Profane N°17 - Fall - Winter 2023
Profane N°17 - Fall - Winter 2023
EDITORIAL:
Animal part.
"Beast", when you think about it, knows a little bit about same ambivalence as the noun and adjective “amateur”.
Beast: any being animated outside of the human being / lacking intelligence, judgment.
Amateur: person who loves, cultivates, researches for pleasure / who lacks skill, dilettante.
Without going so far as to wage a battle to requalify and rehabilitate certain terms – but why not? –, this issue has decided to take animals seriously. Cats, dogs, cows, insects have invited themselves, or rather sneaked into these pages, and show us that there is perhaps a another way of investing in reality, of grasping it, of inhabiting it. Of being sensitive to its beauty. Theirs seems to guide them, let us listen to it. For example: falcons pilgrims, swallows, night birds, and many other species, give thanks to the house of Jacques and Mariek (p. 32). They have not, we are told their host, never been so numerous in the area, as if by their presence, by their return, they testified to the importance of a space to protect, recognized his strength, his soul. Feeling good there.
The animals are there, even when they are not, still inscribed in the imagination of men – those who have decided to continue dreaming – who like to represent them as: beasts in cement in spontaneous gardens (p. 78), in pigments in paintings which celebrate the transience of life (p. 94), and even in a living room in the form of glassware (p. 64)... Elsewhere, robust cows and hot-blooded horses make part of another human's creative path: they patiently lend their flanks to Lionel, who, by drawing on their dresses, makes worlds hatch new (p. 108). Here, it is Emil, a fluffy dog who sympathetically offers the hairs of his tail to make a brush, and illustrate a subject on the possible figure of the animal as an artist (p. 54). We stop at nothing in Profane, and granting animals another status, even for a short moment, in listening to their signals, here is the idea of the creative gesture slightly disrupted, put to the scope of every living being. So let us celebrate the animal and salute its merit. The one to support us.
Carine Soyer
Animal part.
"Beast", when you think about it, knows a little bit about same ambivalence as the noun and adjective “amateur”.
Beast: any being animated outside of the human being / lacking intelligence, judgment.
Amateur: person who loves, cultivates, researches for pleasure / who lacks skill, dilettante.
Without going so far as to wage a battle to requalify and rehabilitate certain terms – but why not? –, this issue has decided to take animals seriously. Cats, dogs, cows, insects have invited themselves, or rather sneaked into these pages, and show us that there is perhaps a another way of investing in reality, of grasping it, of inhabiting it. Of being sensitive to its beauty. Theirs seems to guide them, let us listen to it. For example: falcons pilgrims, swallows, night birds, and many other species, give thanks to the house of Jacques and Mariek (p. 32). They have not, we are told their host, never been so numerous in the area, as if by their presence, by their return, they testified to the importance of a space to protect, recognized his strength, his soul. Feeling good there.
The animals are there, even when they are not, still inscribed in the imagination of men – those who have decided to continue dreaming – who like to represent them as: beasts in cement in spontaneous gardens (p. 78), in pigments in paintings which celebrate the transience of life (p. 94), and even in a living room in the form of glassware (p. 64)... Elsewhere, robust cows and hot-blooded horses make part of another human's creative path: they patiently lend their flanks to Lionel, who, by drawing on their dresses, makes worlds hatch new (p. 108). Here, it is Emil, a fluffy dog who sympathetically offers the hairs of his tail to make a brush, and illustrate a subject on the possible figure of the animal as an artist (p. 54). We stop at nothing in Profane, and granting animals another status, even for a short moment, in listening to their signals, here is the idea of the creative gesture slightly disrupted, put to the scope of every living being. So let us celebrate the animal and salute its merit. The one to support us.
Carine Soyer
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