Manuela Morgaine

May 7 to May 14

April 9 to April 16

April 2 to April 9

March 26 to April 2

March 19 to March 26

During a war, Tristan, mortally wounded, calls the blonde Yseult to his aid because she alone is capable of healing him. He sets up a code with his men and asks that a white sail be hoisted to the top of the mast of the boat that will bring her back if she agrees to treat him and a black sail if she is not on the boat. The sailors take on board Yseult the blonde, eager to join her beloved, and raise the white sail, but when the boat approaches the coast, Iseult with white hands, his wife, consumed by jealousy, tells Tristan that the sail is black. Believing himself abandoned by the one he loves, he lets himself die. When she arrives at his bedside, Yseult the Blonde, learning of Tristan’s death, dies of grief in his arms. The lovers are dead.

March 5 to March 12

February 27 to March 5

Thinking of Safety boxes in banks, this image reappeared in my mind. All those virtual lovers, all those swipings, matchings and datings contained in this gigantic data base. Isn’t this the very representation of the end of love? Mechanization and the boxing of thousands of dehumanized solitudes?

February 20 to February 27

February 13 to February 20

February 6 to February 13

January 30 to February 6

In September 2023 THE CROWN LETTER was invited to participate in an exhibition in the city of Prague entitled 𝑾𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒘𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒘𝒂𝒏𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝒅𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝒕𝒐𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒓𝒐𝒘? 𝑻𝒂𝒍𝒆𝒔 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒂 𝒇𝒖𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆. Barely a month later, on October 7, among two hundred hostages, Mia Schem was kidnapped by Hamas during the massacre at the Re’im music festival. A few weeks after her release, she had the phrase tattooed on her arm: We will dance again 7-10-23. For several months I have been wondering how such synchronicities are thinkable, possible, even if they do not have the same meaning, something here tells us that the question of dancing the future remains a question of resistance and survival.

January 23 to January 30

January 16 to January 23

Our Kids – the color of peace. Installation, Paris, le 7.5, 18/12/2023 (video 15’15mn)

After forty days of silence, astonishment and despair in the face of the atrocities on both sides in our Middle East which is particularly dear to me, came a gesture, a reaction, some form to be carried out as a sign of resistance and ceremonial . The casting of children’s bodies in lead sheets representing child victims of war in Gaza and in the same space-time, the musical creation with my musician accomplice Michaël Grébil Liberg, in which I pronounce the names of the Israeli child hostages. A visual and sound installation in a single room to bring them together. And then a reading of Frank Smith’s GAZA, by then written ten years ago and which continues to resonate today. This Whole Together, OUR KIDS, because on both sides, these children are ours.
The pomegranate is just as much a mystical fruit, fertility and paradise for the Hebrews as for the Palestinians, a weapon that pulverizes everything, turns bodies into lead.
Materials : Lead sheets 0,1 mm/0,5mm/0,75mm/1mm & fresh pomegranates.

January 2 to January 9

December 12 to December 19

November 28 to December 5

It was in Sesimbra, Portugal, October 7, 2023. I was there in Portugal presenting a movie about Syria before war, and it seemed a little paradise away from it all. I read about the tragedy happening in this moment in Israël a few minutes later, after shooting the pictures of this wonderland. These images will always have a very special taste for me. I look at them as a unreal slideshow, a suspended moment, before the announcement of a disaster for our humanity. A few minutes later, I saw this man running alone, as if he was running away, or running for help, was he a survivor? I thought we were all survivors.

November 14 to November 21

November 7 to November 14

Towards them, I implore the future
Let it be done:
of our mixed roots
of our combined resistance
of our white flags hoisted

October 31 to November 7

October 7, 2023, these massacres that day made me say for the very first time:
I was born to an Egyptian Jewish mother and a Polish-Turkish Jewish father.
My maternal grandfather, Joseph, an Egyptian Jew from Alexandria, sang Oum Kaltoum at home.
My father's family, the Morgenstern, were largely deported and exterminated in the camps.
In the summer of 1968, our plane, falsely mistaken for a plane of the Israeli company El Al, was attacked by the terrorist forces of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine founded by Georges Habache) on the tarmac of Athens airport. . We are, the pilot, my older brother, my parents and I, the rare survivors of this attack.
In 2003 a Flemish neo-Nazi illegally occupied the cellar of our Parisian apartment to protect himself from an interpolation warrant issued against him. Learning that we were Jewish, we experienced nearly two years of persecution before succeeding in having him expelled.
These three traumatic and founding events at the same time, just like my Jewish/Arab origins, mean that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict always places me on the tightrope of the border. Impossible since childhood to take sides. I move from one territory to another without ever feeling the enemy anywhere other than in the conflict itself and the inextinguishable hatred it engenders.
When I went to shoot a film in Syria in 2005 and 2007, my family was deeply offended. In my eyes and without naivety, we are, biblically, brothers by land and blood.
I have a visceral connection with Arabic music and I cry every time I slip my wish paper into the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
I bet on a common prayer. HERE on the Palestinian side, and THERE on the Israeli side, my gesture of casting the body of a man in a sheet of lead is intended to be a strong sign in the face of intolerance and the untenable inhumanity of the operations.

October 10 to October 17

Very early that morning we saved my Mother. The butterfly had been there against the window, probably since the night. I wondered if it was the specter of maternal death that seemed inevitable. The moth remained motionless for several hours, there, as if through a magnifying glass, no doubt to remind me of the fragile gap, this thin membrane wall between life and death. I wanted to make sure he was alive and I opened the porthole. The threat vanished and my tears flowed. Both were alive.

