singer, takes part in the Netflix documentary (I haven’t seen it sadly). She is invited, 8 April 2025, on French TV C à vous to react and talks about the documentary:
a) Marie Trintignant died 1 August 2003; in January 2006, Lio
explained the French Noir Désir (ND)
frontman committed a
femicide – it was not a crime passionnel as it was depicted in French
media. b) she reveals, 8 April 2025 on C à vous that ND frontman was violent and French
music business knew it! c) she
continues saying that ND’s label Universal France put pressure, in 2003, on the band and
frontman’s wife (he left his wife for Marie
Trintignant without divorcing her) to silence his violence... for marketing
purposes as ND had been the biggest
rock band in France – Sidenote: 9 March 2002 – 17 months before killing Marie Trintignant - ND
was awarded Best Rock album of the year, frontman took the
piss out of Universal and it was
a great moment in the music industry to
show such courage (I am not being sarcastic) d) she explains that following her outburst on French TV in January 2006 accusing frontman of femicide, she was then discarded in the
music industry (all tour dates were cancelled), she was accused by Universal’s Valéry
Zeitoun of being crazy, hysterical etc. She lost money! e) she reacts on frontman’s brother who
crushed Marie Trintignant for 30 minutes on French TV in November 2004 while Marie
Trintignant’s family including her four young children were still mourning
her...
SIDENOTE: Since 2015,
I have revealed on my first blog and this one how the music business mis-functions
and crushes women (artists, press officers, journalists, photographers etc.)
Have Pascal Nègre (JD Beauvallet good friend), Valéry Zeitoun, catholic Jean-Marie
Messier or any powerful man at Universal
offered Les Inrocks money to put ND’s frontman on their frontcover (# Me Too aligned randomly) in October 2017?
After meeting Yves Bongarcon at Rock Sound in Paris,
he published me, then stopped using me
and became friend with JD Beauvallet
I
have also revealed here and there how Universal
France blacklisted me in Universal
UK: press officers were not allowed to send me any CDs or anything. This...
I haven’t revealed so far: upon meeting Olivier Cachin’s L’affiche team twice in Paris – Les Halles and
in Paris X (?), in the mid / late 90’s, and
following my first piece for them, they invited me to meet them in their new
office in Clichy (?). I don’t remember the name of the young man who received
me but it must have been something like Dubois
because I thought he could be the son of Jacques
Dutronc and Marie Laforet... He was
very nice and enthusiastic and told me that he received an email from Universal France congratulating them
for publishing me. Due to me being stoical, he added it was great news. I asked
if the label wrote anything else, he said ‘no’, that was it! Then, Olivier Cachin’ s friend entered and he
explained they wanted a London based journalist and photographer for a new electronic’s
magazine Cachin was creating. That
magazine had very few prints and then stopped: I never wrote for them, they
never replied to any of my emails but paid the three articles I wrote for L’Affiche! Olivier Cachin became friend with JD Beauvallet!]]
II
– news from Thomas Andrei: He is the
main protagonist for A
Cluster of Pervert Narcissists. Writing a happy-go-lucky book on
paganism in England reveals a few things: as a white lad, he despises, like a
perfect negationist, the entire history of witches / magical people on both the
collective and particular level. Executed women is not his concern! Writing (so
many inaccurate stuff) on paganism makes him an expert, erasing women voices
that are more knowledgeable than him but have less visibility due to lack of
journalist contacts. 2 January 2025, he arrogantly wrote he is an honest
journalist
– HE DID!
Not
only has Andrei colonised my
experience, articles, topics (he
is now on Sylvia Plath and the relation between animals and humans and British Empire) etc, he behaves as if England
belongs to him like a little fascist! From “nobody
knows about England, I’m here to reveal it all” to “nobody
knows about Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, I’m the only one in the know”, he goes further about
food in England “C’est
une idée qui persiste : l’Europe entière paraît penser qu’on ne mangerait nulle
part ailleurs plus mal qu’en Angleterre”... there’s been so much written in
favour of food in England since the 80’s that he perpetuates the idea of nasty
food because he wants to surf on prejudice to sell his crap! In 2010, a film like The Trip about fine
food in England proves him wrong! Meanwhile, Uk based French female journalists
who really know their stuff are struggling!
III
– news from Muriel Zagha who should
have featured in my Cluster
of Pervert Narcissists: another trolling online stalker! Whenever I
published a chapter (once a week since 1 February 2025 until
29 March 2025), she vomited on her Twitter
account as if responding on ‘my’ medieval prose or she praised Hollywood films
from the 40’s when I published on Censorship Production Code in V) Nouar! However,
she never reacted on colonialism, slavery, AIDS etc. I ended my piece (29 March 2025 late morning) on the suffering and HARM
inflicted on the trans-population, she
published this, hours later:
Days later, she promoted “... on
the extraordinary diversity of early Christian communities” as my whole
piece is the responsibility of Christianity to produce suffering and
extermination of humans!
MORE: in May 2020,
when French actor Michel Piccoli died,
I twitted about Themroc out of his
hundreds of films he appeared... 31 March 2025 “Thrilled at the
prospect of introducing Claude Faraldo’s searing 1973 French counter-cultural
cult classic Themroc at @BFI on the 7th of May. Once seen, never forgotten, it is like ‘Jacques Tati on acid’…”
(Same with Hal Hartley, once
twitting about him, she was all over Hartley for days) – this is the girl who
not only supports French Polish pedocriminal, she only praises male film
makers! From 7 October 2023, she blamed non-stop
French feminists on Twitter (I have a good record on that) for being silent
over reports of rapes from Hamas terrorists... she totally made it up! She has
not once supported any women victims of sexual oppression, rape, incest! Glad
the BFI is hiring her mediocrity, proving
racism, transphobia and their conservative rancid attitude!
IV - News from Julie Zaugg: she appears in my Cluster of Pervert Narcissists, Published on Twitter / X 19 October 2024: “While based in China where contemporary art and all things weird have been expanding widely for decades, Julie Zaugg has no track records of investigating in the field.s for Le Temps; Les Echos; Heidi etc. Not even her Instagram shows any particular interest...” Yet in 2018, artist He Xiangyu reported about the North Korean women's fate in China in his White Cube’s feature length film titled The Swim;
“On 9 December 2024, Zaugg posted on alternative prosthetics... Years pre-COVID, I tweeted on Viktoria Modesta using alternative prosthetix...”
10 March 2025:
She came below my window mid January 2025
and
reported
on a photographer living on a boat by my flat... in February 2025
for Le Monde! I am a photographer! How
often have I sent an email to journalists about reporting on alternative living
like on boat or warehouse since I lived in a warehouse? Nobody replied!
