A friend and future mom asked me recently what my parents did well when raising me.

The greatest lesson I got from my home was to be at home in contradiction.

Mother: In a modernist house, and the desire to escape from it.

Father: Businessman and entrepreneur, with the unrealised intent to do nothing.

Housewife and feminist, boss and post-worker, my parent’s transparency and truthfulness gave me the insight and ability to see through them the categories that constitute our reality system: labour, property, care, money, they all were translucent and permeable to young eyes.

The way for me to cope with the irresolvability of contradictions was to overcome them in practice: through art. This is the kind of art that derives from life, and is at life’s service.

The modernist way of learning, codified information, the banking model of education according to Freire, is effective in one way but not in another. All contradiction, all the staff of the weird and the eerie, are reserved for art as a specific domain of activity and not as a generalised quality of life.  But life is not merely comprised of contradictions. it is constituted by it. What else can be, when it is mediated by death?

With time, I would find the words to dress up a life in-between  the opposites. But theory only gives form to what was already warm and kinetic as an undercurrent. For, after all, it is life that determines consciousness, and not consciousness that determines life.

This blog will deal with life, death, and other aesthetic matters.