My first day at Nori Salon. I introduced myself to my workmates and became familiar with the routines of the shop. Everyone was extremely welcoming and interested in the ideas behind the Nine Trades Project. As it was generally a quiet day in the salon, I had the opportunity to have a blether with all the staff members and it was not long before the conversations veered away from the formalities of my initial introductions into the areas of chat that really count - High Heels and Disco Injuries, Festival Anecdotes, Twisted Geography, Genealogy, Bombs on Buses, Bongs on Buses, Grannies Even Driving Buses! Tattoos, Translations and Trivia. A heady mix of personal histories. All ready to be absorbed and remixed into new narratives. The core material of what brainy Frenchman Nicolas Bourriaud would call 'Docu-Fiction'.
I've been reading Gordon Burn's recent book, Born Yesterday - the news as a novel. It opens with a quote from Milan Kundera:
" Man is separated from the past (even from the past that is only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms)...
Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable ( there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exxagerated, the misinformed, an infinite realm of non-truths that copulate, multiply like rats and become immortal."
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