This past month was OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) Awareness Month. Interestingly, OCD is nicknamed the “Doubting Disorder.” For those who live with OCD, Carson’s observation is short of a revelation. Doubt is a default of waking consciousness.

The naming of OCD as the “Doubting Disorder” dates back to the 19th century when the French psychiatrist Jean-Pierre Falret described the condition as la folie du doute (“the madness of doubt”). When Carson presents us with Descartes’ original quotation, I doubt that she, and Descartes, were thinking of doubt as madness. In fact, I think they are thinking about doubt quite productively as a “jumping-off point.” A place from which one can launch into discovery and creation. But for a person with OCD, doubt turns into something sinister and intolerable.

I told my partner the other day that I am going to start calling my OCD “The Dog.” When The Dog wakes up, it doesn’t stop barking. It barks with every single obsessive doubt I’ve ever had. Are you sure you’re healthy? What if that dark spot on your cheek grows into a disease? Did that advertisement I read on the Tube the other day mean something bad is going to happen to me? Am I a bad person? Is this my fault because I thought this? Will I be okay? Was that the wrong decision? What if I missed an important sign in my life and now I’ve somehow ruined everything? Did I actually do that thing? Have I even been alive for the past two decades? The Dog barks for answers to these questions. It barks for certainty. It barks for compulsions and rituals that it thinks will calm it down. It barks for reassurance.

Life with OCD contains an immense intolerance of uncertainty. The discomfort with uncertainty leads to an utter lack of faith and trust in oneself and one’s thoughts, and it easily causes one to trip into compulsion-doubt spirals.

I’m usually hesitant to write about my relationship to God and faith publicly, as I find everyone’s God-shaped hole to be something deeply personal and specific to each individual. But it is impossible for me to write about my experience living with OCD without writing about how it has caused me to grapple with faith as Jacob wrestled with the Angel.

I have a theory that God is uncertainty (insert God here for whatever you wish – goodness, light, the universe, the Creator, Life, etc.) and learning to operate with uncertainty is what gives us a true sense of freedom. Faith, then, is being able to exist, operate, and take action within the space of God’s uncertainty. To trust that this uncertainty is, somehow, good.

In my attempts to decipher the very cryptic writings of Søren Kierkegaard, I’ve found myself confronted with this idea of God as a picture of uncertainty and what faith, in the face of that portrait, looks like. Fear and Trembling (1843) retells and analyzes the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son only for an angel to stop him at the knife and tell him that “it was only a test of faith.” Kierkegaard is confounded and mesmerized by the legend. He uses the story as a site to consider what is actually meant by the word “faith.” He writes, “My intention in telling the story of Abraham is to extract from it, in the form of problems, the dialectical element it contains, so that we might see what an enormous paradox faith is, a paradox that is capable of turning a murder into a holy act that is well-pleasing to God, a paradox that restores Isaac to Abraham, which no thinking can master, because faith begins precisely at the point where thinking leaves off.”

Everything begins with doubt. Doubt is the jumping-off point, “the point where thinking leaves off.” OCD recovery is not about eliminating the doubts but embracing them and having faith that somehow they will lead us to thoughts of what is possible, to solutions, to hope, to faith, to bring us closer to God, and to learn how to exist in it without trying to constantly shed it with a compulsion.

Beyond the realm of OCD, Kierkegaard diagnoses a broader issue in his contemporary society that is relevant today (and perhaps more than ever). He writes, “But people are curious about the outcome, as with the outcome of a book; no one wants to know anything of the anxiety, the agony, the paradox. People flirt aesthetically with the outcome; it comes as unexpectedly as a prize in the lottery but also just as easily – and when they have heard the outcome, they are edified.” Now more than ever, people are obsessed with having answers at their fingertips. Especially in the age of AI, people get so uncomfortable with uncertainty and failure that they turn to AI models for therapy and immediate resolutions. It’s hard to be grateful for OCD and for the things I feel it has stolen from me at times, but recovery has made me more resilient and prepared to embrace friction. It has taught me to embrace doubt as part of my humanity and to not so easily erase it with easy answers.

I wanted to write this piece because starting OCD recovery and treatment was one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. Quickly, it gave me so much and brought back so much light into my life that I had found slipping away into darkness. OCD is so easily misunderstood and misdiagnosed (I don’t even always fully understand it myself), but I want to give anyone who is reading this right now hope, for either you or a loved one that might be in need of feeling a little less alone.

Signing off,

D.M.

In 1976, the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) erected a life-sized outline of her body against the Oaxaca Valley’s night. She commissioned a local Mexican fireworks maker to build the silhouette on a cane armature, strung with fireworks typically used in traditional festivals. The Super-8 film shot as part of her Silueta series captures the sculpture ablaze in front of a dark, mountainous landscape. The figure lights up the night with fire. It glows with mesmerizing intensity as the individual fires that dot a bodily outline grow. Some merge in the center, igniting a brilliant flame. And then the body begins to burn, releasing smoke into the air. As clouds of smog are exhaled, the lights begin to dim. Slowly, the sculpture starts to disappear. The Oaxacan night takes over until we are left with a faint wooden structure and the memory of what once was. In the film, we watch the shadow of a walking figure and of a truck pass over what remains of the body that burnt so brightly only moments before; it’s as though there was never anything there to begin with. Then the scene fades to black.

Throughout her Silueta series, and her work more broadly, Mendieta documents moments of imprint, presence, and disappearance in her explorations of the passage of time. Interested in our human life force and energy, she examines our relationship with nature, how our bodies and environments change and remain across time, and how our energy manifests and leaves the earth. As a Cuban-American immigrant who left Havana in 1961 at the age of 12 through Operation Pedro Pan, a collaborative program run by the US government and Catholic Charities that enabled Cuban children to flee Fidel Castro’s government, her work also often deals with questions of exile, belonging, and the relationship between the physical body and the land.

These are all themes that beautifully come through in a major exhibition of Ana Mendieta’s work currently on view at the Tate Modern. It is the first in-depth, monumental show of her work in the UK in over 10 years, and as a daughter of Cuban immigrants, I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to walk through the exhibit and witness the work of an artist whose work resonates with me so deeply as a woman who carries the memories of generational displacement.

I initially set out to write a complimentary reflection about the exhibition. I intended to write about how well curated it was and how the Tate masterfully told Mendieta’s story as a trailblazing artist of the 20th century, who was simultaneously a wise educator and brilliant activist. But in the wake of recent news and discourse regarding the sexually violent crimes committed at Cornell University in 2024, I found myself writing a different piece that reflects on a different set of questions.

As described above, Mendieta’s work wants us to consider the passing of time and the forces of nature, but in it there is also the question of our human imprint, how our body moves through the world, and the mark we choose to leave on it. Not only is it about how we ourselves etch our way into the earth, but it is also about how we notice and interrogate the marks others have chosen to leave as well.

Featured in the exhibition at the Tate is a piece entitled Moffit Building Piece (1973). For this work, Mendieta poured butcher’s waste on the sidewalk outside an apartment building. Red blood and animal guts formed a disturbing puddle on the stone pavement. As people walked past the suspicious scene, Mendieta sat in her car and photographed their non-reactions. Most let their gazes drop to the ground before moving on. At most, some crane their necks back to keep witnessing a bit longer. The lack of curiosity is astonishing. No one intervenes. No one asks any questions. How are people so comfortable ignoring a perceived act of violence? How do we let these things slide?

