Marias Men

I don’t remember what I looked like that day on rue Charlot years ago, but I wasn’t feeling very good about myself, I do remember that. Walking along by myself in the Marais, I felt le regard of these two men across the street. When I saw the way they were looking at me, I felt a bit awkward and so to ease that tension, I instinctively motioned with my camera, “can I take a photo of you?” 

A little while later I looked at the photo on my camera screen, and that’s when I saw them. Their eyes, their smiles, and myself reflected. It didn’t feel predatory but appreciative. A reflection so different than the way I had been feeling. They hadn’t said anything, there was no street harassment or power play. Just a couple of human beings smiling, seeming to appreciate the young woman across the street. 

Their faces woke me up. 

For that moment, I used those faces to take me out of my inner worrisome thoughts, and decided to try and see myself as they did. To appreciate my youth, my health, what was going well in my life. If I’d learned to be a worrier, I could learn to look in another direction too. I continued that day, a little lighter on my feet.

Mario Forte is now

We met outside the back door of 59 Rivoli, the artists squat where I had been photographing on and off for years. I had just photographed his concert, the closing performance of a 3-day jazz festival, but we wouldn’t have spoken if he hadn’t been standing with pianist Tony Tixier, for two reasons: I’m shy and he resembles Rasputin.

Earlier that same day, Tony had walked in yelling, “Who is Danielle Voirin?!?!” He’d seen my blog. I was posting each day, with best photos from the festival, and I think he was surprised to see the emotion in the photos I’d captured.

When he saw me sneaking out the back door like an introvert who’s ready to go home, he kindly introduced me to Mario as “a really good photographer,” and we became friends, in the way that people who admire each other’s work quickly do.

Many of my favorite Parisians are nomads who keep a foot in town but create/perform/show much of their work elsewhere. Like the center of a wheel with spokes going all over the planet, it’s a city of fortuitous intersections. It’s comfortable, beautiful, geographically practical, but missing an edge, a creative grit that, if you need and can’t manage to keep a hold of here, you have to get elsewhere and bring back with you.

This is what I feel Mario Forte does. You can feel it on him when he comes back to town. And it’s always fresh, because he’s always in motion. Based in Paris, born in Italy, teaching in Lausanne, gigging anywhere and everywhere (Mexico, New York, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Austria, Germany), and sometimes recharging in Morocco.

What I appreciate about Mario, in addition to his incredible talent and diversity in musical collaboration, is that he’s really happy to be here, right now. To be alive, exploring, composing, connecting people, and collaborating. He’s in the present moment. not afraid to jump, a person who lives in the river, rather than watching from the banks.

In one of our first conversations about music, I said if I could do anything other than photography, I would be a musician. He then told me that every one of his friends who practices other creative arts all want to be musicians. But perhaps it’s just human nature, music is so connected to our emotions.

One night, talking about jazz over his home-made tagine, I commented on the lack of female jazz musicians. Many singers, not so many musicians. We were listening to Charlie Mingus, there was a solo and he said, “really, can you imagine a woman playing this?” He had a point, it was hard to imagine, but a woman would play something very different, something striking in other ways, ways we haven’t heard yet.

Mario showed up in a dream I had once. In wondering what my mind was using him as a symbol of, I decided to draw a tarot card on the question. I got The Fool card. I’m a total tarot novice, but know the Fool is the spontaneous, free-spirited child within us, creative and unafraid. It’s the way we are in the world before life teaches us to build protective walls around our unlimited potential.

Still, I wanted more info on the card and went to my favorite resource, biddytarot.com, and found some phrases that rather closely describe how I see Mario :

The Fool :

• Is all about new experiences, personal growth, development and adventure.

• Encourages you to believe in yourself and follow your heart no matter how crazy or foolish your impulses may seem.

• Lives a carefree life, free from worry and anxiety. He does not seem to mind if he does not really know what lies ahead.

• Enhances courage, risk-taking and the creative expression needed to open up new areas in your life.

• Is about to step off a cliff into the material world.

I think Mario had the courage to jump early in life and has been flying like free jazz ever since.

Goodbye Chris

The night before the night before Christmas, when Chris was told to f*ck off

A tender story from a café terrace in Paris.

Moping around the Marais in the rain, I was eating Belgian chocolates out of my pocket, longing for Chicago and slipping into the dream of old horse-drawn, cobble-stoned Paris, fantasizing that I’d find a small abandoned Christmas tree that I could drag home and hang my earrings on.

Sinking comfortably into solitude, my eyes hidden under the shadow of a wide-brimmed winter hat, I took the least populated streets until I reached a clean, dimly-lit café terrasse and installed myself in the corner. There were only two other people outside: men bent over smartphones, quietly complaining to each other about their jobs. Inside, the only customer I could see was a young woman standing at the bar, poking fiercely at an iPhone. 

The waiter was cheerful and so was I, when he set down my glass of rouge that sparkled so prettily in the over-head heat lights. Two days before Christmas, this normally busy Marais street was wonderfully silent. Sitting under the warm red lights, across the street from a building draped in twinkling blue, both colors swirling around each other on the wet pavement in between, it was a lovely smudgy Edward Hopper scene.