October 3 to October 10

Images MANIFESTO made for the exhibition in Prague’s French Institute (13/9-4/10 2023) WILL WE STILL WANT TO DANCE TOMORROW? Tales for a future.

July 25 to August 1

July 11 to July 18

« Avec ces gants vous traverserez les miroirs comme de l’eau. 

Il ne s’agit pas de comprendre, il s’agit de croire. » 

Orphée, Jean Cocteau, 1950

July 4 to July 11

June 27 to July 4

June 20 to June 27

Il arrive qu’au cœur des tourmentes et des guerres qui englobent tout de boue, de sang et de mort, on puisse s’arrêter de faire face quelques moments qui deviennent sacrés. A ce moment-là, l’apparition d’un monde en paix reprenant ses couleurs et sa grâce sont sources d’apaisement. A la brutalité viendra toujours s’opposer la douceur dans un interstice de ce qu’on regarde.

It happens that in the midst of turmoil and wars that encompass all mud, blood and death, one can stop to face a few moments that become sacred. At that moment, the appearance of a peaceful world resuming its colors and its grace are sources of appeasement. Brutality will always be opposed by softness in an interstice of what we are looking at.

June 6 to June 13

May 30 to June 6

May 23 to May 30

GHOSTING – I met a Ghost, I’m still haunted by the Ghost.

The practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.

A form of psychological violence that consists of disappearing overnight, ignoring someone, not responding, without giving any explanation.

May 16 to May 23

May 9 to May 16

May 2 to May 9

April 25 to May 2

On dit, là-bas, que l’univers est né d’une seule goutte de lait. On dit, là-bas, que les arbres sont des cornes d’abondance et qu’ils pourraient nourrir encore longtemps l’humanité. 
We say there that the universe was born from a single drop of milk. It is said there that the trees  are horns of plenty and that they could feed humanity for a long time to come.

April 18 to April 25

Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, what we should be, what we should look like, the way not to be us, this pageantry, so far from the authentic nudity of this face, the expression of lucid rage.

April 11 to April 18

THE UNTOUCHED-  Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica, 2023.
A primary forest is a virgin forest, which has remained identical over the centuries without the presence of man transforming it. It has therefore never been exploited, fragmented or cleared by human hands and has remained intact over time. 

April 4 to April 11

March 28 to April 4

March 14 to March 21

February 28 to March 7

February 21 to February 28

February 14 to February 21

Life line

As I write, 
the 7.5
 magnitude 
earthquake 
has claimed
33 000 lives 
on the border 
of Turkey 
and Syria. 
In these days 
of 
unspeakable
 tragedy, 
they operate 
on me 
out of 
a vein. 
As I
 am being
 drawn 
in marker 
with 
the 14 
incision points 
and the starting 
point
 of this vein
 before surgery, 
and as I 
gradually 
fall asleep,
 I see this
 gigantic fault
 in the earth 
with its
 red 
shaking dots 
 drawn 
by seismologists.

February 7 to February 14

January 24 to January 31

January 17 to January 24

January 10 to January 17

January 3 to January 10

December 20 to December 27

December 13 to December 20

Hypnotic Parrots.

December 6 to December 13

From Rûmî,  the Persian poet, these words say that the face of Iranian women is frozen as long as it is surrounded by a veil that keeps them so far from their desire.

November 29 to December 6

At that time, I was drawing a large nautilus to be sculpted out of concrete and installed in the seas at the Gulf of Mexico. I looked at the river and saw the boat sinking. Are we the ones drawing our own engulfment?

November 22 to November 29

November 15 to November 22

The first time I learned English I learned to pronounce Dad & Mom. Then I learned the word Dead and couldn’t understand why Dad and Dead were pronounced almost the same. This is my father Daniel. Behind the picture, it is written: “Dance of the father with the bride, Rome, 1984. “ Dad died in 1999 but often in my dreams he calls me from the only phone box he tells me he found on this side of death. He doesn’t call me often because there’s a line, often for years.

November 8 to November 15

Shocked this week in France by the invective to a French deputy of African origin by a far-right deputy: “GO BACK TO AFRICA!” I remembered this sculpted face that I had seen in the Ousmane Sow Museum in Dakar. In front of this face I then said to myself that all the suffering of migrations and exile was expressed by this single head of clay that I then saw emerging like a deep root.

November 1st to November 8

In August 1992 I was traveling the roads of Andalusia. It was in this unique landscape that I saw for the first time a lamb being born. These are the few clumsy images I have left of this moving and sacred moment. The same evening I became pregnant with my son, born under the sign of the bull. Since then, I wondered if the vision was not in itself the birth of a form. If it was enough to see in order to bring forth.

In these infinitely barbaric times, I cling to this living memory, this time when we watched animals being born, when we gave birth in joy and carelessness, without imagining that our children would have to face such a present.

October 25 to November 1

You wake up one morning on the river Seine in Paris. You hear the sound of a helicopter coming and going. You know that the war is there but yet it has not yet reached your country. You open your eyes and you see this scene repeating itself for several hours. The same. You understand that this is special forces training. You ask what they train for when they take off in the air from the river at eight or ten. While touring Paris. Then returning to land on the boat again. You are told that these special forces are training in case of a terrorist attack on the boats during the 2024 Olympic Games, the opening of which will take place on the river and will transport all the athletes. You think: – wherever you are now, war is in the air.

