DISTANT SUFFERING LVI
i.d. of events hardly happening here
one month in which the world was turned upside down again
hans overvliet
february 26 – march 29, 2025
front page | near buis-les-baronnies
back page | the olive groves of mirabel-aux-baronnies . . . .
February 26
today no criminal mafia in sight to steal our minerals; instead geese, many geese in the polder . . .
February 27
my studio still lays in a bomb-proof zone . . .
February 28 sculptor ingrid rollema lovingly and attentively began working on two bronze “heads” in a space, not blackmailed by the american scum . .
March 1 yesterday Ingrid Rollema left some warm light behind, countering the darkness of expanding fascism . . .
March 2
between middelburg and nijmegen there were no wardrones active . . .
March 3 today again no bombing of the hospital in goes . . .
March 4 our garden today was not called out by anyone for causing wwIII . . .
March 5 | during this sunset no tanks visible in the polder . . .
March 6
the supporting wall retained sovereign status despite imperialist pressure from outside . . .
March 7
on the road from middelburg to metz, remarkably few military troops were visible . . .
March 9 today, only sunshine out of the sky in beaune . . .
March 10
today no truck carrying much-needed food supplies and medical aid was stopped between beaune and saint-férreol . . .
March 11
no library was bombed into oblivion in condorset today . . .
March 12
as far as can be verified, the infrastructure of taulignan was not attacked today . . .
March 13
today no trace of enemy minefields were observed near buis-les-baronnies . . .
March 14
also today, we did not have to blindfold the children in bellecombe-tarendol because the terrible images stayed away . . .
March 15
no snipers were active today in the olive groves of mirabel-aux-baronnies
March 16
today, we didn't see any bodies without arms, legs, or feet in sainte jalle . . .
March 17
today no one was tortured above the snowline of mont ventoux . . .. .
March 18
today no cutting off all food, medicine, fuel, electricity, and other supplies in villeperdrix
March 19
today we bid farewell to provence for now and say goodbye forever to dorgham quraioi (1997 – 2025)
March 20
today no amputations (anaesthetised or unanaesthetised) needed in beaune . . .
March 21
no waterboarding on the west kappelle sea dike today . . .
March 22
for a very brief moment regarding the pain of others was softened by a single tree . . .
March 23
‘our’ acer has no idea about the genocide somewhere in the mediterranean . . .
March 24
the koepoort in middelburg also remained unscathed today . . .
March 25
unlike other walls, this one has very pleasant memories . . .
March 26
today the earth burst open only to allow a flower to bloom . . .
March 27
café l'espérance in leiden was just out of range of enemy artillery . . .
March 29
writer and poet refaat alareer was killed on december 6, 2023 by the israelis; the kites were saved by movies that matter in the hague. . .
DISTANT SUFFERING LVI
| i.d. of events hardly happening here
After the owner of Facebook totally conformed to the full blown fascism of T., it seemed like the right idea to troll this now degenerate medium. The dismantling of democracy, the killing of freedom of speech, the destruction of protective institutions: all continue everywhere on the globe at a furious and normalising pace. In which it seems as if George Orwell’s book 1984 is being used as a manual, supplemented by the strategies of Paul Joseph Göbbels. At the time period where billions of cameras capture just about everything every day, while all of that is hurled into the world in real time at the speed of light, we look away from the genocide in Gaza, laughingly squeeze Ukraine into a nonpeace, we skip the famine in Somalia this time, we exchange the last educated expert for an influencer, lift the latest regulations to save the environment at least a little, but we do indeed have a great time on the socials . . .
On that contemporary agora we post our the ideal image of a hoped-for archetypal daily life to convince ourselves and show the world how lucky we are: we have everything, fly to ever place ’to be’, we know everything, we can keep up with the Joneses should that idiom still mean anything to you.
All of this then turns out to be a by-product of this type of media. As Zuboff* taught me, we are the product of the socials. Not the consumers. Big-tech collects vast amounts of information about us on an unheard of and often illegal scale** . The harvested information is sold for very large sums of money for such purposes as advertising and feeding AI.
So, we pay for the services with our intimate personal data, being constantly tracked across the web and in the physical world as well, for example, through connected devices. What is exchanged with governments often remains hidden in obscurity, but given the surveillance practices of the present and the past, I am not naive about that.***
This surveillance-business model impacts on privacy, freedom of expression and other human rights; a rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history.
i.d. of events hardly happening here aims to reclaim this vital public space for everyone rather than a few powerful unaccountable companies in Silicon Valley.
At the same time, it attempts to encourage us to use the media for our benefit: not only to Instagram our lives - preferably not, by the way - but also as one of the meeting places, as an agora, to exchange realities and perhaps even truths.
We should convince every politician and policy maker that we need legislation to regulate this form of exploitation through very strict legislation. Because - given the developments in America - buying instead of voting has become the new reality. So legislation; not fining big-tech every now and then where they always legally wriggle out from under it. Regulation may make room again for Israel ending the horrors committed in Gaza and the Russian war crimes in Ukraine, the proxy / civil war in Somalia, the bombing of Yemen, take action to save the environment and so forth. Because we can make all this possible departing from our own paradisiac reality where ‘electricity’ works, where water flows from the faucet, where we don't get shot when we go to the supermarket. To quote Proust**** in the context of my art practice: The greatness of true art, on the other hand (...) consisted in recovering, reclaiming, making known that reality from which we are so far outside, from which we turn away more and more the more dense and impenetrable the conventional knowledge we put in its place, that reality which we run a great risk of not having known until our death, and which is quite simply our life. hans overvliet | Saint Férreol-de-Trente-Pas / ProvenceFrance | March 12
P.S. On March 15 the musician Sjef Hermans gifted me with a song by Loudon Wainwright III: Pretty Good Day. From which I paraphrased some lines because the thrust of his song seamlessly matches mine
* Shoshana Zuboff | The Age of Surveillance Capitalism | 2019 She was inspired the Voltri-Bolton series by David Smith – an American sculptor who in the 1960s created sculptures from old factory machinery and debris.
** The Guardian | Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach The Atlantic | The Microphones That May Be Hidden in Your Home
*** The Virge | Secret program gives NSA, FBI backdoor access to Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft data
**** Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Le temps retrouvé, p.289, édition G.F. | translation h.o.