Why do I feel it necessary to publish this text this year rather than a year or two years ago ? Because of the political context. Because of Memphis and Martin Luther King, Jr. Because of Barack Obama. And may be also because of my own debt to Sartre, as being someone educated as a colonized
In the Frame of COP 21. When Jerry Brown, governor of California, announced that he would attend the COP 21 Climate Conference in Paris, his friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy, professor of philosophy at Stanford, -the two had met 40 years ago, through Ivan Illich- suggested that he adds an event at the Ecole normale supérieure to his calendar.
Sirens and police cars crisscrossing our streets -shootings, radio, TV, messages from friends, from children, from all over the world -confusion. Within a few minutes, we are in a war zone -sirens and police cars crisscrossing down there. The death toll keeps rising, striking the younger ones.
Unexpectedly, Rothko’s Outreach Develops One Step Further. The weather is cool and windy as we walk through the Roman ruins of Djemila (1st-6th century AD), led by two marvelous archeologists, both with unconventional training –Aicha Malek, who studied architecture and Youcef Aïbeche, who graduated as a historian.
On my first evening on the island, the sky turned into a Rothko painting. At the Chilmark Library, the next day, after I presented Mark Rothko as an immigrant, an artist and a pioneer, I couldn’t help mentioning that uncanny coincidence. With a hand-written poster on the road outside the grey shingle building and…
Resilience, Empowerment & Entrepreneurship Everywhere. On my first evening on the island, the sky turned into a Rothko painting. At the Chilmark Library, the next day…
Day by day, I am revisiting my trip to Korea. It was supposed to launch the translation of my Rothko book into Korean, but it became indeed much more than that -much more than a usual book tour. And this first trip of mine to Asia -beyond a series of unpleasant surprises and the language…
I knew about the reputation of Ewha Womans University even before I arrived in Seoul, and long before reaching its campus. After the fascinating interaction with the students at Yonsei University (ranked number 2 in the country), meeting with the students at Ewha is another type of challenge. Also located in Sinchon, it is the…
How to access the puzzle of so much information in such a complex culture as the Korean one? How to quickly interact in a new country after only three days? How to decipher the signs of a whole system while trying to be part of it? These are common questions for an anthropologist facing new…
Today the French Ambassador to Korea, Jerome Pasquier has generously organized a lunch to introduce me to local artists and intellectuals. What a treat! All the more since the French residence immediately appears to me as an absolutely gem of architecture. At first, it seems to hide itself on the top of a hill, behind…