October 18 to October 25

October 11 to October 18

October 4 to October 11

September 27 to October 4

Mahsa Amini died in Iran at the age of 22 following her arrest for leaving a lock of hair hang out from under her Hijab.  The Song of Songs celebrates the hair, and the entire face of women since the dawn of time.

Behind your veil. Your hair is like a herd of goats. Hanging from the sides of Mount Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn sheep. Your lips are like a crimson thread. Your cheek is like half a pomegranate. Behind your veil.
پشت پرده ات موهای تو مثل گله بز است. آویزان از کناره های کوه گیلعاد. دندان های شما مانند گله گوسفندان قیچی شده است. لب هایت مثل یک نخ زرشکی است. گونه شما مثل نصف انار است. پشت پرده ات

September 20 to September 27

September 13 to September 20

September 6 to September 13

July 26 to August 2

Brazilian Indian chef Raoni for forty years he has been fighting to defend the lungs of his land: the Amazon rainforest. Today our forests are burning and I can see his face I met a few years ago in Paris, his face and his labret lip which says that we alone are bearers and that we can change the world. When he was 15, Raoni started wearing a labret, an ornamental disk which warriors wear on their lower lip when they want to show they are ready to die for their land.

July 19 to July 26

Our world is on fire and the epidemic is blowing its waves. Angel is this masked and burned figure seen in the studio of a very dear friend in Orvieto, a few steps from the Duomo where the frescoes of Luca Signorelli paints bodies reborn from the worst plagues.

July 12 to July 19

June 21 to June 28 Women’s Art Factory

June 14 to June 21

June 7 to June 14

May 31 to June 7

May 24 to May 31

May 17 to May 24

May 10 to May 17

Farewell Frédéric. You said you weren’t going to die. You were too young for that. You arrived from Burkina Faso about ten years ago, without official papers all these years. Many of us on the shore were helping you, giving you work, but above all sharing your laugh. You were regularized here in France barely two months ago, after a real way of the cross. When I draw you, two days ago, your  face was that of a living dead. Today you are no longer here among us. I wondered why even us white people had African mask heads when we were on the verge of death. Seeing him for the last time, passing my hands over his hair, saying to him: « Goodbye Frédéric, I pray for you », i remembered an ethnographic film where a tribe in New Guinea sees white ethnologists arriving with their camera and were running away horrified, because for them who had never seen white people, they thought that we were dead.

May 3 to May 10

“We were one day on an intelligence mission in Boutcha, and a soldier dressed in the Ukrainian uniform stopped our car. My friend Ihor saw a Russian army T-shirt sticking out of the soldier’s collar, and he opened fire. The man collapsed but the Russians were ambushed in three or four different places and they fired in turn. Ihor was shot, I was injured in the arm but it is thanks to him that we survived,  » says Sacha, 27, a volunteer alongside Yuri, after leaving his job as a mason and the city of Khmelnytskyi.

April 26 to May 3

Our Democracy - April 24, 2022, River Seine, Paris.

April 19 to April 26

April 12 to April 19

Tribute to Mantas K. (1977-2022) Mariupolis, Mantas Kvedaravicius, 2016.

Mantas Kvedaravicius Ukrainian director has just died in Mariupol with his camera in his hand, while shooting a documentary on the war. He was forty five years old. In 2016 he had already made this documentary MARIUPOLIS at the time of the Donbass war. He was an angel, and a committed poet, until the end, his camera in his hand, over there, testifying for all of us, until the end, over there, his camera in his hand, until the end.

April 5 to April 12

A fallout shelter is intended to protect its occupants from the mechanical and thermal effects of a nuclear explosion (or a nuclear accident) as well as from radioactive fallout, by allowing them to survive for a certain time deemed sufficient to be able to exit without danger. Shelters can be divided into two types: the simple fallout shelter and the fallout shelter also resistant to the blast of a nearby explosion (blast shelter). This is my shelter, the bottom of my home. In this period of war, my point of view is contaminated by the threats.

March 29 to April 5

 красота спасет мир – краса врятує світ – Beauty will save the world – La beauté sauvera le monde. Fiodor Dostoïevski. Video, 2’44, River Seine, Paris –  with Rodolphe Burger’s voice.

March 22 to March 29

Paris, March 21, 2022 
Dear friends from Kyoto, 
 It's the first day of spring here in Paris. For three days, a cloud or rain of ocher sand from the Sahara has covered our country and all of Europe. 
 It's hard not to see in this cloud of dust a radioactive threat from Russia...  
For this I learned to trace the word Heiwa/Peace by giving it the colors of Ukraine.  
May this sign be a lucky charm for all of us around the world. 

March 15 to March 22

Motanka dolls appeared in Ukraine five thousand years ago. Our Ancestors believed that natural threads and materials used to create these dolls are magical and protect family from evil spirits and tragedy: hay, straw, wood, herbs, dry leaves, grains, seeds, filled with fragrant herbs. The doll is an amulet, so it cannot have a human appearance. Empty face. Having no face, it is endowed with all physical existence and therefore it cannot cause misfortune. According to beliefs, people who added eyes, lips or nose to a Motanka would die with it, as their soul moved within the doll. Motanka is above all a protector of children.

March 8 to March 15

“And I learned how faces crumble,
Under the eyelids, how anguish emerges,
And the pain is etching on the tablets of the cheeks,
Similar to the rough pages of cuneiform signs;
How black curls or ash curls
Become, in the twinkling of an eye, silver,
How laughter fades on dark lips,
And, in a dry little laugh, how fear trembles.
And I pray to God, but it's not just for me,
But for all who share my fate,
In the fierce cold, in the torrid July,
In front of the red wall gone blind.”
 Anna Akhmatova, Requiem.