Zaugg is an imposter, colonising my life and work, employed by Le Monde approved by Jerome Fenoglio and Louis Dreyfus at Le Monde! Why do they hire her? Because it looks good to have someone who can buy a £1 M house and can be silent on command! [UPDATE: one day after publishing this on 9 April 2025, she or her twin sister visited me at my local library]
V
- News from Kate Hutchinson: also
part of my Cluster of Pervert Narcissists
in Published
on Twitter / X 30 July 2024
by the photo “19 June 2021 music journalist Kate Hutchinson buys a flat next to
mine:” her 12 February 2025 IG’s post includes: “... magical,
mystical... magical diagrams, vibrant tarot deck... sex magic!”
VI - News from Anne Pigalle: also part of my Cluster of Pervert Narcissists in Published on Twitter / X 26 June 2024. On 22 March 2025 “Tarots anyone ? It’s an art - never wrong in 30 years - here live at Dublin Castle , part of a whole evening I organised for post Valentine for HP #tarot #annepigalle” Reading tarot in public...
VII
- News from Sabine Kindel: she doesn’t
appear in my Cluster of Pervert Narcissists
but she needs
publicity! She started
work for the Barbican in the
music section from 2011. When I started my first
blog, I contacted her. On 22 June 2013, I had a
press invite by a UK label to see perform Rachid
Taha at Barbican. I met a friend
(DH aka Mr Hutchie) there who was also invited (I first met him in 1997 at my RSL radio
show W10 FM aka Ladbroke Grove FM). I tried to engage with Kindel but I found her very distant and cold. I told my friend
about it but he denied adding she was great at inviting him to gigs a Barbican! She never replied any of my
following emails! On 7 April 2022 at 8.04PM, my aggressor wrote: “My first time at The Barbican - it’s never too late, is it?” (https://x.com/E.......T....../status/1512144189634588686)
– he came from Paris to enjoy a gig in London that I was banned from going! An
hour before that gig, I received four anonymous phone calls which I tweeted
about on 9 April 2022: “less
than 10 peeps including my flat agent + hackney. gov have my phone friday
7.04.2022: 4 anonymous phone calls @ 7pm. nobody calls me, i’m 🦻 https://x.com/E.......Tellier
/status /1512144189634588686 ''My first time at The Barbican - it’s never too
late, is it?": 7.04.2022, 8pm” In July 2022, I wrote French
journalism: integrity & discretion... dignity. Sabine Kindel left the Barbican
in August 2022 for Universal UK as International Communications Manager! I am no
longer friend with DH but he and SK do interact regularly
on IG!
In
Spring 2022, my female GP told me I had delusion of persecutions, I was paranoid and
psychotic. For the past three years, she has harassed me by texts (inviting me
to garden by the GP’s practice) and emails: despite my numerous complaints, my
female GP practice director has
finally ceased harassing me in February 2025!
Female
GP has been trying to section me in
a psychiatric institution in Hackney that is well known for
mistreating patients. In March 2025, female GP practice director admitted so.
Female GP has been trying to section me in a psychiatric institution in Hackney that is well known for mistreating patients. In March 2025, female GP practice director admitted so.
French
journalist Luc Bronner for Le Monde has
indulged on psychiatry: “J’étais
intrigué par la psychiatrie publique et cette responsabilité, si importante, si
complexe, de devoir hospitaliser des patients contre leur volonté. Aux confins
du secret médical et du secret judiciaire, du pouvoir des préfets, des
médecins, des juges… https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2025/01/10/les-crises-aigues-de-la-psychiatrie-publique-des-services-pepites-coexistent-avec-des-endroits-d-ou-tout-espoir-est-absent_6490744_3224.html”
...
he knew I was supposed to be sectioned; he is a friend of my aggressor.s; he
and Jerome Fenoglio (Le Monde’s Director) and Louis Dreyfus (General Manager for Le Groupe Le Monde (Telerama, Nouvel Obs, Le Monde
etc) have never replied my emails since 2017 about them
erasing me on Grenfell Tower and signed
it Florian Reynaud!
Boris Bastide who supports my aggressors
reveals his new top position as a film critic for Le Monde
on 10 January 2025
promoting Luc Bronner on psychiatry
Meanwhile, 23 January 2025, Noémie Luciani, precarious film critique,
trying to reclaim Brecht after she was raped at Cannes Film Festival -
@ 39.40 citing Bertold Brecht: “our failings prove nothing but we are far too few to fight against infamy. We are waiting from those watching that they can feel shame ”
vs Boris Bastide soon to go to Cannes Film Festival...
How am I supposed to feel when I discover that Mayor of Hackney Caroline Woodley booked without my consent to a psychiatrist,
Natalie Shoham, specialised in psychosis,
schizophrenia for deaf and menopaused women! I am deaf and menopaused! I
don’t know Caroline Woodley but she
knows that East
London NHS Foundation Trust... is a dodgy rat laboratory! What’s more? Natalie Shoham does Marathon
in Paris and Brighton where her brother works
and where JD Beauvallet, former
colleague at Les Inrocks and my
agressor’s best friend, lived from late 90’s to 2020’s. His daughter did
a few Marathons when living in Brighton...
The way people with less privilege
express themselves to the way they are treated... by the dominant ones:
The
way women talk; ‘Nasty
Woman’ ‘Bad Hombres’; Hillary
Clinton is a witch with a capital B;
Once upon a time,
long time ago, there was a Witch Hunt... in XXI Century,
how often do we hear White male accused of sexual misconducts say they
are victims of Witch Hunts?
[UPDATE: ON 4 APRIL 2025, FOLLOWING FASCIST MARINE LE PEN CONDEMNATION, TWO MEN USE "WITCH HUNT" TERM TO QUALIFY IT!]
And those, fake
allies, who pretend to defend victims, who encourage #MeToo, who are feminists:
When humans who are non white men have a job in a Western
country, they, caricaturally, evolve in a racist, misogynist, sexist, anti
LGBTQAist, ableist, body conformist environment (I’m sure I’m forgetting some).
They step into a place where an invisible law has been implemented before they
were allowed to compete! They reproduce tacitly a language. Journalism is fatefully
one.
8 March 2025, Marine Turchi from French online newspaper Mediapart admits claiming her male colleagues attitude in the investigative sector: “« repris les codes » de ses confrères : « J’aurais peut-être dû essayer de les casser mais je me les suis au contraire appropriés. Ce sont des codes presque sportifs. Moi aussi je me suis inscrite dans la course, la compétition, la rapidité, dans un certain rapport aux avocats, une façon de communiquer sur les réseaux sociaux, dans les médias. »”, she regrets getting into the race instead of breaking these so-called codes!
What trumps do humans off the original sphere possess?
However Mediapart’s
introduction is totally biased as they seem to emphasise on the fact many of
their humans in power are women “... entreprise
dirigée par une femme, que ses deux codirectrices éditoriales ainsi que sa
directrice générale sont des femmes...”: my aggressor at weekly paper Marianne seems to be employing women...
who are anti #MeToo; white male solicitor - who defended a white male
politician accused of sexual misconduct in court against female politicians and
Mediapart (all labelled as on a Witch Hunt against
men...) - is very proud to employ female solicitors only in December 2024 and posing with another bunch of female solicitors in February 2025! The
solicitor who harassed me in Spring 2019 in
defence of my aggressor was a woman employed by that solicitor...
