Translation: A French Artist Pays Homage to the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Donating a Painting

This article by Xinhua News Agency was originally published on CCTV on September 2, 2015 in French.

For the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, a French artist, Christian Poirot, has created a moving painting to commemorate the Nanjing massacre, and he will give it away at Memorial Hall in Nanjing, China in December.

Titled “Delivrance” (“Release”), the painting has impressive dimensions: 2.35 meters tall and 7.46 meters wide, it’s the largest painting that Poirot has ever created.

It shows numerous violent scenes that took place during the massacre in 1937, confronting the viewer with the bloody trials the victims endured. Over more than six weeks, from December 13, 1937 to January 1938, the Nanjing massacre, perpetrated by the invading Japanese, caused the deaths of more than 300,000 Chinese civilians.

Poirot explained to Xinhua the reasons why he created this painting: “So that the whole world could see the work painted through the eyes of a European, the horror inflicted on innocents sacrificed in the name of a Japanese Fascist ideology!”

Two years ago, when the painter was living in China and working on landscape paintings, he was touched by a TV show. Stunned, he saw Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visit the Yakusuni shrine to pay homage to those who died while serving the Japanese Empire.

“He visited the samurai, yes, but also war criminals. When I saw that, I exploded,” exclaimed Poirot. 

A little while later, Chinese friends invited him to visit Nanjing’s Memorial Hall where he was profoundly moved by the homage that was payed to the victims of the massacre. When he returned home, he began to read books written by Chinese historians in order to get to know this tragedy and its ins and outs. Soon after, he felt the need to act.

“I said, for these people who welcome me with kindness, I am going to make a painting.”

In January 2015, he went to work. Each morning, he woke up and read about the Nanjing massacre in order to stay connected to the reality of what had happened before going to his studio to paint.

Working mainly with a palette knife, Poirot painted his characters in a non-realistic but deeply expressive style. The shapes of the characters are fragmented, revealing images within images and multiple layers in each scene.

When he finally unveiled his painting, Poirot told Xinhua that this had been a period when he had worked each day with the same pain that the characters in his painting had experienced, so giving this painting away as a gift is also a form of release for him. “It’s necessary to look deep inside the self in order to do a painting,” he explained. 

For the French painter, other representations of the massacre, especially among his Chinese counterparts, are too reserved, often showing the dead, but in a sober and distant manner. So, he chose a different point of view and decided to show the Nanjing victims as they were being killed, rather than representing them as already dead.

“I am a French artist who has studied through discursive knowledge, which is acquired through study and reasoning. Since we are dealing with a massacre scene, my characters take on several feelings, such as pain, fear, anguish, horror and terror,” he continued. 

The painting he has created is full of somber, turbulent and fragmented images depicting dozens of massacre scenes. On the canvas, the audience sees Japanese soldiers killing civilians for sport and entertainment, while orphaned children look on fearfully having lost their families. 

“Through my painting, I believe that one can see some scenes, one can see the pain, all those feelings of fear, hate, anguish,” explained Poirot.

However, the artist also discovered his own limits, realizing that he could not represent some of the more violent acts recorded in the annals of history of the massacre. Instead, he painted doves departing from the bodies of the victims as a symbol of peace and life.

“It’s like they say, you can take my body, but not my soul!” he declared.

He explained that he had initially wanted to paint doves forming a map of China in the sky, but the format of the painting made this impossible, and he hopes that the audience will be able to imagine what he was unable to include in his canvas. 

“First of all, a painting is always the joy of the eyes it draws, and then the joy of the mind that is captivated, and then there is the joy in the heart that retains the work,” declared the artist.

The decisions to create the painting was obvious for Poirot. Even if it can easily gross 300,000 euros or more, the painting represents a gesture of friendship toward China.

“The gift is simply because I learned to get to know the Chinese people, who touched me with their kindness,” he affirmed. Moved by the characters who had welcomed him during his travels across China, he decided that such a gesture was the strongest way to show his appreciation.

The French painter has not always had a relationship with China. It was only in 2009 when a friend invited him to visit China that Poirot got to know the hospitality of Chinese culture. Since then, he has returned at least nine times, and his paintings, often joyful, are representations of China’s urban landscape. Indeed, the macabre images of “Release” diverge from his usual work, which is luminous, colorful and suggestive of happiness.