March 1 to March 8

February 22 to March 1

February 15 to February 22

 “Women of the ruins » from the German, die Trümmerfrauen – from Trümmer meaning « ruins » and Frauen « women »- refers to women who, after World War II, helped clear cities of the ruins of buildings that had been bombed. These women aged 15 to 50 had been ordered by the Allied occupying powers to participate in the reconstruction of the country by clearing the streets. Many of the men who lost their lives in the war in 1945 included among the women of the ruins widowed mothers forced to work. Companies responsible for clearing the streets of German cities listed these women in their register as Bauhilfsarbeiterin (« construction worker »), Trümmerarbeiterin (« ruin worker ») or Arbeiterin für Enträumungsarbeiten (« worker clearing”). The main work consisted of the demolition of damaged buildings that remained standing, most often using manual winches or pickaxes. After the demolition, the bricks that had not been damaged were salvaged and reused for repairs and the construction of new buildings. These bricks were carried to the road by human chains.

February 8 to February 15

February 1 to February 8

January 25 to February 1

8 days, the memory of the plague came to insinuate itself into this isolation room. Is it the bite of a scorpion? Time of the body humiliated by contamination, beauty remains outside the only consolation. Watching remains possible and keeps the rest of the world changing and alive.

January 11 to January 18

January 4 to January 11

December 14 to January 4

I THOUGHT I WAS IN HEAVEN –  WAVES OF CARE, a collective art work for TRIGGER.

It is said that Saint Nicholas resurrected three children, who had been murdered and pickled in brine by a butcher planning to sell them as pork during a famine. Coming back to life, one of the three sighed: “I thought i was in heaven!”

December 7 to December 14

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launches Operation Cast Lead. On December 27, 2008, the evening of the lighting of the seventh Hanukkah candle, and the last Shabbat of the year, the IDF launched Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, with the aim of striking the infrastructure and launching pads of Hamas rockets following continued terrorist activity and rocket fire from the Gaza Strip targeting Israeli civilians. On the evening of January 19, according to the provisional toll reported by the head of the emergency services in Gaza, Mouawiya Hassanein, 1,315 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli offensive, including more than 410 children and 100 women, and more than 5,285. others were injured; according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, civilians make up 65% of those killed. On the Israeli side, 3 civilians and 10 Israeli soldiers lost their lives, and 113 soldiers were injured along with more than 84 civilians, according to B’Tselem. According to IDF, there were 1,166 Palestinians killed, including 709 militants from various armed groups, which corresponds to a maximum of 39.2 percent of civilians. B’Tselem speaks of 1,387 Palestinians killed, including 773 civilians (including 252 children under the age of 16), 330 activists (including 19 minors) and 248 police officers.

November 30 to December 7

November 23 to November 30

November 16 to November 23

“My dear Crown sisters,  I am very happy to be able to cross the border for the first time since we met at the beginning of the pandemic and to be able to bring our work to the MAPI Museum in Montevideo, Uruguay, as part of the Bienal Sur. I will go by boat early tomorrow morning, cross the Rio de la Plata, and arrive in Montevideo at noon. I will try to record the trip so that I can share it with you and somehow feel accompanied. I confess I’m a bit nervous, it’s a challenge for me, I will do my best! I want to thank Natacha and the Bienal Sur team for all the work to make this happen and all the Crown sisters for trusting me to represent them in Montevideo.  As you know, my English is not good, so I also thank Deepl for helping me every time I write to you : ) I leave you the first picture, the first step for this trip, the place where yesterday I had to take the covid test to be able to travel. Also the link to the MAPI Museum, www.mapi.uy ,which I am very curious to see. It is very symbolic that we are in a museum of Pre-Columbian and Indigenous Art in a small country in South America, and that I am representing women artists from various parts of the world whom I do not know and do not know when I will meet. Women who don’t even know how much they supported me during the lockdown and how happy I am to see them every Tuesday for the last year and a half. I am also proud that all this, the Biennial Sur, comes from a public university in my country, where anyone who wants to study can do so with academic excellence and free of charge. I myself was educated at the public university, so this journey has many layers of meaning for me. That’s all for now, I wish us all the best and good luck in this new adventure! Lots of love and besos, Ivana Vollaro »

November 9 to November 16

Manuela Morgaine – Searching for Native American’s lands. ERASE THE BORDERS – a Collective Art Work for Bienal Sur (Argentina).

November 2 to November 9

Manuela Morgaine SCRATCH THE WORLD ERASE THE BORDERS – a collective artwork for Bienal Sur 2021 (Argentina)

The great cyclone – Dancing Song of the great cyclone Wendy in 1972. Olrat is an Oceanic language spoken in the west of Gaua Island, in the Banks Islands, in northern Vanuatu. Olrat is one of the endangered languages.

“A cyclone has ravaged our country our bones are still shaking and the sorrow is taking hold of me for my offspring. It rose up above Maewo rose straight up to the top of our great volcano and then it slipped down to the lands wreaking havoc and ripping our country and off it fled, behind the clouds hooking on to Rocky Cape at Totghan on that shore to the bones o’ the Dead in the Weresur Hells drifted down to our Lake and to our Volcano it’s all shaking it’s all shaking in our country See yonder frigate birds hovering above our Makenwēn mountain they keep watch over our lands and fly away from me. *Meligho naslang* Sorrow has overcome all of us in this world in a thousand places o Hurricane o Rain falling till night Thunder dashing and bursting in the clouds the Ocean is roaring and crashing on the land and the ground keeps quaking we’re startled by its jolts our land’s collapsing all over a faraway collapse that keeps coming closer *a e we a* I can hear the waves crashing on the shore roaring away on the South Cape o Seasoiler, Boatholder, Moray-Eel! the ocean keeps pounding and crashing on the rocks.”