Until it got better. The men had just left and the girl from inside the bar came out, apparently needing some privacy to yell at her boyfriend. I looked up and our eyes met. I expected her to turn around and find somewhere to be alone, but she didn’t seem to mind having an audience. She faced me as she yelled into her phone. “T’es ! Un ! Vrai ! Con ! Tu m’as pris du fric puis tu m’as jeté ! Je ne vais PLUS être ta connasse ! Je comprends pourquoi les gens te jettent, Chris ! Et moi, je te jette ! VA…TE…FAIRE…FOUTRE ! ET CREVER DANS TA MERDE !”* With that, she went back inside, gathered her things and left.

Stunned at the beauty and force of her efficacy, I smiled and took out a pen to write it down.

Merry Christmas eve eve Chris, wherever you are with this girl’s money.

* Translation of the rant: “You’re! A! Real! Asshole! You took my money and threw me away! I’m THROUGH being your bitch! I understand why people reject you, Chris! And I’m rejecting you! GO…FUCK…YOURSELF! AND DIE IN YOUR OWN SHIT!

Danielle, We're Savages!

Amine Benotmane

I was bartending in an Irish pub in St. Michel. It was a very different epoch in my life. My boyfriend had just moved to London and I was working two part time jobs while attending photography classes. One of the jobs was in this bar, owned by a Turkish man who’s real name was probably not Charlie. The other was for a photographer who shall remain nameless, but whose assistants, un-fondly called Le Monstre. I was living in a 13m2 apartment and in my spare time would pile all my belongings into the bathroom and practice taking portraits with lights borrowed from my school.  I lived this way for about a year but it seemed like five.

Amine came into the pub regularly for a Coke. Our very first conversation began with him asking me, “are you Muslim?”  I was making a mess, pouring an excessively-frothy beer, and he saw the ring on my middle finger.  I bought it on my first trip outside the U.S., to Mexico at the end of high school. It was a silver moon and star that wrap around my finger and cuddle each other without touching. I’d completely ignored this symbol’s many meanings and uses, and simply wanted to wear a couple of elements of the night sky on my hand.

Amine is from Constantine, Algeria, and when I talk about wanting to visit his country he tells me, “Danielle, I’ll take you there.” And, after thinking a momtent, “You have to be careful, we’re savages!” He says this with a big smile and playful eyes. He’s a sweetheart, the friend you can count on whenever needed. When I bought my guitar, he took me to every store on rue de Douai and played guitars for me so I could hear which one felt and sounded like it should be mine. 

He makes friends easily, everywhere, and is a remarkable diffuser of conflict. I’ve seen him use kindness to completely extinguish another man’s anger. The streets of Paris can be aggressive, everyone walks around owning the space around them and pushing you off the edge of it if you penetrate their perimeters. Amine has such an ever-accessible sense of humor and lightness about him, that walking through the city with him, I feel we float above the angst.

In the time we have known each other, he has created a heavy metal band called Acyl. I finally heard their music when they got a gig playing at the Maroquinerie in Belleville and he asked if I would come take photos. It was summer, and I walked in wearing a pale pink tank top, jeans and sandals. I usually try to blend in if I’m going to be photographing, but doing so had completely slipped my mind that day. I believe I was the only person not wearing all black, with very heavy boots on. I felt like a spring chic walking into a dungeon. 

When Amine came on stage, I was down in front, ready. Except that I wasn’t. For my uninitiated-to-metal mind, there was no build up, they jumped right into the fire and took us with them. Heavy guitar, heart-palpitating drums that over-rode my own heartbeat, and then Amine started screaming. Growling, guttural sounds he was forcing into the microphone, from someplace deep inside that I had never seen. I was stunned. I completely forgot what I was doing there. A little confused. Where was this anger coming from? How do you go from absolute silence, to making the most devilish sounds your human voice can create?!?! I was impressed, admirative of the courage and raw emotion! That might feel really good to let out!

Because I consider him such a gentle giant, I think I smiled like Amelie Poulain discovering who the photo-booth repairman is, fascinated by the contrast and delighted to see my friend expressing himself so fully. I stopped just short of laughing out loud as if on a roller coaster, because I could see this was serious business, this metal music that was so foreign to me.

What I find so interesting, and maybe naive of me, is the contrast between their on-stage personae and them being this bunch of really nice guys that wouldn’t harm a fly. Amine is right, they are savages, but only when they express themselves through their music.

Electron Libre

Suisse Marocain

Suisse Marocain (b. David Hardy) is a German artist who was born in the air between Tangiers and Geneva.  When he’s not off traveling and collaborating with artists in Sicily and Madagascar, Germany or Portugal, he lives in Paris.  If you see him here in the winter, he usually has a good tan, choosing his déplacements wisely.  He’s a person who lives and wears his art.  Put him inside the Musée Igor Balut, his ever-evolving installation in his studio on the 4th floor of 59 rue de Rivoli, and he’ll seem to disappear.

