My Condition – The identity of the elaborate ass walking on the treadmill, and lured (or so it would seem) by the bucket of horsefeed dangling in its snout, happens to be none other than the ass of Lucius Apuleyus, who wrote The Golden Ass – the novel from Carthage about a man undergoing the ill fortune of metamorphosis, transformed into a donkey for having blasphemed at an altar of official religion.
A Foreign Memory Landed on His Forehead as He Slept – Two military police officers occupy their office, while the traces of those arrested and detained there still weep upon the walls. Weeping can also leave a more resilient graffiti upon brick. Though part of my family history is Argentinean, I was born and raised on Aruba far from the sites of such occurrences, yet somehow, perhaps in a oneiric way, these foreign memories landed on my forehead as I hammock-slept, and entered my blood-plasma to make their home.
Henri Henriquez Bows Under the Weight of the Hare Police in the Hague – The drawing responds to a scandal and tragedy that occurred when an Aruban tourist visited the Hague during a time of festivities, perhaps carnival, and died in police custody. After Heineken, the tourist saw three policemen in the nocturnal park turned urinal, and recognized one of the men in uniform, an Aruban he knew from the island, who he greeted by walking up to the throng of cops and making a gesture that alarmed the colleagues of the Aruban cop in the Hague. The police sat upon the back of the bulky Aruban tourist, who died. I draw an owl in the corner for the Taino inhabitants of Aruba; in the folklore of some people still living there, seeing a certain owl called the Shoko means one is protected.
Laboratores Jujuy Puna – I made the drawing while traveling in the North of Argentina. There I saw a cemetery, with many-coloured flower wreaths upon the graves just after the end of carnival, during the Southern Hemisphere’s Summer in February or so. The laborers worked, paving a tomb-lid.
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Arturo Desimone is a writer and visual artist from Aruba living between Argentina and the Netherlands.
