JE, cet autre que je ne connais pas. Si JE est autre, qui est-il? Quelle est cette partie de nous qui nous échappe? Nul autre que nous même ne peut le saisir en partant à sa rencontre. Arthur Rimbaud. Lettre du voyant, 1871.

Du latin alteritas, Différence. Altérité, caractère, qualité de ce qui est autre, distinct. Identité de l’autre, la transformer, se l’approprier.
L’altérité est liée à la conscience de la relation aux autres considérés dans leur différence.
Altérité et identité. Le rapport à autrui, primordial dans la construction identitaire et spatiale.
Ou comment l’altérité entre écriture et peinture crée une dualité commune.

Alteritas propose une double lecture à travers le regard du photographe/écrivain Pinaki (Leica) et de la peintre Cécile Donato Soupama (pigment). Surgit, à partir d’une sélection d’extraits d’écrits de Pinaki, une interprétation picturale de Cécile Donato Soupama. Une synergie d’un double langage/regard propre à l’identité des 2 artistes. Alteritas suggère une mise en abîme d’une double sensibilité sur le rapport à l’autre et à son environnement, ou comment d’une diversité d’optique qui provoque des oppositions, finalement s’inscrit une lecture commune qui se nourrit l’un à l’autre dans leur différence. Je est un autre si cher au poète Arthur Rimbaud.

Altéritas est une série de 10 peintures accompagnés de 10 extraits d’écrits. Pigment, liant, mine de plomb et glacis sur papier Rives. 10 polyptyques de 118x73cm. L’ensemble des oeuvres fait 354x219cm. 2024

A Non-Believer’s Prayer. Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris.

How did it all start? In another life, another continent, where everything’s dead, buried alive out of necessity and desperation. But while any connection to where I come from has been erased, over and over, the words that started everything remain seared into me, and I can recite them at will, again and again, as I have to myself over a lifetime. Prayers from someone who believes in nothing, spoken to no one and everyone.

Lost in Oman’s Umm as Samim, the ‘Mother of Poison’.

The cruelest part of the desert is its sound. In that emptiness without people, stretched across countries, you will first be aware of the soft rasping of waves of wind over sand, and sand scraping over sand. Slowly, as I spent hours lying down without hope, waiting for the night that might change my life or end it, the wind and sand seemed to take on lives of their own. I heard faraway cars coming to me, even faint, distant voices that must indicate Bedu where there were none.

The Wind that Moved the Bedouin.

We’re crunching through sand where the wadi spills its guts out, the badlands of sand and dust and bits and pieces of stone carried with the floods that no one remembers, carried from Jebel Qahwan that you cannot see through the sandy haze of the afternoon churned up by the wind that blows three months a year, the wind that stops the fishing and sends even the Bedouin running for cover, deep inland, and their houses lie abandoned and we’re the only ones left, and we’re eating tuna biryani while the sand blows through the house, rice and chickpeas and lemon and fried onion and fish eggs and salad and vermicelli, and we’re eating so fast we can’t breathe and then there’s sweetened tea with a bit of bitter from the nana leaves dissolved.

The Love Song of an Ugly Dog.

They were half stray dogs, and they shot in and out of the villa, through the open gate. One had a thick, velvety black coat, while the other was larger and had short brown hair and a naked, speckled breast and looked like any other stray dog on the streets of Muscat, like any of the limitless number of strays across India and Africa. Dogs aren’t native to Oman, and every one found on its streets traces its origin to lands across the seas, brought by people on boats over the centuries.

Moskva: Sandpaper.

“Moscow in February is sandpaper,” she said. Like when the wind kicks up and your fingers go dead and your lips freeze till you can’t speak Russian and even your English falters, and your nose cracks and bleeds and the blood freezes. So cold the battery starts to die after a couple of shots outside, and you wrap yourself around yourself, and no one says hello. And the dogs turn to leather and the old ladies need help and the only safe place is the old church where I sit in the half-light and try to wake up from a bad dream.

Une folie quotidienne.

Neige.

Cry.

Bombay.