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been meditating on this piece as the news continues to unravel the rape that occurred at Cornell University in 2024. I am disturbed by the lack of humanity with which this case was treated and the way in which some continue to speak of rape victims. This was a criminal act, and it deserved to be investigated and punished as such. Those with the responsibility and power to choose justice instead chose to protect and secure the futures and education of her rapists and the interests of Cornell University. It is not only a failure of the D.A. but also of the president and leaders of the university, the university’s Title IX officials, and the other 50 men in the group chat who did not get curious, who did not empathize, and who were not brave enough to question if another human being was okay. We cannot say that we live in a society that values women as human beings if, in light of these acts, we prove that we require no more curiosity than pigs’ blood spilt on the floor.

Those familiar with Ana Mendieta will know that she had a tragic death. On September 8, 1985, at the age of 36, the artist fell 34 floors from her Greenwich Village apartment window in New York City. Just before the fall, neighbors reported hearing her and her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre (1935–2024), with whom she was living, have a loud and violent argument. One individual even stated that they heard a woman’s voice repeatedly yell “No, no, no!” right before an explosive sound. There is ample evidence to suggest that Andre pushed Mendieta out that window. Mendieta had recently learned that Andre had been unfaithful and had collected evidence for a divorce. On a call that evening with her friend Natalia Delgado, Mendieta discussed this and her plan to confront Andre, which is what presumably ignited the fight. When the police arrived at the scene, the apartment was a mess. The window was high on the wall, and no footprints were found on the sill. Andre is reported to have called 911, and he told the police that they were arguing about his greater public success as an artist. He said that she then went to the bedroom and “went out the window.” He later offered a conflicting statement, saying that she had gone to open the window and fell.

What followed was a series of betrayals on behalf of her peers and the justice system to thoroughly investigate what had happened to Mendieta. After he was convicted, the artist Frank Stella paid Andre’s bail, and the artist Claes Oldenburg loaned him a flat. The night of her death, Mendieta and Andre had dinner with a group of other artists. Those artists had noticed that Andre did not have scratches that appeared after the incident on his face during the dinner; they later retracted those statements. Mendieta’s friends and family had to actively push for a trial, which did not occur till two years later in 1988. Although the artist herself and others never identified as a feminist, feeling that second-wave feminism was a “white middle-class movement,” after her death, her friend, the artist Marsha Pels, even came out saying, “I didn’t want to identify with feminism until I saw the art world stand up with this murderer.” Today, we must recognize why feminism still matters.

Carl Andre’s trial began on January 29, 1988. He chose a bench trial to avoid a jury and cross-examination. From the outset of the trial, the odds were stacked against justice for Ana Mendieta’s case. The fact that Mendieta planned to divorce Andre was ruled as hearsay, and the defense found that the witness who heard the screams apparently suffered from auditory hallucinations. Andre’s lawyer, Jack Hoffinger, also crudely presented her artworks in a way that painted Mendieta as suicidal, claiming that her work was clearly about bodies smashing into the earth. On February 11, 1988, the judge ruled in favor of Andre, stating that the evidence had not convinced him beyond a reasonable doubt.

You will find no mention of these events in the exhibition at the Tate Modern. Despite mentioning it themselves, many of the reviews from the Guardian to the New Yorker commend the exhibition, as it allows the artist’s work to take on a life of its own and tell the story of what really mattered to Ana Mendieta. She is more than what happened to her, and her work testifies to that fact.

While I don’t disagree with the Tate and Mendieta’s estate’s decision to exclude these details of her biography in the exhibition (in fact, I found it to be one of the best shows I’ve been to at the Tate, and it was highly successful in channelling the spirit of Mendieta’s work), I do find the comments made by reviewers, pointing out the omission so obviously and praising it, rather odd. More specifically, in light of the news and discourse surrounding the events at Cornell University, I think that there is no more appropriate time to remember and question what happened to Ana Mendieta than, instead, to try and forget.

Back in February, Katy Hessel conducted an interview with the contemporary artist Tracy Emin on The Great Women Artist’s podcast. At the end of the interview, Hessel remarks that Emin will be exhibiting alongside two major female artists at the Tate, Ana Mendieta and Frida Kahlo, and asks if she has anything she might say to them. Emin replies, “I would ask Mendieta the obvious: Was she pushed out the window?... I really shouldn’t be asking that. Really, I should be asking her about her work, why she made it, and why she used her body. Did she think she was being radical at the time? But I wouldn’t. I would ask her the obvious question.”

I believe that Tracy is right for wanting to keep on asking this question. It is the question that deserves asking, not just for Ana Mendieta but for Jane Doe. Every woman who has been met with violence and injustice deserves the asking of this question. Women deserve justice. Women deserve to restore their hope and faith in a society that fails to protect their personhood.

It is my belief that Ana would want people to know what happened to her and would want justice. As the Cornell case from 2024 reopens, I believe that the artist who once bound herself naked from the waist down, smeared with fake/real blood, and bent over a table as members of her university were invited to encounter this setup, a sexually violent scene in response to the rape and murder of fellow University of Iowa student Sarah Ann Ottens in April 1973, would want to seek justice for Jane Doe.

As an artist as well as an educator, one can imagine how she would’ve felt knowing that a young woman felt the need to abandon her education after being tortured out of it (let us be clear, rape is an act of war, an act of torture), while these men were permitted to continue it. As AOC eloquently stated in one speech, “The reason why these men believed that they could commit that crime is that we exist in a world that has time and time again shown boys that these are ‘safe crimes’ to commit. That you will receive a punishment less grueling than that of one for plagiarizing.” We live in a world that has told such men that it will protect the “bright futures they have worked so hard to achieve,” at all costs and no matter what they do. Yet, we have failed the young woman who worked just as hard, if not more, to find a place at an Ivy League institution. It saddens me to know that this young woman did not feel safe and supported enough to sit in her dream.

When it came to education, Mendieta once said, “The interesting thing is that education is about uneducating yourself ... always ... It’s not about getting something but getting it and then dropping it. We spend the rest of our lives doing that.” She was part of a wave of artists, educators, and philosophers working across the USA and Latin America in the 1970s who recognized that changing society begins with changing approaches to education and wanted to transform institutionalized learning from within. We have reached a point where we seriously need to reexamine our values as a society that continues to uphold the patriarchy. In a recently published Ezra Klein interview with Debbie Milman, Milman stated, “We are not so much in a gender war as much as we are in a power debate – how it gets represented and visualized.” Rape has always been not about eroticism but about power. If we continue to permit these acts to pass in our society, then we are sending a representational message to young men that sexual assault is an appropriate act of power. That is not a kind of world I want women to live in. It is not the message I want young men to receive.

We must continue to ask for justice; we must continue to ask for a more loving and considerate world.

Signing off,

D.M.

This is interview #2 in a series with women artists, writers, designers, thinkers, and creatives about the things they notice, do, love, and practice that inspire their work and foster human connection. This interview is published in both English and French.

Three years ago, I studied abroad in Paris. I was excited to immerse myself in the Parisian arts and culture scene and to exponentially improve my French. That summer, I met Marie Demestre, who was teaching at the school I had chosen to attend. She was teaching the advanced language and literature class called “Perspectives on Contemporary French Society.” Overconfident in my French capabilities at the time, I was certain that I had been placed into her class. I wasn’t.