October 26 to November 2

I look you in the eyes Africa. I don’t forget that you are beautiful, that your black skin and shapes have the grace of statues, that you are a land of rhythms and colored fabrics, an ocean of fish, baobab horizons, and that your braided heads children are living treasures. I look you in the eye, Africa, I see chaos and desolation, misery, pollution, death and the lack of essentials, submission of the poorest. I look you in the eye, Africa, I want to drown in the feathers of your Cameroonian Juju hats and celebrate your rites and tribes, abandon myself to your music, let myself be carried away by your trance, no longer see.

October 19 to October 26

October 12 to October 19

The trail of tears, in Cherokee Nunna daul Insunyi “the trail where they cried” is the path of the displacement of several Amerindian peoples by the United States between 1831 and 1838. Between 4000 and 8000 of them died on the way, of cold, hunger or exhaustion. The two phosphorescent lines on USA map evokes the two trajectories of The Trail of Tears by river (Mississippi & Tennessee) and by land just as much as the two streams of tears on either sides of a face that remembers.

October 5 to October 12

Naxi song from Tackeng by Mrs Xiat Rulian. Naxi is spoken in the northwest of the Chinese province of Yunnan in the first loop of the Yang Tse Kiang river. There would no longer be a single inhabitant who could say a word in this language. Over 6 000 km long, Yang Tse Kiang is the third longest river in the world, after the Amazon and the Nile, refuge of a biodiversity and species unique in the world: Sturgeons, sawfish, the world’s largest salamander, Japanese crane, Chinese alligator. It is called Blue River. Like the endangered Naxi language, the Yang Tse Kiang is part of the threatened rivers.

28 September to October 5

Manuela Morgaine- WE ARE WORLDS – ERASE THE BORDERS – a collective art work for Bienal Sur 2021 (Argentina)

I draw your bodies SE Barnet, USA-Maithili Bavkar, IND-Alisa Berger, DEU-Kate Blacker, GBR- Andrea Blum, USA-Adriana Bustos, ARG-Anne Brunswic, FRA-Claire Chevrier, FRA-Pascale Criton, FRA-Juta Doberstein, DEU-Michelle Deignan, IRL-Silvana Deluigi, ARG-Liza Dimbleby, GBR-Anne Dubos, FRA-Dettie Flynn, IRL-Shani Ha, FRA-Julieta Hanono, ARG-Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel, FRA-Kyoko Kasuya, JPN-Ayilin Leclairc, DEU-Joanna Lombard, SWE-Saviya Lopez, IND-Ruth Maclennan, GBR-Ana Mendes, PRT-Maricarmen Merino, CRI-Aurelia Mihai, ROU-Doriane Molay, FRA-Manuela Morgaine, FRA-Tania Mouraud, FRA-Natacha Nisic, FRA-Kumjana Novakova, BIH-Sudha Padmaja Francis, IND-Emmanuelle Pellegrini, FRA-Piyarat Piyapongwiwat, THA-Catherine Radosa, CZE-Sandra Richard, FRA-Luise Schröder, DEU-Esther Shalev-Gerz, LTU-Mika Shigemori, JPN-Natalia Smolianskaia, RUS-Katja Stuke, DEU-Catalina Swinburn, CHL-Chiyoko Szlavnics, CAN-Mutsumi Tsuda, JPN-Ivana Vollaro, ARG-Emma Woffenden, GBR and mix them with a Badaga song – recorded in 1977 in the Nilgiri district in Tamil Nadu, India. Badaga is part of endangered languages.

Amma Amma, Amma Amma, Amma Amma, Amma Hette Amma [ancestral goddess of the Badagas] wearing a colored garment (bis) thinking that Hette will come to Bannari (bis) wearing a white tundu [white cotton cloth wrapped around the body of a Badaga lady like a dress] (bis) thinking that Hette will come to Bergani (bis) Amma Amma, Amma Amma, Amma Amma, Amma Hette Amma Having long hair (bis) tied [tighly] in a hair-bun like a Mangala nut, Hette (bis) in the right hand, a comb (bis) in the left hand, a nit-comb (bis) Amma Amma, Amma Amma, Amma Amma, Amma Hette Amma holding a milk vessel in the hand (bis) it is time to go to the stone cow-pen, Hette holding a milk-pot in the hand, it is time to go to the stone cow-pen, Hette it is time to go to the stone cow-pen, it is time to milk the buffalo Hette Amma Amma, Amma Amma, Amma Amma, Amma Hette Amma

September 21 to September 28

September 14 to September 21

The snail moves, only forwards, thanks to its foot, which is a gigantic muscle which contracts and lengthens alternately: this is the phenomenon of crawling. The average speed of a snail is one millimeter per second, or six centimeters per minute. The glands of snails also secrete different types of mucus containing many compounds that both allow it to move more easily by sliding over obstacles and even attach itself vertically to certain walls. Mucus is also part of the composition of the shell. Thick, it hardens and dries on contact with air, leaving a brilliant trail in the light. The songs and noises of the snails all seem to be reduced, with variations, to a single physical phenomenon: under the effect of a sudden and rapid retraction of the animal, withdrawn from its element and excited, a mass of gas, like air bubbles, trapped in a cavity is violently expelled and passes through a narrow orifice, encumbered with more or less viscous liquid, and it bubbles: the noise produced thus may go from a simple twitter to an almost musical sound close to kissing. Likewise, the contact between the snail’s shell and a glass pane emits, during the movement of the animal, a noise similar to that of a wet finger on a glass; the shell playing, opposite the glass, the role of a bow on a stringed instrument. Some snails produce plaintive calls when caught. In captivity, Planorbis corneus emit a high note, similar to the sound produced by a flute, with each daily feeding. Helix aspersa, utter cries of agony when cooked alive. These noises were at the origin of European beliefs, attributing to the « song » of snails a premonitory value.