10 years ago, when I contacted Edwy Plenel and other male journalists in Mediapart asking for a job while revealing my trauma at Les Inrocks, nobody replied – yet Edwy Plenel is all over #MeToo on 8 March 2025 “En ces temps obscurs où les ombres gagnent, la révolution #MeToo inspire et insuffle nos résistances. Écoutez Lola Lafon dans « L’échappée » sur @mediapart.fr #8mars2025 #JourneeInternationaleDesDroitsdesFemmes www.mediapart.fr/journal/fran” - I emailed on a regular basis. Some years ago, soon after #MeToo, I tweeted / emailed about military/gendarmes/police wives who are victims of sexual oppression by their husbands. When living abroad, they have nowhere to turn to. My father was in the army and we lived in Africa. Mediapart employed Justine Brabant as a freelance in 2018 and as a full time journalist in 2020.
While female journalists at Mediapart might not have been able to investigate properly my aggressor – because he is a journalist; because most of Mediapart’s staff is friends with Les Inrocks; because they employ former Inrocks – why couldn’t they insist on employing me? What’s so cool about voyeuring my poverty, my homelessness status, my 10 year agony?
On 4 March 2025, British author, journalist, podcaster,
and musician Musa Okwonga wrote “If
your country is doing things you find shameful, please find a way of channelling
that shame into action. Shame makes us retreat - and that punishes the victims
of our country’s actions a second time, because it renders the people who care
inactive. Please don’t give cruelty that second victory.” Paraphrasing it and
stealing his very well pinned statement: if your colleagues or fellow
journalists / politicians / activists are doing things you find shameful, please
find a way of channelling that shame into action. Your shame makes me invisible
– and that punishes me twice, because you look like protecting my aggressor.s
and it renders my voice silent. Don’t be cruel and criminals!
Accusations of being nasty women or weird people, having an unpredictable
behaviour or being verbally abusive when voicing discrimination and abuse is
sadly still a recurrent plague in western countries. A Witch Hunt in disguise
without proper trial!
Elsewhere, in less privileged lands, witch trials are not a
thing of the past. Accused of being a witch are increasing
and punished.
How
is it rating in terms of Witch Hunt? A short birdview:
In
India 50 to 100 women labelled as witches are killed every year;
Some (mainly) women in Sub-Sahara Africa are accused of practicing witchcraft;
The Amazon and Papua New Guinea are still executing women for practising witchcraft;
Amina
Bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser was beheaded in 2011 in
Saudi Arabia; Muree
bin Ali bin Issa al-Asiri was beheaded for witchcraft in Saudi
Arabia in 2012;
From the 60’s to 2000, more than 40000 people have been accused of witchcraft and murdered in Tanzania;
Ama
Hemmah
was burned to death in 2010 in Ghana after
confessing to being a witch; Akuah Denteh was beaten to death for
practising witchcraft in Ghana in 2020; Witch camp in Ghana.
Since
2021 a resurgence in witch hunts in Democratic Republic of
Congo
has been observed burning eight women to death for practising witchcraft out of
324 accusations;
Ngema Makhemu was accused of witchcraft and burned to death in South Africa in 2000 by lynch mob, along with housemates Mbhejile Sibiya, Hlengiwe Ntuli, Samukelisiwe Masikane, Khanyisane Ngema, and Siyabonga Masikane.
Why is modern witchcraft violence growing? “Modern witchcraft persecutions are driven largely by religious fundamentalism and are further exacerbated by factors such as civil conflict, poverty, and resource scarcity.”
One 2020 UN report states at least 20,000 “witches” were killed across 60 countries!
United
Kingdom has also been a growing
concern on Witchcraft-related violence. In
2010, 15-year-old Kristy
Bamu was killed in London.
IX) Chuncho; Weak; Atomic
Soda; Pure Morning;
Souka Nayo; The Mystic Dream; Douce France; Leysh Nat'Arak; Woman
In January 2025,
The
Atlantic wrote “The American populism of the late 19th century was a rebellion of
working people against financial elites; the American populism of this century
is one of financial elites feigning rebellion while crushing the vulnerable”.
In February 2025,
The
New York Times
reported
“The order threatened to cut federal
research funding to force hospitals to stop “the chemical and surgical mutilation of children””
A new-ish Witch Hunt is on!
“Mutilation” or “so-called
transition” is how a government describes trans youth humans who experience
gender dysphoria. Targeting a relatively small percentage of the population as
if trans identity was a contagious plague and pointing fingers at them
nationally / globally using visual images and dirty language in the hope of triggering
disgust while purposely causing harm is a nasty way to perpetuate persecution.
Are transgender people a
threat to cisgender people?
Are disabled, homeless or
unemployed people a threat to society?
Women and children occupy a
large proportion in society... yet they are abused endlessly!
Animals and nature are by
definition voiceless and pay a high price for it!
Spending time to demonise,
marginalise a minority... what a mission in life!
Since the beginning of
Witch Hunt, long before Christianity, up to today, millions of magical people
have been oppressed or executed worldwide by (mainly) White male in power. They
never seem to lack opportunity to create misfortune, manipulating weak minded
humans to join their farandole.
Art, culture and nature
should provide abundance to shift our mode of thinking. Re-addressing or at
least questioning how we live, work and communicate with each other should be
central to our mental health well being.
Let me tell you four
stories. The first one is partially made up, but how far am I from its truth?
Once upon a time, magical
women all around Earth picked up
flowers for healing, cooking, medicine purposes. Male doctors in the-learn and
developing a science were largely fed up with women’ interference who were not
allowed to study a new genre of medicine. The one that added chemicals to
flowers or plants. Mid-wives were regarded as absolute devils – who are again a target in politics. Male doctors invented a
capitalist game: flower shop. They picked up vulnerable women and children,
gave them little money in return of them going to fields and bringing back
flowers. There were no flower left for magical women to pick but men could buy
flowers by bouquets and offer them to their loved one(s). With so called
bouquets of flowers in their hands, they would be labelled as nice lads. That
brand new label was very handy because behind closed doors they could beat up
or rape their wives. Who would believe a woman complaining of being assaulted?
Centuries later, single women teach their sons about offering flowers, a
phenomenon otherwise called ‘rape culture’!
https://x.com/carowoodley/status/1792270026054975840
@StJoHospice: “Congratulations,
Caroline! Thank you for your support.💙”
Set up by Father Gallwey an Irish Jesuit Priest
[“⬇️ the
first allocation of funding for hospices has been announced and we’re so happy
to see
@UKLabour Government
supporting the excellent St Joseph’s Hospice in #Hackney -
@StJoHospice does
so much to ensure each life in their care is lived well.”]