According to the painter, “Release” will become part of the collection of the Nanjing Memorial Hall, and he hopes that one day, this painting will be exhibited permanently so that visitors can see his rendition of the massacre. Poirot is currently working on new paintings, including a collaborative project with a Chinese painter.

Formerly a chemist, Poirot began painting at 26 when a work accident left him disabled. Having first studied at the regional level, and then the national level in Paris, the Alsace native quickly developed both his passion and technique. In his career, Poirot has had a lot of success, having won prizes in France and the UK, as well as having held exhibitions in galleries in various countries. Two of his paintings are in the collection of former French President Jacques Chirac, who bought them during an exhibit in Paris.

Translation: In India, A Young Artist Shakes Up Unilever

 

This article by Laurence DEFRANOUX was originally published on La Liberation on August 9, 2015 in French.

With a clip, Sofia Ashraf has propelled the cause of the employees of the thermometer factory, who want to expose their mercury poisoning.
 
Kodaikanal is a tourist resort perched at 2,000 meters in the south of India, known since 1845 for its magnificent views, clean air, waterfalls, forest, lake. It's also the place chosen in 1983 by a subsidiary of Pond's cosmetics as the new location for its thermometer factory, which had been located in New York state up to that point. For 18 years, metal was imported in large part from the United States, with thermometers going the opposite way to an American distributor who commercialized them in the US and Europe.

On the other hand, the Americans did not saddle themselves with hundreds of tons of toxic waste relegated to local partners outside of any official recycling cycle. They also did not inform the worker population of the dangers from exposure to mercury, which causes serious lesions in the brain, the spinal chord, the kidneys and the liver. There were no safety measures taken. Peter Suderarajan, a former employee, tells his story on film: "There was no way to wash ourselves. We had mercury in our eyelashes, eyebrows, under our nails. The mercury was everywhere where we were living, sleeping, in our water and our food."

"Dear stockholders, your company has poisoned us"

In 2001, with the help of the NGO Greenpeace, residents exposed 7.4 tonnes of broken glass and waterlogged dirt with toxic metal buried only 3 km from the factory, which in the meantime became the property of Hindustan Unilever, after Pond's was bought by the Anglo-Dutch multinational in 1997. But the times changed. The fabrication of thermometers is no longer part of the "hard nucleus" of the activities of the third largest consumer products manufacturer in the world, and most importantly, mercury is no longer popular. An international treaty aiming to reduce its use is underway, and mercury thermometers are already prohibited in several European countries. Unilever closed the Kodaikanal factory and in 2003, 289 tonnes of waste were sent by boat to be treated in the US under the order of the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Office. It's the first operation of this scale in the world of returning toxic waste to the sender.

Since then, the inhabitants of Kodaikanal are fighting the general indifference toward making the multinational finally clean the site, where 1,045 people have worked, and to compensate the victims and their families. On June 30, former employees brandished signs at the general assembly of the stockholders of Hindustan Unilever (67% subsidiary of Unilever) in Bombay: "Dear stockholders, we have enriched you, your company has poisoned us." They estimate that the factory has caused the death of 45 former workers and 18 children. Their efforts were wasted: Unilever insists on negating the existence of profession-related illnesses that touch the workers when the pathologies tied to mercury exposure are well-known and very identifiable (1). The company has multiplied its negating declarations in front of Indian courts, it continues to accumulate counter-evidence in its favor and deliberately underestimates environmental pollution. The Indian Department of Atomic Energy has revealed up to 2,640 times the normal rate of pollution in the lichens of the fragile Pambar Shola forest, contaminated by mercury vapors ejected through ventilation.

Nicki Minaj's "Wow"

But the current state of affairs quickly changed in 10 days, with the dissemination on YouTube of the clip "Kodaikanal Won't" by Sofia Ashraf. A former graphic designer and campaign designer in an international advertising agency (which counts Unilever among its clients by the way) the young woman is from Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. A cinema and performing arts creator, she was contacted by three local NGOs to write a text for their campaigns. After having gathered information and visiting the site, Sofia Ashraf, who does not consider herself a singer and had never committed herself to an environmental cause, took on that of the mercury victims, and with former employees of the factory recorded a clip with the music of Nicki Minaj's hit "Anaconda."