Still, within my first week, I was convinced that Marie was one of the coolest people I had ever met and was determined to be in her class. I loved our discussions in passing and during our field trips about art, literature, culture, and politics and wanted to learn more from her. In the end, I was able to bargain my way into her class by agreeing to take extra French language tutoring for an hour twice a week at the end of the day.

An hour of my free time was worth participating in Marie’s class. There are few things more valuable than a great and passionate teacher. Not only did I have the honor of enriching my understanding of French culture, language, and society through her knowledge, but I also made a truly wonderful and brilliant friend.

We’ve stayed in touch over the years, and, from a distance, I’ve gotten to see the development of her recently published book, Enfants de la Chapelle (2026). I am so happy to present to you Marie and this deeply intelligent and thoughtful work to you in this post.

Enfants de la Chapelle traverses depths and thresholds, the street and its laws, social shame, and stories of survival. It explores lives on the margins: exiles suspended in limbo, awaiting bureaucratic decisions; children of working-class families; silhouettes crushed by waiting. Language plays an array of parts, as a border, and then as a weapon. Beneath the surface of everyday life, an urban cosmogony emerges, and something, despite everything, rises. La Chapelle ceases to be a neighborhood and becomes a world. In this interview, Marie beautifully reflects on the process of composing this text and the craft of writing and breathes hope, love, and attention as a practice of repairing an increasingly fragmented world.

For the past ten years, Marie has taught French as a foreign language and literature at universities and art schools. Her courses focus in particular on writing intimacy, exile, and contemporary aesthetics, as well as the poetics of insubordination in French rap.

She wrote her doctoral thesis on the Egyptian author Georges Henein in 2013. This research marked a radical entry into writing. Since then, she has written and published texts in literary and poetry journals run by passionate people and has led writing workshops in various forms, both academic and experimental.

What sparked the inspiration for this book, and how did it finally come together? How did you consider the plurality of voices captured in the text, and where did these voices come from?

This book was born from a need to transmute reality into fictional material. “La Chapelle” is a neighborhood in the 18th arrondissement where I spent a great deal of time, where I lived, and to which I am magnetically drawn back. Historically, this neighborhood has been a locus point bearing witness to several waves of migration, but it is also a crossroads where people do not necessarily remain, as it is steeped in social tensions and continually absorbs societal upheavals that transform its landscape or distort it, depending on how you see it. The neighborhood struggles to keep its population in place and offers a snapshot of our era, an instant portrait of the collective, its human victories, and its administrative and diplomatic limitations.

Throughout the period of reflection preceding the writing of the collection, the essay form was not an option for creating this “transmutation of reality.” A constellation of thoughts initially converged around the body: what can bodies feel in the streets of the neighborhood, behind the façades of its buildings, in the darkness of a bedroom, depending on one’s personal journey, one’s heritage, one’s patrimony, one’s heart language? By creating these fictional sensory experiences, it became apparent to me that I needed to create a literary device capable of holding the complexity of this overall vision. “All these voices in my head, all these voices, there” is a fragment from the collection itself. I could not say where these voices come from, but perhaps that is the case for anyone who imagines fiction. The years I spent in this neighborhood eventually gave my imagination a lack of contours, to such an extent that reality there is infinitely extensible in its horror or its beauty, and it seems that this text was born of itself, however abstract that may sound, returning insistently to my mind.

You say that your work is both documentary and poetic. Do you ever think of poetry as ethnography? Where do documentary and poetry come apart for you, and where do they intersect?

The genre of the text borrows both from the codes of contemporary poetry and from traces of documentary practice that have been fictionalized. This collection of texts is composed of intimate narratives with shifting theses. A pivotal sentence in the preamble announces this generic ambiguity: “Everything is true, nothing is true.” The literary approach here moves away from a sociological inventory while aligning itself with the desire to give voice to individuals whose speech is minor or confined to stereotypes. There is certainly a desire to represent multiple characters within the text, but the literary dialectic here questions realism and plausibility, rather than their analytical dimension.

The writing of the book was quick because it responded to a sensory need. The construction, however, took several years: how to account for the neighborhood’s protean character, how to make its multiculturalism appear without allowing this topos to become an activist project but rather one of resistance, and above all, by what means can the space of the text become a place of reconciliation? The composite nature of this so-called “sensitive” neighborhood – an interesting polysemy – had to be reflected in the text: a realistic social cross-section, disparities in living spaces, a mixture of registers of language, the visual fragmentation of the city. I had to find a literary vessel capable of formally translating the complexity and tensions of the neighborhood.

I did not want to engage in description; I wanted to conceive of a device faithful to the brouhaha of the neighborhood through fragmentation, and to reach a level of writing where apparent disharmony becomes collective symbiosis. The text moves away from a purely sociological reading insofar as it does not seek to offer a definitive thesis. Enfants de la Chapelle raises more questions than it provides answers; it is a suspended moment, literary material for reflection. They are something like intimate chronicles, in which each text is an immersion into the mind of a character. It is this whole that gives the collection its depth, rather than its temporality, which is also fragmented. Its unity is established through its immersive structure and the serial nature of the collection: each text gives us access to the intimate space of a protagonist; we know the name of their street and the initial of their first name. These are the only clues that situate us.

How did you go about preparing and researching this book in order to construct the topography of La Chapelle and represent the lived experiences of the people within it? Were there any practices that allowed you to resonate with and process such weighty themes as memory, exile, language, and sociopolitical structures?

The topography of the neighborhood became imprinted on me after working and living there, to such an extent that I could not not write about this phenomenon. The neighborhood influenced my reflections and my worldview more broadly. And the text seemingly attempts to translate this: how the city comes to contaminate bodies and minds, this dialectic of inside and outside that marks the characters. Some are possessed by the city, while others have only one obsession: to rid themselves of it.

The carnivorous, anthropophagous city that devours the weakest becomes a personification in its own right, something to struggle against, or at the very least, within which one must seek to survive. But, like Édouard Glissant’s “Tout-Monde,” where the network of characters exists within a system that is more vibrational than territorial, or in the tradition of the surrealist city-as-character, Enfants de La Chapelle draws a network of isolated hearts that communicate in more ways than through language: a kind of rhizome of the sensory.

Memory appears in the form of haunting fragments or obsessive voids, while the space of the text weaves plausibility around them, as any brain seeking truth might do outside literature. Direct, aggressive, or salvific language, and the administrative structures that underpin “reception,” are all manifestations of reality that act upon bodies. Much of the collection is devoted to revealing a process of perpetual acronymization: language can also mutate into a territory that categorizes, blocks, confines, and objects to the unity proposed at the end of the collection.

You’ve cited Assia Djebar as one of your influences, and I couldn’t help but think about the resonances between your work and So Vast the Prison, where, for Djebar’s protagonist Isma, writing is a way of tracing the cultural boundaries within which she feels imprisoned but also a way of transgressing the traditions of both Islamic society in postcolonial Algeria and European French society. There is a line in the book where Isma says, “I write to clear my secret path.” In what ways was writing this book a cartographic experience of tracing the world of La Chapelle? Has writing this book cleared a “path” for you within this world, or for others?