Suisse inside his installation at the Vagabond Gallery show in a pop-up store-front space on rue des Saint Pères.

When I think of Suisse, aside from his incredible dimples, I think of freedom. Freedom of expression in fashion, painting, collaboration, performance.  I’ve seen him wearing pink knit legwarmers, a harlequin-printed jumpsuit, a top hat with a red heart on top (a favorite), and usually clothing he or another artist has painted on.  His playfulness says, “c’est pas grave” just have fun with it all, we don’t have to be so serious all the time, here’s a paint brush.

An average day at the atelier on rue de la Tour des Dames, where the artists at 59. Rivoli were temporarily relocated for three years.

Suisse is one of the original residents of the well-known squat in the center of Paris at 59 rue de Rivoli that began in 1999, was bought by the city who renovated it from 2006-2009, then returned to the artists who now pay a nominal rent, and re-opened to the public on 09-09-2009.  I became friends with him when I hung around photographing in 2006 while they moved the entire 6 floors of studios over to the temporary one-floor space in the 9th, which the city loaned them during renovations.

“I came to tell you I’m leaving,” the title of a Serge Gainsbourg song painted on the walls of the former Musée Igor Balut, on one of the last days in the old version of 59 rue de Rivoli. Suisse Marocain can be seen walking into his old studio, through doorways that have since been torn down. Paris, 2006.

59 has the kind of energy that makes you feel something is always just about to happen.  It’s an adult fun house where the paintings don’t end at the borders of their canvases and there is always live music being played somewhere.  The entire place is a collaborative installation, or as my friend Holden calls it, “an art zoo.”  Being open to the public, it has become a tourist attraction.  If you stay there for an entire day, you meet a lot of people (artists, musicians, curious people, and some lost, who just want to be pointed toward the Louvre or the Notre Dame).  As Suisse has been working there for over a decade, he’s made a lot of connections and has often helped bring over artists from Lisbon, Madagascar, Italy, Germany and elsewhere to collaborate here and hold exhibitions.

Suisse & collaborative painting on a truck during Nuit Blanche, Paris, 2010.

I had a small studio at 59 in 2009/2010, around the corner from Suisse.  During that time, a part of my practice became devoted to self-portraiture, which began by using elements from Musée Igor Balut. At that time, his generosity encouraged me to claim space that I may never have asked for let alone taken, without having him metaphorically open the door and say, have a look in there, you can work here you know, we’ll make room for you.  Last summer I was looking for a studio and he cleared out a corner for me to use while he was in Sicily working and doing his under-water art show, an installation of artwork that requires viewers go diving in goggles to discover his work.  Because, why not?  With Suisse, anything is possible.

Hanging around during the 2nd move, from rue de la Tour des Dames back to 59 rue de Rivoli. Paris, 2009.

Planted Stillness

Sea Eymere

The first thing she ever said to me was, “Did you hear, there’s no hot water!?!”  I looked at her in horror and she laughed.  “Just kidding!”  I met Sea at a 10-day meditation retreat in Brittany, France.  Ten days in silence: that I can handle. Ten days with cold showers: I’m not that courageous.

There was something familiar about Sea right away.  Later she would tell me I look like her cousin, so seeing me in a neighboring bunk-bed gave her some comfort.  She had looked comfortable enough to me.  In the meditation room, as I sat struggling not to fidget, in pain from sitting still for hours without moving, she appeared to be the definition of peaceful.  With folded-up legs, a straight back, and years of yoga practice behind her, she was planted stillness.  

The girl is a bit of a hippy, a word we laughed about the last time she was in Paris because though she does not like it, it pretty much fits.  This free spirit has been traveling almost non-stop for the last eight years, and her agenda has included much yoga teaching (usually on or near a beach), surfing, water fasting, and Amazon tribe commiserating.  A recent Facebook post of hers informed us she was traveling around in a van in Australia with surfboards on the top.  I had lost track after I saw photos of her teaching yoga to children in Sri Lanka.

Born and raised in Paris, she has always been looking at the horizon.  In the ten years we’ve been friends, she has lived/traveled in Iceland, Brazil, Finland, Sri Lanka, India, Japan, Australia, Mongolia, The Philippines, Bali, Peru, Spain, Italy, South Africa, Namibia, Costa Rica and likely many other places I haven’t been able to keep up with.  I include her in my favorite Parisians because this is the city that nourished her, it was her trampoline, where she flew away from and sometimes flies back to, which I’m grateful for.  It’s inspiring to keep up with her courageous free flight around this planet.

Through the years, we’ve had many coincidences in our friendship.  One night when she helped me move some things into a friend’s cellar, it turned out to be just below the apartment where her brother lived.  Last winter when I suddenly wanted to spend all my time in the kitchen baking, she was doing the same five hours south.  And tonight, as I tell her about starting this new blog on my birthday, she tells me she is also starting a new blog, planned to be launched on her birthday, though it’s a week late.  It seems like it’ll be born the same time as mine.  Happy Birthday dear Sea.