20 years ago, I followed a
couple with a knife... A week before leaving London, UK for Lima, Peru, one of
my former warehouse mates wanted to celebrate, a bit late, my birthday. She
brought champagne. I was all packed, anxious, I had developed a colony of mouth
ulcers. I never had mouth ulcers before. She was my favourite former warehouse
mate out of the ten others – I had moved to a next door warehouse. At times,
she had unexplained severe crisis. We were drinking, laughing, she told me how
courageous I was to give up everything for the unknown, she wished she could do
that. At some point, her boyfriend texted her and she asked if he could join
us. I told her he could on the condition she behaved with him as many factory
mates had told me when in crisis, she would slap him. She promised she would be
on her best behaviour. I sat on the floor, so they could sit next to each
other. We spoke and laughed when suddenly she disagreed with him and ‘gently’
pushed his face. I poked her leg as a reminder. He demonstrated his point – he
was a very well regarded scientific in his field – and she slapped him. I told
her this was unacceptable behaviour and before I could finish my sentence, she
asked screaming if I wanted to fuck him and slapped me so hard I heard a crack
on my jaw – I’ve had a painful, at times, dislocated jaw ever since. I got up
and punched her. I never lifted my hand on anybody before, I’m more a verbal
person or rather a writer, so I was surprised by my action, especially when I
saw blood from her mouth. Her boyfriend took her hand to leave as the situation
could go nasty, though none of us spoke, argued, swore at each others. It was extreme
silence. When they went through the narrow kitchen’ corridor, they hit the
bunch of cutlery drying. I managed to retain it from dropping by its longest
bit... a pineapple knife. It remained in my hand as I followed them out. It
actually calmed me down when I saw I had a knife. I was from angry to smiling
inside myself, I found the incongruity of that context so absurd. It could have
been a spatula, but it was a knife. After going to the hospital for my jaw, I
bumped into two of my former factory mates who asked about the knife situation
as it was the talk of the warehouses around: I explained what happened. The day
before leaving, I met her brother who lived in an adjacent warehouse. I asked
him why she could be so violent because I adored her – she is one of the best
persons I have ever met on Earth and
it saddened me we would never speak again. He was very close to his sister, he
knew we had developed a strong bond and he believed time would ease our wounds.
He revealed she was on daily medication and was not allowed to drink or do
drugs, so the mixing was never good news. She didn’t want people to know she
was on medication because she didn’t want them to know she suffered from
schizophrenia. Leaving the following day and having much more urgent
preoccupation than spreading ‘rumours’ about her mental illness, it was safe
for him to speak out. Recently, I randomly bumped into a warehouse mate. He
reminded me the knife episode. When I asked him if he knew what happened, he
laughed and said it was funny to picture me as a murderer...
Back from Peru in 2008, living an hour away from Paris, I came across a French artist called Frederic or Jais or OOF. I was supposed to help him tour in Latin America and other under privileged countries. On RSA, I was looking for jobs in Paris in the culture sector. Things were a bit dodgy with that artist, but I thought it could be me being paranoid. When an employer in Paris was ready to employ me at a super minimum salary, my jobscentre’s officer advised me against because I would have to pay a train journey: I would struggle. I insisted I should try, so the jobscentre’s office searched funding to pay my monthly train journey. The Department accepted to participate. Because my potential employer would receive financial help from the Culture Ministry, the jobscentre’s in République (Paris) I applied to suddenly refused my application invoking my ‘distant’ location... they ‘forgot’ to mention only Parisians could apply. My jobscentre’s officer called the guy in charge and he said there was no favouritism... the whole office was in dismay and so sorry for me. Someone at the office knew my plans about getting artists to travel and asked me about that OOF guy. They found out that he was registered at the République jobscentre’s’s office where he lived; he never turned up to any of their meetings and never received any warning. I was a bit shocked because he had a music company. They said he changed its status to charity so technically he could receive benefits. Searching further, they found out he had a furniture company based in Normandy (Le Havre?). When my contact in Fondation des Alliances Francaises asked me more information about him, I was in a troubling position: I knew he would not pay me a percentage of his extravagant fees and I didn’t want to say he was ripping off taxes and the French government, so I emailed her he was doing drugs. Next thing I knew, Gaelle Massicot-Bitty of the Institut Francais – part of French Culture Ministry as mentioned on my article A Cluster of Pervert Narcissists - got him to tour in India and Nepal, all expenses paid for a week or two. I found out he was also friend with my aggressor.s, all of them, especially Christophe Conte! My guess is he was a very good friend with Christophe Girard as he performed regularly at the 104 venue! My jobscentre’s’s office believed he was behind the cancellation of my employment.
When Sandrine Rousseau became president of commission des enquêtes on sexual violence in the culture environment in France in Autumn 2024, I was curious... I have been reporting its dysfunction for 10 years. When Frederic Bonnaud (former Les Inrocks director) was questioned about how La Cinematheque functioned, I was jubilating. He was pure luminescence of machismo and misogyny! 14 March 2025, French prominent feminist Caroline de Haas was very angry when she realised a prominent figure of French cinema was being questioned: “J’avoue que quand j’ai vu ce matin que le monsieur qui a appelé à me gifler à la télé et a déclenché une vague de cyberharcelement contre moi a été auditionné à l’Assemblee nationale pour parler des violences sexuelles, j’ai câblé. 🤯 #MondeALEnvers” He was not invited to have tea! Sandrine Rousseau has just announced late March 2025 her role as president had ended and my aggressor has reposted an article from his magazine Marianne criticising Rousseau’s role “Dix-neuf avocats mettent en garde contre les méthodes de plusieurs commissions d’enquêtes parlementaires, dont celle présidée par Sandrine Rousseau qui vient d’achever ses travaux.” Signataires : Basile Ader, François Artuphel, Thomas Bidnic, Robin Binsard, Romain Boulet, Karine Bourdié, Fanny Colin, Julia Courvoisier, Emmanuel Daoud, Marie Dosé, Jacqueline Laffont-Haik, Céline Lasek, Jean-Baptiste Marre, Julia Minkowski, Christian Saint Palais, Sébastien Schapira, Lucie Simon, Martin Vettes, François Zimeray, Avocats à la Cour.
He has
deleted his repost but most female solicitors who signed against Rousseau, have backed my aggressor when
I revealed humiliation and sexual oppression he inflicted on me while working
at Les Inrocks aged 23-24!
Whatever
the result of these investigations, it’s a culture shift in France to take
conscious, to look deeper into discrimination, how women are still treated
despite #MeToo!
In a
country that gave birth to Punk and The
Benny Hill Show, among other
wonders, journalism and street extravagance were also prominent in shifting
ways of seeing and behaving.
At present, there are two major splendidly
curated exhibitions showing off what the 80’s and 90’s had to offer in the Perfide Albion territory: The
Face Magazine: Culture Shift at
National Portrait Gallery until 18 May 2025; Leigh Bowery! at
Tate Modern until 31 August 2025
(video for exhibition)
Both of them feature, without honouring her, Margaret Thatcher, then Britain Prime Minister! Both are vibrant though Leigh Bowery is less artificial in its montage: it’s crude, reinvigorating, outrageously unceremonious and absolutely fabulous! Bowery explored identity, celebrating differences until his AIDS related death.