September 7 to September 14

August 31 to September 7

August 24 to August 31

To make her lessons « palpable », Angélique de Coudray invents a mannequin made of wood, cardboard, fabrics, cotton, reproducing life-size a woman’s pelvis in layers and allowing various manipulations. This mannequin was used to teach the art of childbirth in the 18th century. Angélique travels across France and trains 5,000 midwives with the authorization of Louis XV. The island of Kythera in Greece is the birthplace of Venus.

August 3 to August 10

July 27 to August 3

July 20 to July 27

July 13 to July 20

July 6 to July 13

COUNTDOWN – AMORCES, 35 mm, 1999.

In July 1999 at the moment my father died, what strikes me the most is his watch as his own pulse stops, his watch whose hands keep turning. The next day, between tears and the energy of filial love, I go from one cinema to another in the streets of Paris and meet the projectionists in the booth to whom I ask kindly to give me abandoned film leaders. I harvest it during this month of mourning. Since then, every time I enter the month of July, from its first days, I see my father’s eyes closed, and the hands of his watch turning eternally. Each beginning of July this series of animated countdowns bring this unforgettable and heartbreaking moment back to life.

June 29 to July 6

June 22 to June 29

June 8 to June 15

INDIAN WAVE 3 – A wave comes and goes, an image comes and goes, as voices, as feelings, as journeys, as memories.

June 1 to June 8

In the Logic of our dreams, her epidemic diary filmed in Kerala, Sudha Padmaja Francis pronounces this sentence: « When will everyone get to sleep? » Since, every night, from the river, I keep asking myself.

May 25 to June 1

INDIAN WAVE 1 – In 2006 I left for my first trip to India with the hope of finding strength to change my life. First love journey to Mumbaï, in the chaos of the city, the peace of the island of Elephanta, and the sweetness of a beach filled then with recklessness. I had never seen those four hours of footage shot there before today. Here is a first extract – gesture extended to you, our Indian accomplices, as a sign of support during these epidemic times which affects your country more tragically than elsewhere.

May 18 to May 25

May 11 to May 18

May 4 to May 11

April 27 to May 4

Assan S. is an artist. Assan is like a brother for me. Assan had an accident and was amputated six months ago. My mother is my mother. My mother is a virus survivor. Assan makes today his first exhibition at the Invalides, in Paris. In this precise place, his first exhibition since losing his leg. I see him for the first time with his prosthesis, there, at the Invalides. He’s the one supporting my mother, he’s the one missing a leg. This is the best life lesson that I can receive. The sense of Care.

April 20 to April 27

April 13 to April 20

Testament song by Violeta Parra, chilean artist who committed suicide in 1967 at the age of forty-nine. First South American artist to exhibit at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. Song of shared life with charango, a five-string guitar. Brief passage of life. May the passage of LA VIDA on the Seine, accompanied by sand and black birds, be a sign from her.

April 6 to April 13

I grow my salads while waiting you grow your salads while waiting he/she grows his/her salads while waiting we grow our salads while waiting you grow your salads while waiting they grow their salads while waiting i conjugate the present with the future

March 30 to April 6

455 days later, Wuhan. January 2021: this image is part of the collection of haunting images that fill my Venetian Plague Doctor mask. I wear it from time to time to look at the horizon through my porthole and give it the power to predict future or call memory. We are the day of the exit from Egypt. How not to think about the ten plagues? So that the people of Israel can leave Egypt, God inflicts ten punishments or plagues, to convince Pharaoh to let them go. The waters of the Nile turn to blood; the frogs fall from the sky; soil dust turns into lice; horseflies fly; the herds die; men and animals are covered with boils and pustules; hail falls and turns into fire; locusts cover the entire surface of the Earth, eat plants and fruits and plunge the world into darkness; darkness; the death of the firstborn.

March 23 to March 30

March 16 to March 23

French slang calls the female sex a mussel. The word mussel comes from the Latin Musculus, the shell, just as much as from Modulus, the measure. No doubt we are made of this double nature, a shell that protects us and a measure of ourselves on the edge of our skin.

March 8

March 2 to March 9

“And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

William Shakespeare – King Richard IV.

February 23 to March 2

I went to Syria for the first scouting in 2005, then a second time in 2007. Today, I can precisely list EVERYTHING that has been destroyed and realize to what extent my rushes, despite myself, represent a reserve of documents. For fifteen years, I could not open these images, view them, so unthinkable was the superimposition of all these beauties with the traumatic images of war. I thought about it day after day, year after year, but the treasure seemed inaccessible. And above all, I didn’t know what to do with it. It was a dead letter. And then there was the shock of the movie FOR SAMA by Syrian director Waad al Kateab. I had never seen such an intimate document on the war. It took me several weeks to realize that her film finally gave birth to mine, which dreamed of being the antidote. During the pandemic, during the months of confinement, I viewed and flushed the long hours of footage. I imagined a particular film, a letter that I address to Waad. In this epistolary form, it is the exhumed images and sounds that bring life to a bloodless Syria. This film follows the chronological order of the shooting from 2005 to 2007 from Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Palmyra, to the desert of Cham along the Euphrates. The story of two trips, but above all a sensory and memorial experience, he seeks to literally express and show the country, its unforgettable humanity, its sumptuousness and vitality, its grace and its joie de vivre before destruction. mass of its people, its houses, its cities, its heritage.

