Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about for a while…and took some time during my train trip through Switzerland to write them down..it’s a bit messy..sorry, but I just wanted to start sharing some ideas! I find some pictures soon!

Part one: some visual ideas 〢 Here are two things that I find very interesting : the first is the work of Juergen Staack, a german photographer who takes Polaroid of people in a city and shows these photographs in the public spaces of another city. I find his work very interesting, I like this concept of opening windows on another world/another reality, intruding somewhere else’s reality into the public space. This is definitely pure urban life, but probably this space disruption, showing l’ailleurs, puts more emphasis on the disruptions composing urban life, and on the multiplicity of different lives composing cities. So, I like this paradox, well it’s not really a paradox, but I like those little evidences that allow us to stop and think about diversity. It’s interesting but probably also easier, since somewhere else’s diversity and difference is certainly less disturbing than one’s own diversity, as it would appear when showing the city’s own people.

〢 the second thing I find pretty inspiring is what I have seen in the ethnographic museum where I studied. I’ll try to see if I can find something to show you some exhibition, but it’s difficult to get the feeling if you don’t actually walk through it! Anyway that’s not really the point though. I can still describe you how it works: basically it‘s all about representing/showing those objects composingour day-to-day activities. What I like is that these objects are put in a way that tells us something about our own way to see (and do) the other, ourselves, and the objects. What I like is that feeling of strangeliness that suddenly emerges from the familiar. And that’s precisely what most inspires me: the process of transforming the familiar in strange and the reverse: transforming the strange in familiar. That’s probably how we all work in our day-to-day activities, transforming the strange in familiar, and then stopping to consider the strange, and looking for the strange somewhere else, but the familiar strangeliness, the one where the thin line between strange and familiar is easily crossable and identifiable. But sometimes the strange is ieasier to cope with when it follows from geographical and spatial disjunctures, rather than from social, individual disjunctures! Again, we tolerate the strange more easily if it’s far from us! At the same time, I think it is extremely interesting to look at the familiar with those strange eyes, because it puts into reflexion and question what surrounds us! That’s vasically why I like that museum, they manage to constantly play with that line, with much humour as well. But there is another very interesting thing there, which is their way to show that things (objects, people, ideas) don’t exist per se but are mostly (historical and/or spatial) social constructs. For example, there is a room dedicated to Tibet. But rather than showing objects from Tibet, they show those people and objects who actually built Tibet, or at least, the idea we have about it. That means that they put a picture of Richard Gere, of the Dalai Lama, a book of Tintin au Tibet, and other such books that helped building the myth of Tibet.