Enfants de la Chapelle is the repository of my research over the past several years, a textual object at the intersection of poetry, chronicle in fragmented fictions, and literature of confrontation. This collection of solitary narratives takes the form of a literary manifesto of the margins, an urban polyphony in which the human persists within the folds of the city. Its themes are evoked through characters who doubt; no dogmatism or defended ideology takes on a definitive tone in any of the texts. The common noun “la chapelle” gave its name to the neighborhood in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, “La Chapelle,” and this transformation of the common noun into a proper name allowed the collection to expand toward a vision more encompassing than the neighborhood itself. Like a contemporary mythopoetics that transforms social reality into symbolic material and gives a “cosmic” depth to lives relegated to the margins, stretching them beyond the territory. Fiction offers a proposition of multiple narratives, and the collection presents numerous elements that are experienced negatively in relation to the way the world is supposed to function. Within this collective fictional inventory made up of individual gaps, there are sometimes intimate resonances, and the use of autofiction—although the latter represents only a very small part of the engine driving the writing—may leave a few traces in the collection.

Exile and identity are themes directly connected to my family history, and you invoke the occurrence of the word “path,” which is not an insignificant term in the life of an exiled person. Even when previous branches of a family have settled in a land of welcome, some descendants still seek to give shape to their own trajectory in pursuit of a phantom road, as if the path never truly ends.

Writing this text also took shape as a vibrant and discreet tribute to people living through exile, whether territorial and/or intimate.

I’m also interested in your love of James Baldwin. I recently read If Beale Street Could Talk, and it is one of the most brutally honest and visceral depictions of love that I’ve ever read. Tish and Fonny’s love seems able to erase the violence and discrimination directed toward Black people in the United States. When they are together, as recounted through Tish’s memories, a space of imagination, dreaming, and hope opens up for them. It becomes clear that the lovers’ distance from one another while Fonny is imprisoned only intensifies the threats of the outside world. I’m interested in knowing what you think drives hope and where spaces of love and affection are created, as well as what threatens them.

The collection is composed of three parts: the first explores the underground depths, the second moves into the streets above ground, and the final section unfolds through a series of texts that attempt an elevation toward a broader territory.

For me, what nourishes hope is what we have in common. The unbreakable human vibration, the awareness of this vital, inextinguishable fire. We do not exist without others; we define ourselves in relation to mirrors that are not us, and love as an act, stripped of any desire for domination, can restructure our societies and resist any logic of oppression. Radical love, not as a feeling but as an act, closely following in the lineage of bell hooks, seems to make consideration for others an ethical principle. This is what I believe.

I also believe in “airplane mode” as a way of protecting our humanity; the diversion of our attention is a real exchange currency in which we gain nothing but the coercive control of individuals. Since technofascism is a process of attack, let us equip ourselves/unite ourselves.

Finally, what works of art and other books have impacted you the most?

The embodied principle of “poetic justice” in Tupac Shakur produced an explosion in me when I was eleven, even though I only grasped its broad outlines. Thirty years later, I realize that I read only authors who seek to reconcile these two principles by conveying a certain reality through an alternative voice—one that is more imaginative, one that creates new narratives. In this sense, Kae Tempest and their text “Connection” is a foundation of my personal library. One can also find Georges Henein, for his prophetic vision of authoritarian mechanisms (complete works); Ionesco’s The Solitaire, which puts the relationship to the Other in peril without being able to free itself from it; Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist; and Kafka, for the absurd construction of existence and the administrative machinery. Also Edgar Hilsenrath’s Fuck America, a book that did not hold itself back as it wrote itself. It is deeply unpleasant, even for some readers, in terms of the physical sensations provoked by the harshness of the narrative. But it acted upon me as a permission to experiment with a text’s typography, with breaks in register and tone, and with the direct use of surrealist irony as a narrative marker. The reflections of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, Hakim Bey and his theoretical proposition concerning Temporary Autonomous Zones, “TAZ” [2003], and Teilhard de Chardin and the concept of the noosphere in The Human Energy [1962] are three texts that are of great help to me and to which I often return. The poetry of Joyce Mansour as well, for its fragmented bodies and tormented hearts; her collection Cris is my favorite for the formal and thematic transgression it initiates. Finally, music inspires me. French rap from a certain era has accompanied me and strengthened my spirit throughout my life.

FR

Il y a trois ans, j’ai étudié à Paris dans le cadre d’un programme d’études à l’étranger. J’étais enthousiaste à l’idée de m’immerger dans la scène artistique et culturelle parisienne et d’améliorer considérablement mon français. Cet été-là, j’ai rencontré Marie Demestre, qui enseignait dans l’école que j’avais choisie. Elle y donnait le cours avancé de langue et de littérature intitulé « Perspectives sur la société française contemporaine ». À l’époque, j’avais une confiance un peu excessive en mes compétences en français et j’étais persuadée d’avoir été placée dans son cours. Ce n’était pas le cas.

Pourtant, dès ma première semaine, j’étais convaincue que Marie était l’une des personnes les plus cool que j’aie jamais rencontrées et j’étais déterminée à intégrer son cours. J’adorais nos discussions, que ce soit au détour d’un couloir ou lors de nos sorties pédagogiques, autour de l’art, de la littérature, de la culture et de la politique, et j’avais envie d’apprendre davantage à ses côtés. Finalement, j’ai réussi à négocier mon entrée dans son cours en acceptant de suivre, deux fois par semaine en fin de journée, une heure supplémentaire de soutien en français.

Une heure de mon temps libre valait largement la peine pour pouvoir participer au cours de Marie. Il y a peu de choses plus précieuses qu’un enseignant passionnant. Non seulement j’ai eu la chance d’enrichir ma compréhension de la culture, de la langue et de la société françaises grâce à ses connaissances, mais je me suis également fait une amie véritablement merveilleuse et brillante.

Nous sommes restées en contact au fil des années et, à distance, j’ai pu suivre l’évolution de son livre récemment publié, Enfants de la Chapelle (2026). Je suis très heureuse de pouvoir vous présenter Marie ainsi que cette œuvre profondément intelligente et réfléchie dans cet article.

Enfants de la Chapelle traverse les profondeurs et les seuils, les rues et leurs lois, la honte sociale et les récits de survie. Le livre explore des vies en marge : des exilés suspendus dans les limbes, dans l’attente de décisions administratives ; des enfants de familles ouvrières ; des silhouettes broyées par l’attente. La langue y joue plusieurs rôles, d’abord comme frontière, puis comme arme. Sous la surface du quotidien, une cosmogonie urbaine émerge, et quelque chose, malgré tout, s’élève. La Chapelle cesse d’être un quartier et devient un monde. Dans cet entretien, Marie revient avec beaucoup de finesse sur le processus de composition de ce texte et sur le travail d’écriture, faisant de l’espoir, de l’amour et de l’attention une pratique de réparation d’un monde de plus en plus fragmenté.

Depuis dix ans, Marie enseigne le français langue étrangère et la littérature dans des universités et des écoles d’art. Ses cours portent notamment sur les écritures de l’intime, l’exil et les esthétiques contemporaines, ainsi que sur les poétiques de l’insoumission dans le rap français.