February 9 to February 16

QUARANTA LACRIME – FORTY TEARS

Cecilia Mangini just passed away on January 21, 2021. She was a pioneer in Italian documentary cinema, politically engaged alongside Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is he who writes the words of STENDALÌ around the lamentations and funeral songs of the region of Puglia. Faces and gestures of mourning filmed like no one else. Here, a sixteen year old young man is celebrated and sung and mourned. For the fortieth week of the Crown Letter, as the whole world has been living in quarantine for almost a year, I think of this young man celebrated, and sung and cried, I see those white handkerchiefs waved like an intimate and loving flag of peace, as the only object to wring out sorrow above his childish face. I think this young man could be the face of the world right now that we all watch as we celebrate, sing, cry, shake our hair , our linen, our hopes as women, as mothers, watching over the world with all our strengths.

STENDALÌ by Cecilia Mangini, 11 minutes, 1960. Film clip cropped, contrasted, saturated by Manuela Morgaine February 2021. Text by Pier Paolo Pasolini spoken by actress Lilla Brignone. Music: Egisto Macchi

February 2 to February 9

January 26 to February 2

THERE IS ALWAYS LIGHT
 
« There is always light if we are brave enough to see it. There is always light if we are brave enough to be it.” Amanda Gorman – 20/1/2021
 
Spectrogram of my voice saying in loop these last two sentences of the poetess’s speech at Joe Biden’s induction ceremony.

Technics: PhonoPaper ©Aleksander Zolotov.
Launch the app PHONOPAPER on your mobile phone, point the camera at the code and smoothly scan the picture from left to right. You will be able to hear the sound and play the poem.

January 19 to January 26

January 12 to January 19

Crossing Abbey Road – Pandemic remix. Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport 7/01/2021.

January 5 to January 12

White pillows inhabit a room. They are listening rooms, offering an intimate posture. They all contain a few minutes of original composition. The sound pillows alternate between sleeping and waking, bringing out a musicality of low masses and soft waves. Tactile and sound surfaces. The association of the object with the world of sleep makes listeners wander like sleepwalkers. The sensuality of contact with the pillowcase, the music coming from inside the pillow, wants to offer a tactile and supra-sensitive experience of sound, experience another form of chamber music.

LOVE PILLOW

December 15 to December 22

En 2008 j’ai enregistré les battements de mon cœur afin qu’ils rejoignent LES ARCHIVES DU CŒUR de Christian Boltanski. Depuis 2005, il poursuit une collecte d’enregistrements de battements de cœur à travers le monde afin de rassembler tous les cœurs. Projet universel et utopique, LES ARCHIVES DU CŒUR sont conservées depuis 2010 sur l’île japonaise de Teshima, dans la mer intérieure de Seto.

In 2008 I recorded the beating of my heart so that they could join the HEART ARCHIVE by Christian Boltanski. Since 2005 he has been collecting heartbeat recordings around the world in order to bring all hearts together. A universal and utopian project, the HEART ARCHIVE has been kept since 2010 on the Japanese island of Teshima, in the Seto Inland Sea.

December 8 to December 15

stay, remain, rest, linger, loiter, dally, stop, stay put, stick around, kick about, kick around, bide, tarry, stand by, hold back, be patient, bide one’s time, hang fire, mark time, kill time, waste time, cool one’s heels, kick one’s heels, twiddle one’s thumbs, pause, stop, cease, halt, discontinue, rest, hold on, hang around, hang about, sit tight, hold one’s horses, sweat it out, await, look out, watch out, anticipate, expect, be ready, be in readiness, long for, hope for, count the days until, be postponed, be delayed, be put off, be held back, be deferred, be put on the back burner, be put on ice, delay, postpone, put off, hold off, hold back, defer, delay, hold-up, period of waiting, interval, interlude, intermission, pause, break, stay, cessation, suspension, detention, check, stoppage, halt, interruption, lull, respite, recess, postponement, discontinuation, moratorium, hiatus, gap, lapse, rest, entr’acte, stay awake, stay up, keep vigil.

December 1 to December 8

VIA LUCIS

Le jour de la Saint Martin, le 11 novembre, à la nuit tombante, les enfants défilent en processions, portant des lanternes, chantant des Martinslieder. Comme un appel à la lumière pour fendre la nuit. Nous sommes en 2020 à travers le monde depuis un an en proie à une épidémie. L’épidémie de peste frappe l’Italie entre 1629 et 1631 tuant un million de personnes, 25% de la population. Le médecin de peste portait alors un masque à la forme d’oiseau au long bec. Les gens croyaient que la peste s’était propagée par les oiseaux et que ce masque permettait à la maladie d’être éliminée du corps du patient en le transférant au vêtement. Le masque protégeait aussi le médecin de peste. Son bec était rempli de substances fortes et agréables, ambre gris, menthe et pétales de rose.