Barely online on YouTube, on July 30, the clip did really well, beyond what had been hoped, in India and abroad. Viewed 2 million times, it launched the petition on the Jhatkaa citizen platform. Addressed to Unilever's CEO, Paul Polman, and asking for "the cleaning of the pollution at Kodaikanal and the compensation of the employees," the petition has reached 60,000 signatures. Sofia Ashraf, on the phone with Liberation, speaks of "an unexpected success. We had never expected such coverage." She says that her advertising experience was a trump card for the humanitarian campaign, even if "in advertising, one does not learn to work with the reality of things." At the other side of the world, the American rapper greets with an admiring "wow" the culture-jamming piece.

Rocked on social networks, the European multinational forked out a press release on August 4, affirming without batting an eye, "The safety of our employees is our number one priority. We have closed the factory and launched an investigation on this matter since its emerged in 2001." It then follows with a list of expert reports proving against all evidence that "none of the former employees suffer from an illness due to the nature of their work," and that "there are no negative effects on the environment." They have even accused the NGOs of "having delayed their efforts by opposing the cleaning work launched in 2009."

It's a delay that Sofia Ashraf explains in the following way: "Hindustan Unilever initially agreed to clean the soil until the amount of mercury fell to 10 mg/kg, which is the Dutch standard. Knowing that Kodaikanal has a fragile ecosystem, the NGOs asked that the British standard of 1 mg/kg be applied. The company responded that it would ultimately only clean up to 25 mg/kg. The Worker's Association of Kodaikanal and the Pollution Control Office of Tamil Nadu did not accept."

Rachita Taneja is behind the petition on the citizen platform Jhatkaa. She explains, "We were happy to see Paul Polman break the silence on our campaign, but disappointed to see him blame the Indian government. Hindustan Unilever has tried to impose cleaning standards that would not be legal in the United Kingdom, where Unilever has its headquarters. It's an obvious double standard."

Nevertheless, the case could advance in a spectacular manner. Meetings are planned for the entire week between the workers' representatives and the multinational. For Sofia Ashraf, "the success will not be complete until the inhabitants have received their reparations."

(1) Mercury poisoning is characterized by lesions in the nervous centers, which cause shaking, speaking difficulties, physical problems, stomach aches, vomiting ...                 

Chronicle: Street Art, Between Instrumentalization and Conformity

 

Translation by Bora Mici. Original article, originally published in French on Oct. 1, 2014, here.

It's difficult to miss street art. In the same way as space invaders, which deploy their network in the great global metropolises, the "art of the street" puts itself on display, exhibits itself, insinuates itself into the smallest urban interstices and crevices in order to put itself on the stage, irresistibly passing from the shadows into the light.

- A chronicle by Heloise Balhade, urbanist.

Urbanism and Land Planning | The World

It seems like a distant time when graffiti artists and taggers - whom some readily taxed as vandals - worked clandestinely. Street art has made a name for itself, and even better, today, it is more and more sought after, whether by major brands, art galleries, and even public collectives. Beyond the debate on what is beautiful, it interrogates the place and role of the artist in the public space and in the process of [creating] the city fabric.

The Polemical Invasion of a New Popular Street Art

All the French and international metropolises that see themselves as dynamic - from Marseilles to Berlin, going through Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Valparaiso, Nantes, Jerusalem, and many others - adorn themselves with the colorful works of the new messengers of our modern times. The renown acquired by certain street artists flatters national egos. France is not missing out with its JR, Space Invader, Miss Tic, or even C215, among the most well-known.

A debate has been raging for several years in the street art world - largely relayed by the media. The paradigm is the intensive presence of certain artists on social networks, all the way to blogs, films (Bansky,) apps (JR), or even branding ("Obey" by Shepard Fairey). While tags and graffiti are compared to vandalism, the new paintings and stencils are considered works of art - something that does not fail to unleash passions around the market value of these works, counter to the essence of their process, which is free, public and reversible.

Social Utility?

The debate is elsewhere. Whether "activists" or "artists," the city is their environment for action, the street their expression buffer, society their source of inspiration. Whatever their message, they interrogate public space as a meeting place, rise up against its privatization, against the ubiquitous presence of advertising, lay claim to liberty of expression, distract from representations, common places, and reveal forgotten spaces. These urban explorers reveal the city as a palimpsest, an allegory, but above all, as a place for dialogue, relationships, as a system of meaning and value.