Elle a consacré sa thèse de doctorat, soutenue en 2013, à l’auteur égyptien Georges Henein. Ce travail de recherche a marqué une entrée radicale dans l’écriture. Depuis, elle écrit et publie des textes dans des revues littéraires et de poésie dirigées par des passionné·e·s, et anime des ateliers d’écriture sous différentes formes, académiques comme expérimentales.

Qu’est-ce qui a été à l’origine de l’inspiration pour ce livre, et comment a-t-il finalement pris forme ? Comment avez-vous pris en compte la pluralité des voix qui sont recueillies dans le texte, et d’où ces voix viennent-elles ?

Ce livre est né d’un besoin de transmutation du réel en matière fictive. “La Chapelle” est un quartier du 18ème arrondissement dans lequel j’ai passé beaucoup de temps, où j’ai habité et dans lequel je retourne magnétiquement. Historiquement, ce quartier est un point névralgique témoin de plusieurs vagues migratoires, mais est aussi un espace-carrefour où l’on ne reste pas nécessairement car il est pétri de tensions sociales et intègre continuellement des bouleversements sociétaux qui transforment son paysage ou le dénaturent, c’est selon, ce quartier lutte pour maintenir sa population en place et révèle une photographie de notre époque, un instantané du collectif, de ses victoires humaines et de ses limites administratives et diplomatiques.

Dans la phase de réflexion précédant la rédaction du recueil, le genre de l’essai n’était pas une option pour créer cette “transmutation du réel.” Un faisceau de pensées a convergé en première instance vers le corps: que peuvent ressentir les corps dans les rues du quartier, derrière ses façades d’immeubles, dans l’obscurité d’une chambre, selon son parcours personnel, son héritage, son patrimoine, sa langue de cœur ? En créant ces expériences sensitives fictives, il m’est apparu nécessaire de créer un dispositif littéraire qui puisse recevoir la complexité de cette vision d’ensemble. “Toutes ces voix dans ma tête, toutes ces voix, là” est un fragment de texte du recueil justement, je ne saurais dire d’où ces dernières viennent, mais sans doute est-ce le cas pour toute personne qui imagine une fiction. Les années passées dans ce quartier ont fini par donner à mon imagination une absence de contours, tant le réel y est extensible à l’infini dans son horreur ou sa beauté, et il semble que ce texte soit né de lui-même, aussi abstrait que cela puisse paraître, en revenant de façon lancinante dans mon esprit.

Vous dites que votre travail est à la fois documentaire et poétique. Pensez-vous parfois la poésie comme une forme d’ethnographie ? Pour vous, où le documentaire et la poésie se séparent-ils, et où se rejoignent-ils ?

Le genre du texte emprunte à la fois les codes de la poésie contemporaine et des indices de l’instance documentaire qui auraient été fictionnalisés. Ce recueil de textes est composé de récits intimes à thèses variables. Une phrase-pivot du préambule annonce ce trouble générique: “Tout est vrai, rien n’est vrai.” La démarche littéraire ici s’éloigne d’un état des lieux sociologique mais s’accorde avec la volonté de donner voix à des individus dont la parole est mineure ou circonscrite à des stéréotypes. Il existe une volonté de représentation de personnages multiples au sein du texte, certes, mais la dialectique littéraire vient questionner ici le réalisme et la vraisemblance, pas son versant analytique.

L’écriture du livre a été rapide car elle répondait à un besoin sensitif. La construction en revanche aura nécessité plusieurs années: comment rendre compte de la facture protéiforme du quartier, comment faire apparaître le multiculturalisme sans que ce topos ne s’inscrive dans une démarche militante mais de résistance et surtout par quels moyens l’espace du texte peut-il devenir un lieu de réconciliation ? L’aspect composite de ce quartier dit “sensible” - intéressante cette polysémie - devait se refléter dans le texte: échantillon social réaliste, disparité des lieux d’habitation, mélange des registres de langue, éclatement visuel de la ville. Il fallait trouver un réceptacle littéraire qui puisse traduire la complexité et les tensions du quartier de façon formelle.

Je ne voulais pas faire acte de description, je voulais penser un dispositif fidèle au brouhaha du quartier par l’éclatement et accéder à un niveau d’écriture où la disharmonie apparente devient symbiose collective. Le texte se détache de la lecture sociologique pure dans la mesure où il ne cherche pas à apporter de thèse définitive. “Enfants de la Chapelle” pose plus de questions qu’il n’apporte de réponses, il est un temps suspendu, une matière littéraire à réflexion. Sortes de chroniques de l’intime où chaque texte est une immersion dans l’esprit d’un personnage. C’est ce tout qui donne de la profondeur au recueil, ce n’est pas sa temporalité - qui est également fragmentée -, l’unité s’établissant dans son découpage immersif et l’aspect sériel du recuei : chaque texte nous permet d’accéder à l’espace intime d’un protagoniste, nous avons connaissance du nom de sa rue et de son prénom en initiale. Ce sont les seuls indices qui nous situent.

Comment avez-vous procédé pour recueillir et effectuer les recherches nécessaires à ce livre, afin de construire la topographie de La Chapelle et de restituer les expériences vécues par les personnes qui y vivent ? Y avait-il des pratiques qui vous permettaient d’entrer en résonance avec des thèmes aussi lourds que la mémoire, l’exil, la langue et les structures sociopolitiques, et de les appréhender ?

La topographie du quartier s’est imprimée en moi, après y avoir travaillé et vécu, à un point tel que je ne pouvais pas ne pas écrire sur ce phénomène. Le quartier a influencé mes réflexions et ma vision du monde de façon plus large. Et il semble que le texte tente de traduire cela: comment la ville vient contaminer les corps et les esprits, cette dialectique du dedans et du dehors qui marque les personnages. Certains sont possédés par la ville pendant que d’autres n’ont qu’une obsession: s’en défaire.

La ville carnassière et anthropophage qui dévore les plus faibles devient une personnification à part entière contre laquelle lutter, à tout le moins dans laquelle il faut chercher à survivre. Mais à l’instar du “tout-monde” d’Édouard Glissant où le réseau des personnages s’inscrit dans un système plus vibratoire que territorial, ou à l’image de la tradition surréaliste de la ville-personnage, “Enfants de La Chapelle” dessine un réseau de cœurs isolés qui communiquent autrement que par le langage ; un rhizome du sensible en quelque sorte.

La mémoire apparaît sous forme de fragments lancinants ou de vides obsessionnels, l’espace du texte brode de la vraisemblance autour, comme n’importe quel cerveau en quête de vérité le ferait à l’extérieur de la littérature. La langue frontale, agressive ou salvatrice, et les structures administratives qui fondent “l’accueil” sont autant de démonstrations du réel qui agissent sur les corps et une grande partie du recueil s’attache à la monstration d’un processus d’acronymie permanent: la langue peut aussi muter en un territoire qui catégorise, bloque, enferme et objecte l’unité proposée en fin de recueil.

Vous citez Assia Djebar parmi vos influences, et je n’ai pu m’empêcher de penser aux résonances entre votre travail et Vaste est la prison, où, pour la protagoniste de Djebar, Isma, l’écriture est une manière de retracer les frontières culturelles dans lesquelles elle se sent enfermée, mais aussi de transgresser les traditions de la société islamique de l’Algérie postcoloniale comme celles de la société française européenne. Il y a une phrase dans le livre où Isma dit : « J’écris pour déblayer mon chemin secret. » Dans quelle mesure l’écriture de ce livre a-t-elle été pour vous une expérience cartographique, une manière de retracer le monde de La Chapelle ? Écrire ce livre vous a-t-il permis de dégager un « chemin » pour vous-même au sein de ce monde, ou pour d’autres ?