Offrir au monde ce chant de lumière murmuré par un enfant d’Italie, comme une conjuration d’automne aux oiseaux de malheur, porteurs d’épidémies.

On Saint Martin’s Day, November 11, at nightfall, children parade in processions, carrying lanterns, singing Martinslieder. Like a call to the light to cut through the night. We are in 2020 across the world for a year in the grip of an epidemic. The plague epidemic struck Italy between 1629 and 1631 killing one million people, 25% of the population. The plague doctor then wore a mask in the form of a bird with a long beak. People believed that the plague was spread by birds and that this mask allowed the disease to be cleared from the patient’s body by transferring it to the garment. The mask also protected the plague doctor. Its beak was filled with strong and pleasant substances, ambergris, mint and rose petals.

Offer the world this song of light whispered by a child from Italy, like an autumn conspiracy to birds of misfortune, carriers of epidemics.

November 24 to December 1

WITH YOU

prayer for our girls

concept & voice:  Manuela Morgaine

music & soundscape: ∑ichaël Grébil

When it happened in Nigeria April 14th 2014,  i couldn’t pronounce BRING BACK OUR GIRLS. I could only Pray for our girls. I couldn’t pray without pronouncing your names, more than two hundred. I couldn’t pray without asking Michaël Grébil to compose music for this prayer: WITH YOU.

Today in these pandemic times, I still pray for “our girls”, and more and more inside our Choir of women, Crown Letter sisters trying to create a space to be TOGETHER. Today, more and more WITH YOU.

© Manuela Morgaine & ∑ichaël Grébil – 2014.

10 November to 17 November

3 november to 10 November

OCCHIO

CAVE CANEM – Prends garde au chien – cette inscription on la trouve à l’entrée des anciennes demeures de Pompéi. En Italie OCCHIO, littéralement ŒIL indique un danger imminent dont il faut se protéger. Premier jour du deuxième confinement à Paris, en un temps épidémique hors de contrôle, mêlé à la terreur des couteaux sur la gorge des innocents, l’impression qu’une Peste menace notre Humanité. Cet Œil ouvert reste un refuge et le garant de notre résistance.

CAVE CANEM – Beware of the dog –  this inscription can be found at the entrance to the ancient residences of Pompeii. In Italy OCCHIO, literally EYE indicates an imminent danger from which you must protect yourself. First day of the second Lockdown in Paris, in an epidemic time out of control, mixed with the terror of knives at the throats of the innocent, the impression that a Plague threatens our humanity. This Open Eye remains a refuge and the guarantor of our resistance.

20 October to 27 October

EX VOTI

A l’heure où le virus se propage à la vitesse de la lumière à Paris, où la nuit ne se partage plus, où le couvre-feu a été déclaré, où un innocent a été décapité pour avoir transmis à des enfants la liberté de penser, de crument dessiner, je marche dans les rues de Gênes en Italie. Je découvre la tête de Saint Jean-Baptiste déposée en « décollation » et la Madone du Lait – ou Vierge Lactens – à qui les parents font Offrande des bavoirs de leurs enfants. En laissant couler des larmes, je forme des voeux.

MADONNA DEL LATTE – – Chiesa delle Vigne, Gênes.

6 October to 13 October

GRAPES

Lockdown Harvest: between March and September 2020

It took all this time to grow the grains and pick them.

POLYPHONIC MANIFESTO

LE TEMPS A COMMENCÉ DE CESSER

بدأ الزمن في التوقف

TIME HAS BEGUN TO CEASE

Suis d’instinct

Tout ce que tu ne comprends pas

Instinctivement

Organique

Cris encore à la Nuit

Compte les nuits de guerre

Compte les jours de paix

Compte les heures sans le sang

Compte sur ta main

Tes ancêtres

Raconte pour refermer les plaies

Raconte pour enfanter

Sans douleur

Raconte

Tout ce qui se forme

Et ne se détruit pas

Invente le

Pour qu’il existe

Dans ta langue

Et qu’on s’y love Indéfiniment

Dans la boucle du vivant

Je te dis :

Prends ta propre nature

Non la multitude

Pour guide de ta vie

Prends toi

A part entière

Divination proférée au nombril

Au chœur du flanc des hommes

Peuple multi-racial

Aux multiples bras

Issu du milieu du monde

Manuela Morgaine

poésies oraculaires, 2020 

May 12 to May 19

Apnea
When there are no more words, none at all, when there is nothing more to say, just sketchy gestures, when artistic breath is reduced to the essential, to the very breath of life, then what remains is this handmade gesture – with a megaphone, or a siren, or fog horns, or song, with hands applauding the care-givers every evening at 8 p.m. I am in Paris, this takes place on the river Seine, on a Freyssinet barge, Saturn, which dates from the time of the Spanish flu. My maternal great grandmother, Esther Louza, died from this flu in 1919. So, for me, each evening is like a ritual, the only possible gesture at sunset to ward off the dead and testify to the living. While waiting to rise to the surface again, to cry out, to be born again.

Manuela Morgaine is a writer, a theatre director, a filmmaker and a performer living and working in Paris. She runs Envers Compagnie  which has been devoted to the production of interdisciplinary works since 1991. She is the author of several books and experimental radio documentaries broadcast on National French radio station France Culture. She has given her voice to numerous radio and film projects, and has directed several movies, including the four-part, four-hour long FOUDRE- LIGHTNING  in 2013 and more recently FOR WAAD, an archival movie about Syria before war. She is also a performer and actually working on ORAKL, a long-term project on the question of Oracles, involving research on oracular traditions all around the Mediterranean.