Fergus Greer Session 3, Look 14, August 1990
© Fergus Greer. Courtesy The Michael
Hoppen Gallery
The Face Magazine helped
shape – like Dazed and Confused, ID etc - new ways of using photography and new style
of writing though it raises questions whether they exploited female
photographers from its start early 80’s featuring Jill Furmanovsky and Sheila
Rock – both were famous and
published in NME, Melody Maker etc - to at least mid 90’s when “The Face reached its highest readership...
in the years of Blur vs Oasis in the
battle for Britpop... a group of Young
British Artists promoting, among other things, sharks in tanks, and a New
Labour government proclaiming, “things can only get better””. Anette
Aurell, photographer in 1993: “The
Face offered new photographers
creative expression on a living platform and were paid a small page rate, so we
produced the editorials with our own funds but in return enjoyed the outreach
and popularity of The Face
publication”
When
I escaped Paris and France altogether for London due to sexual oppression I was
subjected to at French magazine Les
Inrocks in 1991-1992, I embraced the capital
culture scenes. It had a lot to offer though the multiculturalism in which I
was happily navigating daily was not represented so flagrantly in galleries and
museums.
Starting
a blog in 2013 with Passage at the Wapping
Project, I was still hoping to be hired, aged 45, as a
journalist in art, culture, social issues stuff... instead I was aggressively
plagiarised by French journalists while I signed on!
Half
a millennium after Gutenberg’s movable-type
printing press, women are still discarded from being journalists in France!
Other exhibitions highly recommended in London:
The
exquisite Remembering’s first solo
institutional exhibition of Arpita Singh
outside India at
Serpentine North Gallery until 27 July 2025 featuring tarot cards in Journey (1971), an astrology map representing “56 men, 12 women, rest aborted, burnt or banished” in My Lollipop City (2005), feminine fables
or the glory of ageing. No miss her video in the tiny bookshop: Singh is absolutely precious.
Inka Essenhigh: The Greenhouse at Victoria Miro until 17 April 2025 is absolutely magical, especially when the mid afternoon Sun interacts below Essenhigh’s paintings.
Also at Victoria Miro until 17 April 2025, Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts... “My young self and I – we are the same person. I can stretch out my old hand – with its age spots – and hold my young unblemished hand.” — Celia Paul.
Ed Atkins at
Tate Britain until 25 August 2025
is a must-see exhibition if into life and death but mucho death and dark
humour, repetition and emotions or lack of them. While at Tate Britain, do not miss
under any circumstances THE
80s: PHOTOGRAPHING BRITAIN “a
landmark survey which considers the decade as a pivotal moment for the medium
of photography. Bringing together nearly 350 images and archive materials from
the period, the exhibition explores how photographers used the camera to
respond to the seismic social, political, and economic shifts around them.”
until 5 May 2025. A photo of female photographer Lesley
Boulton about to be hit by a policeman on
horse at a strike miner is exhibited and also appears in Donald Rodney’s Soweto-Guernica’s piece (see down paragraph
on his exhibition).
Tanat Teeradakorn’s National_Opera_Complex at Gaswork was a Thai intriguing and understandably loud “National Opera Complex examines how a country is represented, the forces that shape and promote certain ideologies, and their impact on minds, bodies, and socio-political realities. It questions which stories are told, which are omitted, and how both can be used to construct a more truthful and nuanced portrayal of a nation.”
A few days left before Theaster Gates 1965: Malcolm in Winter: A Translation Exercise ends on 6 April 2025 at White Cube. Gates engages “with the methods of care and preservation nurtured in Japanese philosophy and craftsmanship, drawing upon them as a framework to consider the role of art and aesthetics in shaping political, ideological and cultural legacies.”
Female gazing for Her Gaze: A Woman's Truth at Rele until 18 April 2025
Noah Davis at Barbican until 11 May 2025 concerns themes of racism, bereavement, illness and domestic violence but really “If I’m making any statement, it’s to just show black people in normal scenarios, where drugs and guns are nothing to do with it”
Donald Rodney’s work – Visceral Canker at Whitechapel until 4 May 2025 - is strongly associated with the Blk Art Group of the 80’s. Created in 1982, its movement of Young Black Artists, critics and curators formed in Wolverhampton, UK, was coincidently set up a year following the New Cross Massacre with its "Thirteen Dead, Nothing Said” march from Fordham Park to Hyde Park and the ensuing Brixton riots. The first Black British filmmaker Horace Ové had somehow predicted the rebellion against ingrained racism in the Police and government inadequacy in his mid 70’s Pressure film.
Meeting British fellow student artist Keith Piper at University, Rodney started exploring themes related to race, identity, Black masculinity, technology as well as addressing issues around Britain’s colonial past and his chronic illness infected with racism – one of his exhibited work Flesh of my Flesh is a terrifying scar on his skin done as if Black people had tough skin... hard to stitch! The artist lived with sickle cell anaemia, a debilitating blood disorder, forcing him to undergo surgeries and ongoing treatments leading to increase lack of mobility until his death in 1998.
Among the many profound art works in display, The House that Jack Built is a headless
self-portrait, a scarecrow-like figure dressed in a spectral slave man seated
on a straw chair in front of a house made of X-rays... like a decaying strange
fruit. Made in 1987 and curated at the time by artist Lubaina Himid, she remarked that “his X-ray pictures, eerie in their secret
visual codes, overlaid with bright sharp strong realism, are the perfect
metaphor of Britain as a sick nation”.
Upstairs in the gallery are sport trophies in vitrines
called Doublethink. Looking deeper
into their engraved plaques, the words are taken from daily prejudicial abuse
Black people have suffered: on one hand, they are celebrating for their prowess
in sport, on the other they are victims of racism!
Rodney’s struggle against
discrimination and vulnerability to his illness treatment, or more
appropriately inequity to health care – as seen in the first paragraph of this
article - still sadly resonate over 20 years past the new millennium.
The
philosopher Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes said “there is treasure everywhere”, so many
magical people wished they had found it!
VF!X?C) Patriarchy reclaimed by women in Hackney
DECEMBER 2024
17 December 2024: Jennifer Wynter (assistant director of benefits and homeless prevention at Hackney Council). [UPDATE: see 29 January 2025]
and
recognises
her hard work to fight the homelessness crisis, crying over spit milk “These numbers can feel despairing, and this
year’s awards ceremony was a poignant display of the emotion felt by those of
us working in the sector”... Mid July 2024, she
didn’t seem to care
much about those dying in her care! Caroline
Woodley, Labour Mayor of Hackney,
couldn’t bother showing concern over those dying in her borough either. Yet she
did share her ‘emotions’ on X / Twitter:
6 December 2023 “The
victim who died following yesterday’s tragic shooting in Vine Close has
been named as Lianne Gordon. @MayorofHackney: "My thoughts and everyone’s
at the Council are with the loved ones of Lianne and the other injured
victims." ℹ️
https://orlo.uk/feavG”; 26 December 2023
“My thoughts go
out to the family and loved ones of those affected by this tragic loss of life.