“Enfants de la Chapelle” est dépositaire de mes recherches de ces dernières années, un objet textuel à la frontière de la poésie, de la chronique en fictions fragmentées et de la littérature de confrontation. Ce recueil de récits solitaires se présente sous la forme d’un manifeste littéraire de la marge, une polyphonie urbaine où l’humain persiste dans les plis de la ville. Ses thématiques sont évoquées par le truchement de personnages qui doutent, aucun dogmatisme ou idéologie défendue ne trouve de ton définitif dans aucun texte. Le nom commun “la chapelle” a donné son nom au quartier du XVIIIème arrondissement de Paris “La Chapelle” et cette proprialisation du nom commun a permis d’étendre le recueil à une vision plus englobante que le quartier lui-même. Comme une mythopoïétique contemporaine qui transforme le réel social en matière symbolique et donne une épaisseur “cosmique” aux vies reléguées, l’étirant au-delà du territoire. La fiction offre une proposition de récits multiples et le recueil présente de nombreux éléments qui se vivent en négatif par rapport à la marche du monde telle qu’elle devrait être. Dans cet inventaire fictionnel collectif constitué de béances individuelles, parfois quelques résonances intimes et l’usage de l’autofiction - bien que cette dernière ne soit qu’une partie plus qu’infime du moteur de l’écriture - peuvent laisser quelques traces dans le recueil.

L’exil et l’identité sont des topoï directement liés à mon histoire familiale et vous convoquez l’occurrence de “chemin” qui n’est pas un terme anodin dans la vie d’une personne exilée. Même si des branches généalogiques antécédentes se sont établies sur une terre d’accueil, certain·e·s descendant·e·s cherchent encore à donner forme à leur trajectoire en propre, dans la poursuite d’une route fantôme, comme si le chemin ne s’arrêtait vraiment jamais.

Écrire ce texte s’est aussi dessiné comme un hommage vibrant et discret aux personnes qui vivent un exil, territorial et/ou intime.

Je m’intéresse également à votre amour pour James Baldwin. J’ai récemment lu Si Beale Street pouvait parler, et c’est l’une des représentations de l’amour les plus brutalement honnêtes et viscérales que j’aie jamais lues. L’amour de Tish et Fonny semble parvenir à effacer la violence et la discrimination dirigées contre les personnes noires aux États-Unis. Lorsqu’ils sont ensemble, tels que les souvenirs de Tish nous les rapportent, un espace d’imagination, de rêve et d’espoir s’ouvre à eux. Il devient évident que l’éloignement des deux amants, alors que Fonny est emprisonné, ne fait qu’intensifier les menaces du monde extérieur. J’aimerais savoir, selon vous, ce qui nourrit l’espoir et où se créent les espaces d’amour et d’affection, ainsi que ce qui vient les menacer.

Le recueil est composé de trois parties : la première explore les bas-fonds souterrains, la seconde partie s’invite dans les rues en surface et la dernière s’étend sur une suite de textes qui tentent une élévation vers un territoire plus vaste.

Ce qui nourrit l’espoir est pour moi ce que nous avons en commun. La vibration humaine insécable, la conscience de ce feu inextinguible et vital. Nous n’existons pas sans autrui, nous nous définissons par rapport à des miroirs qui ne sont pas nous, et l’amour comme geste, défait de toute volonté de domination, peut restructurer nos sociétés et résister à toute logique d’écrasement. L’amour radical non comme sentiment mais comme acte, dans l’étroite lignée de bell hooks, semble faire découler la considération d’autrui comme éthique, en cela je crois.

Je crois aussi au “mode avion” comme moyen de protéger notre humanité; le détournement de notre concentration est une réelle monnaie d’échange où nous ne gagnons que le contrôle coercitif des individus. Puisque la technofascisation est un processus d’attaque, (m)unissons-nous.

Enfin, quelles œuvres d’art et quels autres livres vous ont le plus marqué(e) ?

Le principe incarné de “poetic justice” de Tupac Shakur a produit une déflagration lorsque j’avais 11 ans, même si je n’en saisissais que les grandes lignes. Trente ans plus tard, je constate ne lire que des auteur·e·s qui cherchent à réconcilier ces deux principes en rendant compte d’un certain réel par une voix alternative, plus imaginative, faiseuse de nouveaux récits. En ce sens, Kae Tempest et son texte “Connexion” est une fondation de ma bibliothèque personnelle. On peut y trouver Georges Henein pour sa vision prophétique des arcanes autoritaires (œuvre complète), Ionesco “Le Solitaire” qui met en péril le rapport à l’Autre sans pouvoir se départir de lui, Cioran “La tentation d’exister”, Kafka pour la facture absurde de l’existence et la machinerie administrative. Également “Fuck America” d’Edgar Hilsenrath qui est un livre qui ne s’est pas regardé écrire, il est très déplaisant même pour certain·e·s en termes de sensations corporelles provoquées par la dureté du récit. Mais il a agi sur moi comme une autorisation à expérimenter la typographie d’un texte, les cassures de registres et de tonalités et l’usage frontal de l’ironie surréaliste comme marqueur narratif. Les réflexions de Michel Foucault dans “Surveiller et punir”, Hakim Bey et sa proposition théorique sur les zones d’autonomie temporaires “TAZ” [2003], Teilhard de Chardin et le concept de noosphère dans “L’énergie humaine” [1962] sont trois textes qui me sont d’un grand secours et dans lesquels je replonge souvent. La poésie de Joyce Mansour, également, pour les corps fragmentés et les cœurs tourmentés, son recueil “Cris” est celui que je préfère pour la transgression formelle et thématique qu’il initie. Enfin, la musique m’inspire, le rap français d’une certaine époque m’accompagne et solidifie mon esprit depuis toujours.

Merci beaucoup, Marie.

D.M.

In Spanish, there are two ways to tell someone “I miss you.” One might say Te hecho de menos. The direct translation is literally “I cast you of less.” The other way is to say, Te extraño. The verb extrañar comes from the Latin extraneare, meaning to treat as a stranger. The longer you live apart from the person you love, the more they can be reduced to a memory, the more the present version of who they are becomes a stranger.

James Baldwin writes in his 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk, “When two people love each other, when they really love each other, everything that happens between them has something of a sacramental air. They can sometimes seem to be driven very far from each other: I know of no greater torment, no more resounding void – when your lover has gone.” The novel’s protagonist, Tish, is forced to visit her lover and the father of the child she carries, Fonny, in prison daily after he is wrongfully accused of rape. Each time she turns away from the glass through which she is condemned to look at Fonny, she repeats that she “walks toward the Sahara.” This desert is the vast space in which the novel unfolds. It is an absence crowded by the injustices, fears, poverty, and suffering. A void that extends itself into time.

“I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”

Time takes on a sinister character in the Sahara. Its mirages are memory palaces, places of refuge from Tish and Fonny’s cruel reality. But the truth, the hard truth, is that time is simply the time that Tish and Fonny spend apart, and the more that it passes, the more their time together becomes but a moment in time.

