Profane #19

"An island spirit floats through this issue. Of course, the evocation of life journeys on islands, from the Cyclades to the Balearics, works towards this state. Happy chance has led us to these elsewheres gifted with the ideal, conducive to the development of one's own rituals, to a form of sovereign detachment from the gray continent. We breathe a little. Three subjects in the lapping of the sections is perhaps too few to illuminate a beacon, and yet a question comes to us  : but what is an island  ? Can the surface of a ring topped by a mezzanine transformed into a painting studio in a neighborhood boxing gym come close to it  ? The wallless enclosure of the first Freinet school in Vence with its free and alternative pedagogy  ? A simple blank sheet of paper  ? The period of confinement when it could have been conducive to exercising an imagination, sculptural or cinematographic  ? The promontory represented by a cat tree  ? And a house, rich in history, promised to a new occupant  ? Anything with visible edges within which it is still possible to cultivate a form of freedom—this is the condition—could join an extended island family. Ours. It calls to us, it is what we strive for. So, we can imagine Profane as a bridge, busy connecting stories, narratives, experiences, trajectories, ways of being and doing, like so many islands to be discovered, through the exercise of curiosity. A bridge, islands forged by desire. A vision we want to cherish in these times of withdrawal, denial, rupture, and disconnection. That of an evolving and living archipelago."