Thank you to the emergency services for their support on the scene. We will do
all we can to help the police with their enquiries and support those impacted
by this terrible event. https://x.com/MPSHackney/sta/MPSHackney/status/1739606802973544669”; 28 April 2024
“Solidarity with #Hackney unions for
#InternationalWorkersMemorialDay We met at the London Fields memorial bench for
public
servants who lost their lives to Covid-19, to honour them and to commit to
“Remember the dead. Fight for the living.” #IWMD24”; 30 May 2024
“Response from @mayorofhackney Caroline Woodley
to last night's shooting in Dalston.
Anyone with information that can help police should call 101 or post @MetCC
reference CAD 8082/29May. To remain anonymous, call Crimestoppers on 0800 555
111.”; 24 July 2024 “This is terrible news. It is so desperately sad
and wrong that a young boy’s life has been taken. I hope we can come
together to support his family, friends and communities. If anyone has any
information about the incident, please do call 101 quoting CAD 5387/23Jul.”;
24 July 2024 “'This incident took place in a busy area and in broad daylight. There
must be people who'd be able to tell us more about what happened' Mayor of
Hackney, @carowoodley
urges anyone with information to come forward after a fatal stabbing in Hackney
last night.”; 1 August 2024 “A man has
tragically died following a stabbing on Northwold Road, near Stoke
Newington Common, on Tuesday 30 July. @MayorofHackney: "My thoughts are
with his family and friends during this incredibly difficult time. https://orlo.uk/RHCci
”; 3 August 2024 “The terrible
events in Southport and devastating loss of three young girls, is made even
more distressing by those spreading misinformation and targeting Mosques.
Forever thankful to the communities who are honouring the victims and standing
together against hate. #HopeNotHate”; 4 September 2024 “Finally, the #Grenfell report has been
released. Seven years after that tragic
injustice, the grief and anger remains. We've heard it in the voices of the
survivors and the bereaved and felt it on the silent walks. Commitment to
reform is vital. 💚”; 14 October 2024: “I’m so sorry to
hear about the sudden loss of Nick Perry. Sincere condolences, love and
strength to his husband Andrew, and to family and friends hit by such
incredibly sad news. Please read this warm and insightful tribute, by fellow
local history powerhouse Amir Dotan.”; 10 November 2024: “It was an honour to join the parade and to remember
those who have fallen. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning /
We will remember them.” – Binyon #LestWeForget”
23 December 2024:
Around 5PM, I received three calls from 0204 532 13
13. Being deaf, I didn’t pick up but I intensely stressed because it was
insisting. At 5.12PM, I received a text informing me
I had a voicemail. My voicemail goes “Please don’t leave a message, I’m deaf!”Not having credits on my phone + being deaf, I have no idea
what’s up!
24 December 2024: I checked the number at the library: https://who-called.co.uk/Number/02045321313: it might be from Hackney Council though their number is usually 0208 356 xx xx – [On 2 January 2025, I received a letter from Jennifer Wynter “...Full Case review has been determined on 23 December 2024... Wynter knows I’m deaf!]
JANUARY 2025
2
January 2025:
Letter sent 23 December 2024 from Jennifer Wynter – Homeless prevention
officer at Hackney Council, backed
up by Caroline Woodley, Mayor of Hackney - her usual confusion
& vagueness:
3 January 2025, email from rogue landlord:
4 January 2025: On my way to my local library, Lea Bridge ward Cllr Margaret Gordon was 'waiting for me' by the library though her surgery was due elsewhere (+ she doesn’t live near the library!). The other Lea Bridge surgery was advertised on 2 January for 11 January: “Lea Bridge ward Labour councillors next surgery (advice session) is on Saturday January 11 from 1.30pm to 2.30pm, Venetia's Coffee Shop, 55 Chatsworth Rd E5 0LH. * Appointment in advance is preferred - call 07890654068 or email leabridge@hackney-labour.org @hackneycouncil”
Once back home:
Letter from rogue landlord
Week starting 6 January 2025, I received various post cards from state agents on a daily basis. In the past 10 years, I might have received three or four a year of these types of postcards:
8 January 2025: Letter sent 2 January 2025 from Jennifer Wynter – Homeless prevention officer at Hackney Council, backed up by Caroline Woodley, Mayor of Hackney - her usual confusion & vagueness:
9 January 2025: I owe £600:
11 January 2025: Around 8AM, while having breakfast by my window looking over Lea River, a woman by the Walthamstow Marches right across my window got her phone out by - 5°C aiming in my direction. I middled fingered her, she rushed away. A minute later, she was back walking towards Lea Valley Park Bridge, crossed it. Minutes later, she was below my window... stopping to take picture.s of the canal boats...
UPDATE: Though posted on 16 January 2025 by Julie Zaugg on her Instagram,
it looks like she was across my window as temperature on 16 January were 6°C:
it was not as frosty as the image is! Liked by Arnaud
De La Grange, London correspondent for Le
Figaro.
Around
Mid day, I published my first words of Witch
Hunt from 2 January to 9 January.
I
went back home.
4.18PM, Caroline Woodley, Labour Mayor
of Hackney posted she was in my hood: “Starting
off the New Year with @HackneyLabour, talking to #Lea Bridge residents on one
of those stunning cold, crisp and sunny January days 🌹❤️”
I
guess Caroline Woodley was middle
fingering me for criticising Margaret
Gordon on an email dated 8 November 2024 “‘Complex’ is a word I have seen written so
many times (from my ward Cllr in
September 2023) in one year that I associate it with ‘we can’t do anything’!
Yet, does my ward
Cllr work hard… if only my Lea Bridge neighbours knew who she is or
where/when to go to meet their Cllr!”:
9.41PM: my Labour ward Councillor Margaret Gordon and co posted “Starting the year in Lea Bridge ward, @HackneyLabour team have been listening to residents on the doorstep about their issues: cost of living crisis, rising rents, tackling climate emergency. Contact Lea Bridge cllrs: leabridge@hackney-labour.org.uk @hackneycouncil @Margaretgord”
15
January 2025:
Debt Collector for EDF sent email +
letter: I owe over £500. I have not received any letters from EDF for over six months... Has corrupt
postman not delivered my mail? My mail has been regularly opened and left
opened...
17
January 2025:
Hackney Centre sent a letter dated 13 January 2025: My Job Seeker Allowance (JSA) will be £92 a week from April 2025 [Yet I haven’t signed on since early December 2024; I haven’t applied to Universal Credit; Jennifer
Wynter has sent me many letters informing my allowance have stopped...]