Baldwin’s novel asks us: What are the things love can conquer? Can love defeat discrimination? Can love bring about justice? Can love elude time?

Throughout the novel, Tish continuously inches toward the mirage before finding herself back in the desert. It is in these memories that the power of ultimate proximity – touch, kisses, intimacy, closeness, and sex—is revealed. Baldwin’s description of Tish and Fonny’s lovemaking is painfully beautiful. As when Tish recalls, “I thought of Fonny’s touch, of Fonny, in my arms, his breath, his touch, his odour, his weight, that terrible and beautiful presence riding into me and his breath being snarled, as if by a golden thread, deeper and deeper in his throat he rode – as he rode deeper and deeper not so much into me as into a kingdom which lay just behind his eyes.” These pockets of time and memory are radical. They serve as an escape from the oppressive system the characters exist in outside of their nearness. With love, they can carve out a space for their own existence, a kingdom of freedom.

Despite the paradise built by their intimacy, love still comes down on its knees to beg at the feet of time. “Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church. Fonny was doing time. In six months’ time, our baby would be here. Somewhere, in time, Fonny and I had met; somewhere in time we had loved; somewhere no longer in time, but now totally at time’s mercy, we loved.” Time and space work in tandem. The longer they are apart, the more the space of memory grows. Love hangs over the chasm’s distance, and you can only hope that time will eventually close the gap.

What makes the distance between Tish and Fonny unbearable is the fact that time does not stand still. It is always operating. We are reminded of this when Tish states, “And Fonny’s body was a total mystery to me – the body of one’s lover always is, no matter how well one knows it: it is the changing envelope which changes the mystery of one’s life.” Here, there is an understanding that people change, physically and internally, over time; because of this, we perhaps can never truly know a person. However, we can try to. Try by being near them and observing those changes unfold before your eyes. Tish and Fonny’s distance causes them to miss out on this intimate witnessing. It slowly creates estrangement, one that is unbearable and senseless because they are in love.

There is a parallel intimacy to romantic love explored in the novel, a love that equally hovers above the suffering Tish and Fonny face in the society they live in and that also demonstrates the distancing pains: Fonny’s art – wood carving. Sculpting, we are told, is what saves Fonny from the “death” that his poor, black peers face around him. While in prison, we see him dreaming of it, touching it, unearthing a vision from it. Tish even says, “I am imprisoned somewhere in the silence of that wood, and so is he.” The wood contains all that he loves, all that he is.

In many ways, Fonny’s relation to wood reminds me of the dedication note/preface for John Steinbeck’s East of Eden:

But how tragic is it that Fonny is unable to access wood, his art, behind bars. His anguish and craving for it, and for Tish, prove its meaning. Creation and love – these things form a crossing.

Onward,

D.M.

From the 2026 NBA Summer League to the FIFA World Cup, sports fans around the world have congregated in stadiums, filled streets, crowded bars, and dressed head to toe in their teams’ merch. Screams of joy are let out when players score, men are brought to tears, and families hold each other close in little acts of prayer. Observing audiences at major sports events is as much a spectacle as the game itself. It is an engrossing theater of emotion. But what is it about sports that brings masses of people together in this shared ritual of competition, spectatorship, and expression?

Just before this sportsmaxxed summer came to a close with Spain’s win in the World Cup, I visited the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where on view was Get in the Game: Sports, Art, and Culture. It is a timely exhibition that invites a moment of pause for viewers to reflect on the cultural impact of sports. Featuring a breadth of global modern and contemporary artists and designers, the exhibition moves viewers through the spectacle of the game, unveiling what is at the center of human endurance and resilience. As someone who isn’t usually sensitive to the range of high and low emotional responses of sports games, the exhibition took me by surprise, leaving me unexpectedly touched and moved by representations of athleticism. The curation told a compelling story of human identity, connection, perseverance, and sacrifice, one that we must be reminded of today in a world that is beginning to suck out the vitality of these human experiences with technologies and destruction.

The first piece viewers are presented with upon entering the exhibit is an American basketball jersey parody of Picasso’s monumental work Guernica by the artist Hank Willis Thomas. Painted in remembrance and mourning for the Basque town of Guernica, bombed in 1937 by Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion and Italy’s fascist government during the Spanish Civil War, the original Guernica awes with its sheer size and depiction of human suffering. This past December I had the privilege of seeing the work in person at the Reina Sofía in Madrid. It was nothing short of a religious experience. Because of the painting’s monumental dimensions, you are called to stay with the piece and cogitate on the affliction possessing Picasso’s anguished characters – the mother yelling to the heavens as she cradles her dead infant, the startled horse trampling over a severed arm, the panicked man raising his arms, and the ghosts already beginning to appear.

But what is especially of interest here is Guernica’s long-standing legacy. The painting has not left Spain since it was transferred there in 1981 from the MoMA, where it was stored until “democracy was restored to Spain,” at Picasso’s request. It is a symbol of national pride and a reminder that the country’s relative peace was achieved at the expense of innocent people’s martyrdom. Guernica is no stranger to parodies. With the likes of Simpson and Sesame Street characters inserted into Picasso’s personages, normally I would be skeptical of an American sports jersey rendition of such an important and serious masterpiece. However, instead, Thomas’s work took me by surprise and instantly contextualized the journey of sports that the curators wanted viewers to go on. The rivalries between opposing teams such as the Celtics and the Lakers are serious. They sometimes incite violence. Athletes, like cultural figures and artists, shape political discourse. Athletes face physical and psychological pressure. Likewise, sports teams, athletes, and athletic competition between states and nations fuel pride and bring communities together, even during difficult times. It would be amiss to equate these struggles to the sacrifices and horrors of war. But in the context of the arts and cultural impact, Thomas demonstrates how the sensationalism surrounding the world of sports grasps our emotions and can forge alliances within communities. The world of sports, like wars, like arts, and like culture, pulls us apart and drives us together.

I was pleasantly surprised again when, in the same room, I saw Stadia I by Julie Mehretu. For years, I’ve followed Mehretu’s work. Mehretu creates deeply intelligent, abstracted landscapes. The depth in her paintings is built from the daily visual language of symbols, signs, and movements. Combined, these elements signal at how human identity, change, and civilization are shaped by the things we build and choose to destroy. Stadia I was made in 2004, in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which occurred amid growing anticipation for the Olympic Games that same year, and the piece, part of a three-part series, highlights the complexity of global movements simultaneously dividing and destroying while bringing people together in competition. She uses the architectural outline of the stadium as a magnet that draws in a spiral of recognizable symbols from the Olympic Games, flags, colors, and stars. In their abstraction, however, these forms remain ambiguous. We recognize them for what they are, or really, what they could be, but their meaning has been diluted. Viewers are left to interrogate what these spaces of human athletic spectacle and performance are and what rituals and celebrations of human potential actually mean when they coincide with human suffering. Today, we are not far from where we were in 2004, nor any better than we were in 2004.

Alongside the symbolic exists the material. Textures and design elements came to life in the exhibition to illustrate how sports have impacted how we outwardly express our identity. Expertly curated was the selection of fashion and design. There’s a collection of Air Jordans by Nike from a range of designers that tell the story of how the iconic shoe signals affiliations with players, teams, and the designers themselves, and one of Virgil Abloh’s last designs for Louis Vuitton, where the designer returns to his roots of fusing streetwear and culture with his position at the luxury fashion house.