During a conference on the "Rewriting of the Political World through Contemporary Public Art (1), Christian Ruby, PhD and teacher,  analyzes: "Contemporary public art has largely conquered today's street, all the while trying to destabilize the streets that are very neatly connected to the rationalization and occupation of space ... In sum, this is not without often participating in the denunciation of the moral order established by certain urbanistic or aesthetic practices."

The actual context allotted to skepticism, disengagement - all the way to the disenchantment - of city residents, and more generally the citizens, constitutes the compost of "street artists." Their activity fully subscribes to the democratic re-appropriation of the city (2). Such practices actively participate in the emergence of a process of the fabrication of the city that is alternative, open, iterative and collaborative. In addition, the values of sharing, being free, dialogue between generations and social classes, but also of the reversibility that drives them, stimulate citizen participation.

The Institutionalization of Street Art: Ultimate Treason or Stroke of Genius?

The case of fallow and neglected urban land is edifying in this respect. The atypical places - utopian? - are historically taken over by street artists who find terrains for experimentation there at the scale of their own ambitions. A good number of them have become high places of urban culture, popular and, more and more, "bobos," victims of their own success. Let's briefly make mention of La Belle de Mai in Marseille, the Isle of Nantes or even the Niel barracks in Bordeaux.

Thus, the institutionalization of street art would be nothing more than the recognition of the social and urban utility of such a practice, of its symbolic and mobilizing form? The liberation of neglected urban spaces by street artists enters into a process of the re-symbolization and re-integration of these places in the collective urban imagination - sometimes, at the scale of an entire city, like Baltimore (3).

It's to this process that subscribes the strategy of the development of galleries for street art, with the negotiation of wall sections directly with collectives and social landlords, without financial return. Going even further, the "In Situ" project in the Fort d'Aubervilliers was imagined by an organization, Art en Ville [Art in the City], which negotiated with AFTRP, the fort's manager, the state, and its collectives. It was able to offer this unused enclave so that a project should transform it into an eco-neighborhood for street artists and then for the public during the time of its transition. In Ivry-sur-Seine, "French capital of street art," this process gave rise to the creation of an HQAC label - Haute Qualite Artistique et Culturelle [High Artistic and Cultural Quality] - working for the integration of an "artistic strategy for a restructuring program"(4).

Territorial Marketing, Independence and Externalities

So, in the current context of the race for the image of the brand and the attractiveness of metropolises, the presence of works of street art is forcibly driven to be a marker for dynamism and "creativity"(5). Hence, the attempt of elected officials to turn it into a pillar of cultural territorial marketing is irresistible.

Problem: What is the spontaneity in these interventions? Worse yet, what about the independence of these artists? According to Mehdi Ben Cheik, director of the street art gallery Itinerrance in the 18th arrondisement of Paris, the artists remain independent since they work for free and have no economic aims beyond a certain level of visibility for their work. In the same sense, the artist Invader declares, "Why should we have institutions against us if they are proposing to us the realization of a beautiful piece? I call that my legal 1 percent"(6).

However, it is still more and more difficult to ignore the externalities generated by the works today. If they are positive in the change of perspective they imply, they could however be accompanied by the creation of annuity situations, capable of generating a real estate tension that escapes them. It's there that public policy needs to intervene.

While some "star artists" export themselves, street art remains eminently contextual. If certain people regret the "wisdom" of certain works, the counter examples that testify to their liberty of expression are not lacking. The erasure of the commissioned fresco by the Italian artist Blu at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2008, an acerbic painting, against war, is emblematic.

Whether we love it or hate it, street art thus would not know how to remain indifferent, in such a way fulfilling its polemical role.

(1) Conference held at the Academie de Lille in March 2007
(2) A process, both institutionalized with the new divisions of public space into projects and urbanism documents, but also by more alternative and activist practices, such as the green guerilla
(3) See the article by Stephanie Baffico: "Baltimore, creative city? The Cultural Impulsion for an Urban Renaissance," Revue Urbanites, January 2014
(4) Extracted from the website of the Atelier Trans305
(5) In the sense of the "creative class," theorized by Richard Florida
(6) L'Express, "Street Art: A Movement that is Becoming More Institutionalized," Julie Bordier, Feb. 15, 2013