18
January 2025:
Hackney Centre sent a letter dated 14 January 2025: My JSA
stopped on 2 January 2025 [Yet, Jennifer Wynter sent me a letter dated 23 December 2024
– received 2 January 2025 – informing me my JSA stopped 18 November 2024
as published above]
20
January 2025:
landlord sent email about rent arrears and Section 8 - eviction notice; He
urges me to speak to him. No thanks, I’m tired of his lies, the misleading from
Hackney. I’m resting...
21 January 2025: Landlord sent letter from his email. How funny he is so prompt when he let me rot in his flat for eight years with no bath, no shower... accusing me in court of all sorts of psychiatric illnesses! A court case he lost in September 2023! Anyway, I received his letter around 3pm when all letters are through my letter box around 5 or 6 pm...
Caroline Woodley needs foster carers for
Hackney: “Message
from Hackney's Labour Mayor: Foster carers play a vital part in the lives of
children who come into care, & we always need new people. If you have space
in your home and your life, find out more about how we can support you to
become a foster carer https://hackney.gov.uk/fostering?utm_campaign=1913739_Hackney%20News&utm_medium=dotdigital&utm_source=emailmarketing&dm_i=6NIJ,150NF,29Y9DU,5AFO1,1”
Why can’t she ask me if I want to foster in a flat she can offer me in order to escape rogue and dangerous landlord? Because she has labelled me as being psychotic as well as displaying an unpredictable behaviour between January and March 2024! In August 2024, Woodley decided to book without my consent with a psychiatrist Natalie Shoham who specialises in schizophrenia and psychosis on menopaused women “Shoham N (2023). Associations between common mental disorders and menopause” and deaf women! Did Woodley think viciously I would naively throw myself to the rat laboratory I’ve been avoiding for two years and get sectioned?
East London NHS Foundation Trust where Caroline Woodley hoped to get me down has been reviewed in December 2024 as “Abhorrent,
unethical, harmful” for under 18’s! Yet I have been loud about EL NHS FT ever since my GP has been
insisted for two years to get me in... being seen by a
psychiatrist that has no experience on women victims of sexual oppression!
Yet, Caroline Woodley knew I was a
victim of sexual oppression from 2021 which she looked
up again in January 2023:
Why
would a woman send another woman to her death while claiming she supports women
victims of abuse?
Due
to me being alive in November 2024, Caroline Woodley arranged to erase me
from celebrating Xmas / Winter Fest
at Woodberry Community Centre. Sarah Young, Labour Councillor for
Woodberry was quite certainly making sure my presence was not welcome...
[UPDATE - February 2025: Once again, Caroline Woodley is on a piss take
journey... this time at Sadler's Wells
where everybody
is welcome "A great day for
culture! @Sadlers_Wells East is open and that "YOU ARE WELCOME""]
9 November 2024
“Would you, or a local business you know, like a stall at Woodberry Down’s Winterfest?” https://x.com/redmond_centre/status/1855192285748572471
People
I volunteer with in Woodberry CC had
received an email from Zimmie Sutcliffe,
project coordinator but architect IRL. They asked me if I was coming. I told
them he might have erased my name on that occasion; they all witnessed how rude
he was to me because I dared complain about how refugees were treated like
shite in the centre! Sarah Young promised to investigate and despite CCTV...
nothing!
Back
in Spring 2024, when Ramadan was over, people I volunteer with asked me to help them for
the celebration. Three people of WCC
didn’t come: Zimmie Sutcliffe, Finn Keane-Conley and the problematic
& catholic French girl Caroline...
Caroline Woodlley didn’t show up!
After
the dispute I had with Sutcliffe, he
and girlfriend ostracised me; they organised a photography session
with a French guy called
Pierre Bureau: How funny I’m French and a
photographer... but no longer gets invited to anything!
Around
that time in Autumn 2024, they installed a CCTV in
the kitchen without letting me know
Woodley is proud of her one year as Mayor of Hackney: https://x.com/carowoodley/status/1857492588921606638 “It's one year since I took office as
@mayorofhackney The year has gone quickly and there is much more work to do,
but I promise to keep listening, learning and doing my best. Thank you to
everyone who has helped, challenged, campaigned and given their all - you make
#Hackney!” –https://x.com/hackneycouncil/status/1857488456743821425 “"Each and every day I recognise what an
honour it is to serve the people who make Hackney." An update from
@mayorofhackney Caroline Woodley, after one year in the role.”.
Yet, she has misled Hackney residents “But campaigners said other options were not explored and the council's
consultation had "misled the community"… Hackney Council accepted its
consultation materials were "not sufficiently clear"” as well as
being unlawful “You’ve also overseen an *unlawful* consultation on
proposed children’s centres closures - as the cabinet member for Early Years,
will you be taking responsibility for #Hackney council ‘misleading the public’
as was argued by our legal team? https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98ej9rl31qo
@hackneycouncil”. Hackney needs a safe Mayor, not
dictator ego-tripping!
23 January 2025: I think Julie Zaugg was dressed in gothic
attire by the library at 10am! What a disguise from a strict
Catholic good girl!
24 January 2025: I just watched the last surviving persons
from Hitler genocide.
26 January 2025:
29 January 2025: On 28 January, I wrote this bit “17 December 2024: Jennifer Wynter (assistant director of benefits and homeless prevention at Hackney Council) interviews herself...” at around 3PM. At 5.16PM, Wynter sent an email “Our records show that you were due to pay an agreed arrangement payment of £413.54 to your council tax account.” Followed by a text message at 5.26PM. The woman is a total creep backed up by Caroline Woodley, Labour Mayor of Hackney.
30 January 2025 to 8 February 2025: I received an avalanche
of emails and snail mails from electricity / Water debt collectors! Electricity
threatens to come to flat and takes stuff (?); I’ve also received snail mails
from Jennifer Wynter harassing me about
Council Tax she and Caroline Woodley
Mayor of Hackney know I can’t pay! Jennifer Wynter also called me and left a message: my voicemail goes "please don't leave a message I'm deaf" She knows I'm deaf!
FEBRUARY 2025
1 February 2025: I wrote part I above: I) Allez mon voisin à la
crèche that includes “Between Stonewall and Aids, a brand new
world was shaking up the planet through Reggae to Punk to Sinead O’Connor.” JD
Beauvallet, former colleague at Les
Inrocks, has been hunting me ever since I resigned in 1992...
33 years on, he tweets / X on Reggae and Punk “grand
homme!”
about
photographer
Dennis Morris exhibition on Reggae
and Punk... Morris has so many exhibitions between Paris (Agnes B is very link with Les Inrocks that dates back to the
times I worked for them from 1991) and London that
he even forgets to mention some... I think it’s the
first time I see JDB mentioning Morris! Yet Dennis Morris lived in Paris in the 90’s
for eight years where he collaborated with French
music magazine Rock & Folk.
Had he been a photographer for Paris based Les
Inrocks, surely JD Beauvallet
would have included him amongst the eight White male
only photographers he ‘worships’!
3 February 2025: Within half an hour I
received two emails from my GP’s practice and my dental practice. Both of them
have seriously been taking the piss... My GP since May 2022:
I have seen no GP since and I’m menopaused...