My favorite piece of fashion was Thom Browne’s Statue 10, from the Spring/Summer 2020 Menswear Collection. With its two legs firmly planted in comically large footballs, the figure wears a pinstriped red and white suit cropped in the typical awkward Thom Browne way. The football the statue holds is covered in the same fabric as the suit and is about the same size as the crotch protruding from the tight-fitting shorts. A former competitive swimmer, Thom Browne is known for militaristic adherence to form in his designs. Browne’s uniformity is never bland; instead, it breeds collective and artistic storytelling. His pieces reveal his identity and have given a unique voice to his brand. This look, placed in conversation with other pieces of fashion and design, revealed how sports shape our self-presentation and our identity as much as the clothes on our backs. Many of us can remember the sports we played throughout our adolescence and how being part of those teams shaped our tastes, our interests, and even our style. Sports are not separate from visual culture; they are part of its influence.

Beyond the global and socio-cultural/political implications of sports, the exhibition explored another dimension: the religious. The religious connotations of sports are hardly an exaggeration. For example, since the 1970 World Cup, the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City dresses its Niño Futbolero, or Soccer Baby Jesus, in the sports kit that the Mexican team will wear on game days, and people pray for the team. In an interview with the New York Times, Father Corral Martín said, “It’s not that the child is going to perform the miracle, but rather we create the miracle; the team itself does it by working as a team, and that’s what we have to do in all areas of life.” Pieces such as Katrina Majkut’s collection of embroidered baseballs and Samuel Fosso’s Self-Portrait (Muhammad Ali), where the artist stands as both the fighter and a martyred Saint Sebastian, showcase how athletes and sports memorabilia are turned into icons and relics. Like religion, they become part of identity and can bring forth mundane miracles. For many, sports are a source of hope and provide a space to navigate their aspirations as they watch athletes reach some of the greatest heights of human potential.

However, the sacred quality of sports is not reserved for audiences alone. In fact, it is perhaps most felt by the sacrifice extended by the athlete’s body. The final part of the exhibition captured the psychological and physical strain athletes endure, highlighting their self-discipline, endurance, and resilience. Yet most of the pieces chosen to reflect the strenuous activity and strong bodies of these athletes were meditative. Rather than solely capturing heightened moments of strife, they instead looked at the quieter moments of solitude. The artwork here was about an athlete’s preparation, self-care, and the toll that time eventually takes on all of our bodies – time.

One painting in this final room is arguably not of athletes at all. Blow Dry, from the series Locker-Room by the artist Joan Semmel, depicts two women butt-naked, blow-drying their hair in the mirror of a changing room. Their breasts sag. The way the paint drags across the surface of their bodies points to cellulite and a bit of back fat. They stand ordinarily proud. Their act of self-care on display in this painting feels radical. It is radical because they can embrace how mundane it is to get clean after a workout. A workout not meant to alter your physique or to become an athlete, but so that you continue as a healthy human. Even the woman who contemplates while holding a towel to her chest seems not to be pondering her appearance vainly. Rather, her expression is one of peace, of simply being in the state of getting ready. A post-shower existentialism.

In a world that is continuously shrouded in appearances and where individuals fall into trends such as looksmaxxing, a world that cares more about outcomes and the final destination than about what it takes to actually get there. This sportsmaxxed exhibition presents a real vision of what it means to be maxxed, to perform, be obsessed, and reach greatness through hard work, failure, grit, pain, and community. It is not about the goal scored at the end of the day but the story of all the fans, the culture, and the societies that create the spectacle.

This is the first interview in a series with artists, designers, writers, thinkers, and creatives about the things they notice, do, love, and practice that inspire their work and foster human connection.

I wanted to open the floor to people whose work I admire and whose posture toward living reflects values of attention, deep awareness, and creating from a place that is human-centered.

I am so happy to have Marisa Fort as our first guest. Marisa was born and raised in Miami, FL, and is the eldest and only girl of 6 siblings. She graduated from my alma mater, Ransom Everglades School, in 1998. In 2002, she graduated from Barnard College, and in 2006, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She lives in Miami with her husband, four kids, and two dogs, and works for her family’s architecture firm, Arquitectonica. Marisa also teaches architecture at Ransom Everglades.

My first conversation with Marisa was just over a year ago, over FaceTime. We had an in-depth conversation about the importance of good design and how architecture can bring attention to beauty in our daily lives. I remember we discussed The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, a book that explains how the architecture of our lives – homes, bedrooms, backyards, and attics – become the spaces where our consciousness and dreams are formed. Bachelard argues that they are thus essential to shaping our inner worlds and imaginations, influencing how we create.

Last week, I had the privilege of attending Marisa’s high school students’ architecture critique. Their assignment was to redesign the school’s entrance. From the students’ designs and the thoughtfulness of their presentations, I could tell how Marisa was guiding them to think about how space brings people together, generates movement, and builds community. She encourages her students to notice what’s happening in the moment and to imagine the potential for a different and better future for places and the people who inhabit them. In this way, they learn to design with empathy and compassion, always thinking about how a space might influence another person’s inner world and attitude toward reality. The future of rising architects is in good hands! Marisa’s responses reflect her infectious joy, generous spirit, and love for the people around her.

What is something you’ve noticed and have been paying attention to lately?

I have been paying attention to my energy and posture. If you think of a boat cutting through water – rough or calm – the shape of the hull, its sturdiness, and stance of approach is how I think of myself moving through, navigating, and existing in the world. I have also always been in the practice of anchoring myself to take a beat to look for and marvel at the beauty I can find in the mundane.

Do you have a habit or practice that helps you better connect or stay connected to your creativity and artistic work?

Doing basic things to the best of my ability every day, specifically cooking from scratch and exercising. Those two daily practices keep me grounded and anchored in my body, which in turn fuels my creativity and expands my patience to engage in artistic practice.

Teaching architecture to high school students also forces me to revisit the fundamental underpinnings of my profession on a daily basis. On top of that, I stay connected to my creativity and artistic work by writing down or sketching out every wild, random idea I have on any given day. I do my best to funnel my energy into something tangible that serves others and those around me.

What is something that brings immense joy and contentment into your life?

Easy question. My family – my kids, my husband, my parents, my many brothers, and even my extended family and my best friends. They bring me immense joy and contentment. I am madly in love with my crew. Being with them, talking to them, being around them, and helping them with literally anything brings me the most joy, purpose, and contentment. They give my life meaning.

How does art help you stay connected to reality and other people?

Ideas need to be manifested in some form or another in order to do the job of connecting people and bringing them to reality. I personally have an affinity for art made by my family and close friends – art by my kids, my art teacher, my peer architects, siblings, and of course, my best friend. It is their work on the walls of my house (for the most part).

Do you have any reading recommendations?

In all honesty, I do not have favorites and avoid superlatives. However, I am forever obsessed with YA novels and love to read them out loud to my kids. The stories are so distilled, and the writing so wrung out. The really good ones have strong arches and emotionally deep themes. I recently read A Wolf Called Wander and Mala’s Cat, both fantastic. They also both happen to be about solo journeys through the forest without any destination. The stories are incredibly introspective and engrossing. I can’t say they are my all-time favorites, but they are recent standouts!

Thank you, Marisa!

Logging off,

D.M.

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