excerpt
Yann Toma
Président à vie de Ouest-Lumière
Le président à vie de Ouest-Lumière au reste du monde
For several months now, our Ouest-Lumière agencies have been busy making an inventory of the capacity of today's world to produce artistic energy—a very arduous and fastidious task.
It is in this spirit of receptivity that we have taken up our position at the UN—the United Nations—as well as within its Security Council. Hence, throughout the month of September, at a time when our political existence is finally being recognized by the most representative of international authorities, we managed to secure a lasting presence there. But our aim has also been to prove the worth of our findings by setting up systems in different parts of the world, operations designed to help all of us re-think—within the framework of a concerted effort—a new mode of distribution of the world's animal energies. We too readily gorge on such energy without fully exploiting its substance, its intrinsic worth.
Our capacity to live experiences is implicitly what is being convoked here. Nothing can be presented to us without the aid of experience. And hence, I understand no more about the spontaneous succession of the movement than I do about the alterations such systems of combined interests are likely to produce unless I am able to see them in their totality. By putting a hundred people together in one place, however, and giving them the sole function of pedalling, one after the other, I will see the last happy pedaller at work as soon as the first has made a complete turn of their pedal.
Beings are nothing other than matter and movement.
If there is one impenetrable natural resource then, TOGETHER, we are going to find it. Bodies already combined could be taken for units. The composite / unity thus formed would become a work of art. As everything is full, no sooner do you have ingoing currents than you have outgoing currents. When, therefore, the currents that penetrate to the earth's center intensify their action, we begin to see the emergence of a principle of energetic cohesion and everything rises up by converging. That which the individual consumes in terms of movement is replaced by a sum total of universal movement causing, in its wake, an irredeemable surplus of artistic energy.
I therefore invite you to pedal harder than you have ever done before, to your heart's content, as you admire the magnificent energy all around you of Ossip Zadkine. There is nothing gratuitous or childish about this; beyond the idea of actively managing the current situation of penury in the world, you will be given the possibility of becoming actor and driving force in a jubilatory and participatory stratagem for producing and distributing artistic energy, energy capable of improving our situation—that of everyone's.