Agnieszka
Polej replied to an email I sent on
18 December 2024:
response to an email I sent 20 September 2024
(which I'l come back to it)
December 2024 because as an homeless
I have no rights to free treatments...
I can't change my glasses either, if they break, I can't see!
4 February 2025: Sarah Harvey (friend with Carmen
Gray) emailed on my Yahoo,
over 10 years after arguing with me because I’m just a blog. Funny that once she wanted to know my ID and I told her I didn’t always recognise people,
she
stopped sending invites and JD
Beauvallet emailed me this on 17 Oct
2014, 14:05 jdthedj@pavilion.co.uk: “Mais honnêtement, n'y vois pas de mépris, je ne me
souviens pas - ma mémoire est poreuse et je souffre de prosopagnosie depuis des
années”. JD Beauvallet that searches cultural blogs
where he says he’s after
blogs from 4.14mns – once he found my blog, he contacted PRs and asked who
was behind Babylondonorbital, PRs
indulged... my guess only but how far am I from the reality?
JDB tweeted / Xed
about Dennis Morris as mentioned
in 1 February 2025.
6 February 2025: Jennifer Wynter is working hard for Caroline Woodley...
7 February 2025: Dentist emails about an
appointment that I cancelled in December 2024...
Hours
later, landlord emails some bullshit
I replied I had nothing to say to him + he visited the flat in December 2024.
8 February 2025: I wrote part II above: II) Yes I’m a Witch
11 February 2025 @ 9.39AM: Landlord emails he’s
coming on 12 February... if I don’t open my door, he
will charge me £19 per hour... I replied in BCC to my MP Diane Abbott:
Random
thoughts: how depressing in XXI Century, a US
president fools himself as Jesus.
When a French male député wants to light a religious candle... that Sandrine Rousseau has to interfere in that total nonsense!
Following
writing FEBRUARY 2025 part between 3 and 5 PM
on 11 February 2025, I received a text from Jennifer Wynter @ 5.19PM
and an email about not paying my Council Tax bill!
12 February 2025: Landlord turned up at 11 AM. I was beside myself! He was all soft spoken
telling me he was all here for me, to help me. I told him to leave loudly. He
didn’t. I slammed my door. He freaks me out so badly.
Late
afternoon, postman got half way through letter box electricity debt collector:
they are going to change my meter reading to a Pay As You Go box, meaning I
have no more electricity; I have no gas... Landlord has not paid his court fees
(£30000) on the case he lost against me in September 2023. Once he pays, I get
nearly £2000 (I paid my Legal Aid fees in 2022) as my ward Cllr Margaret Gordon and Mayor of Hackney Caroline Woodley know. But as long as he doesn’t pay, I can die!
Mid February 2025 to late February 2025
sum up: I
have seen on a regular basis Julie Zaugg
sitting a few tables away from where I sit in the library I go to! How can she
possibly know I go there? She lives in Windus
Road, N16, two minutes walk from Stamford
Library! Why would she travel 1km to get to mine? If I’m sitting on an
isolated spot, she comes like a furious creep near me and leaves the library:
this is stalking and behaving like she is visiting a human zoo! As written on 11 January 2025:
Around 8AM, Zaugg
was below my window and she
published my place on Le Monde on 21 February 2025.
This
is what I wrote to Jerome Fenoglio, Caroline Monnot, Louis Dreyfus, big bosses of Le
Monde
From Late November 2024 to mid February 2025, every Saturdays, a Jeremie Souteyrat twin looking sat opposite me in library! UPDATE: 16 MARCH 2025. at 2pm, I am sitting in Stamford Hill Library (1km away from my usual library), pretty empty. the Jeremie Souteyrat twin like was to sit in the empty space when he saw me and sat right behind me, so I sat on the other side of my table and I'm facing him 'reading' "An Introduction to Psychodynamic Counselling (Basic Texts in Counselling and Psychotherapy)" by Laurence Spurling... but who is Laurence Spurling? He is a Consultant Adult Psychotherapist at East London NHS Foundation Trust where my GP and Mayor of Hackney Caroline Woodley tried to have me sectioned. REMINDER: ‘Abhorrent, unethical, harmful’: East London NHS Foundation Trust diagnoses ‘personality disorder’ in under-18s – it’s a rat laboratory for over 18s!
this is his ugly face to be compared with Jeremie Souteyrat:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BfzgHQ1le1F/?hl=en //
https://www.instagram.com/p/BgiWUhLA1UC/?hl=en
On Youtube it's even more probant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN9tRJK5GYM
I
left the library at 4.15pm - it closes at 5pm (my camera time is set on
summertime btw). I said to myself: if he leaves in the next 15 mns, then he
defo stalks / intimidates me! If he leaves at 5Pm, I will still believe he
stalks / intimidates me but he will be granted the benefice of the doubt... So I
sat outside the library, hidden. At 4.25pm, he got out and while he was setting
out the bike, his coat and helmet, he saw me. I indulged and took pictures. He
was furious, but I’m magical:
4 April 2025: I left my home between 10.30 and 11.45 AM going towards Springfield Park, E5.
A neighbour [friend with Abi Hopkins
(‘psychologist’
and Chair of RobinHood Garden RHG – Hopkins and Caroline Woodley, Mayor of
Hackney, banned me)] was outside (before banning me, I was going to RHG unaware it would be closed and that
neighbour would be outside, I intuitively thought she reported me to Hopkins):
1 or 2 doors away, a very good Dutch friend with Vicky
the racist abusive RHG manager, lives there too.
As I passed RHG, a tiny woman was coming towards me
and gave me a real nasty look! I intuitively thought it could be Natalie Shoham (psychiatrist mentioned
in VIII) Sonegaly “How am I supposed to feel when I discover that Mayor of Hackney Caroline
Woodley booked without my consent to a psychiatrist, Natalie Shoham”). Was she going to Abi Hopkins?
CCTV by RHG
View from RHG's CCTV
CCTV by RHG
Or was she going pass my place?
5 April 2025: the woman who comes to my
library (and friend with Jeremie Souteyrat lookalike) came.
6 April 2025: On my way to Stamford
Hill Library, in Springfield Park, the woman was waiting (?) for me in
Springfield Park; she didn’t attend the library but gosh Security guy was rude to
me!
Since
my
article mentioning Jeremie Souteyrat
from “Published on
Twitter / X 19 October 2024:”,
he has been published
intensely in NYT from January 2025... Thanks to London based French Photo Editor @ NYT Maud Bodoukian,
previously at Le Monde!
This
is so sickening! Bunch of fascists white supremacists!
15 February 2025:
I wrote
part III)
Hold Up
22 February 2025: I wrote part IV) Too
Sick to Pray
28 February 2025: I wrote part V) Nouar
Received
a mail pack: I’m invited to the Tribunal
25 March 2025:
Landlord
owes the Court £30000 from what he lost against me on 7 September 2023, he
still hasn’t paid anything but he can do whatever... I’ll play dead!
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