Le Dragon Déchaîné

Ouest Park Festival: What makes Le Havre a city and what makes Le Havre a home.

As the fall break passes, second year student Shivani Ekkanath takes a minute to contemplate a popular LH festival, and her time in our beloved city.

Think obscure artists, all manner of techno, pop, and indie, paired with seizure-inducing lights, deafening cheers, cheap beer and an overall, great weekend? C’est l’Ouest!

We always believe that Le Havre is quaint and small, yet there has always been more to this maritime port city that so many of us SciencesPistes call home. Owing to the thriving youth population, Le Havre has steadily transformed over the years. Ouest Park Festival is an excellent representation of these dynamic changes as well as the vibrant cultural wave that is overtaking the city as it transitions from its old roots to form a new cultural identity. One of the venues, Le Tetris, a gentrified establishment as well as an important cultural project, is proving to be the melting pot of Le Havre’s growing hipster and artistic culture with its melange of live performances and acts. The festival is also a great way to support and give local artists from Normandy a platform and an opportunity to share their music with a large mass audience, especially because prices for tickets are nominal and the last day is free of cost and people often come in big groups with their family and friends.

The weekend of Ouest Park witnessed dozens of artists, both established and up and coming, across France and beyond, making their way to Le Havre to share their latest music with avid and eager Havraises, among them many of us Sciences Pistes! The sixteenth edition of Ouest Park proved to be yet another breath of fresh air as we finally bid farewell to the summer and welcomed the colder but colourful and crisp months of fall. This year featured artists such as Daysy, Cadillac, Hocus Pocus, Taxi Kebab, Hellios Collective and others, each bringing with them a distinct and unique sense of style. Many of the Ouest artists this year explored and experimented with different types of music within genres like electro and groove. For example, the band Helios Collective riled up audiences with their haunting yet powerful tribute to the city. Born and bred in Le Havre, they conveyed the feral and wild nature of Le Havre’s cliffs, rough seas and beaches through their experimentations with different kinds of techno music, while also drawing inspiration from Le Havre’s industrial roots and evolving modernity in some of their pieces. Similarly, acts like The Jungle and Sentimental Race also featured a lot of music incorporating techno, percussion and other elements like rave and gabber.

Moreover, one of my first experiences in Le Havre was in fact, my visit to Ouest as I climbed the steps to Fort de Tourneville breathless but excited to see Therapie Taxi in concert and engage with my strange but fascinating new environment. My second time at Ouest not only took me back to this first few weeks of the first semester last year but also made me reflect on how fleeting time is indeed as we come to the second half of the semester. A large part of my love for Ouest over the past two years has also been other aspects of the festival, from the hype and the introduction of the acts on the Facebook page to its atmosphere, not to mention the free crepes. Apart from that, this is obviously the best opportunity to discover and explore new music as well. One of my personal favourites was a band called Daysy, I have even added a lot of their music to my playlist. They incorporate a lot of pop, soul and urban touches with their powerful vocals and deep lyrics, both in English and French. I now realise that the festival is also one of the only occasions where we truly see Le Havre in its truest form and essence. It is a great lens into the local culture, as we temporarily leave the everyday hustle and bustle of the Sciences Po bubble and engage and experience the liveliness and life of the city.

Perhaps, when I look back at my time in Le Havre during my 3A next year, I will remember my time at Ouest, which marked the beginnings of the two years of my university experience as well as the beginning of my concluding year. It remains one of those transitory phases, where I am finally at peace with my environment and bask in the comfort of what I can call home in my own way before I await the next phase of what is to come.

Photos: author.

On being ok, mental health, and regrets.

For Alexis.

1. “Are you okay?”

I am often stumped by this question, despite the simplicity of its earnest demand – there are only so many responses to it. Yet it is precisely this simplicity that stumps me: I can only be either okay, or not okay. Oftentimes, I lie on a spectrum of okayness; there are shades of okays and not-okays. My often complicated situation, my complicated feelings towards it, and my inclination to honesty all makes it harder to respond to this question.

I might be inclined to respond with an affirmative – “yes, I am okay” – or negative – “no, I am not” – followed by a caveat – “but…”. I could tentatively reply with a prefix “maybe” to the typical response, already indicating the slippery feelings that escape the neatly defined responses. I could also opt for a more obstructionist response; I might defensively or aggressively demand why I was asked that way – “why do you ask me that?” – deflecting the question and the intention of the questioner, trivial though it might be. Etcetera, etcetera.

But what makes it even harder for me to answer it, beyond just a surface linguistic examination of the question, is that often, I am compelled to say that I am okay, while in fact, I am flat out not okay. Within the possible answers the question purports to have, there are certain expected answers. Imagine for once, the question was asked when I just stepped onto campus, or while waiting in line for my turn to the microwave, or as I was just seated for a lecture in the grand amphitheater. Given the fact that there is too little time for an elaboration of my feelings, and that everyone is around me, and maybe that I don’t quite know who the person asking is, it simply is more practical to answer yes, perhaps an indifferent “yea, I’m alright.” Even a “maybe” might be inviting too much attention; they might follow up with a “why?” and then there is no time nor space to properly address it. God forbids me saying “no”, then out of their assumed kindness and care for others, they might have to ask why, when they themselves most likely lack the time, nor the space, nor the real intention to care about it, given their busy lives. I would not want to bother anyone with that; you would not expect to listen to struggles from strangers, nor do you know whether you could do it effectively. So out of sheer practicality, or perhaps, more precisely, the pressure to be practical, I answer yes. And nothing happens; life continues, undisrupted.

But we can push this a bit more. Let’s assume, whatever the context is, no matter how impractical it could have been, I say no. And let’s assume also that they followed up with a why, expecting, genuinely, some concrete answer. Now, my answers to this might differ, depending on who I am talking to and the situation I am in. If, at the time, I am only facing something mildly annoying and short-term. the answer could be similarly short, followed by a brief and inconsequential exchange of dialogue. But if I am facing something more drastic, something – or multiple things – fundamentally problematic, that causes me significant distress, I am stumped again, because there is no time for a proper elaboration. The best compromise, one that conforms both to a need to express myself honestly and the lack of time and space, would be a truthful but short, reductive, and unsatisfying answer. A recent example of mine was “I’m depressed, and I can’t muster the effort to study or doing anything else” (some more unfortunate individuals encountered a “I’m suicidal”). Now it’s their turn to be stumped, probably uncomfortable; the effect only amplifies if the answer is longer, obliging them to listen for longer, straining their limited patience.

2. Mental health, but for whom?

The heart of the problem is that no one really expects to see others’ dysfunction in life, especially in the workplace or on campus. We carry on living with a facade of functionality: Here I am, punctually, I work, consistently and without problems, therefore I exist. We might care about others, genuinely or not, but in all cases, it is difficult to go out of our way to assist them. We have distanced ourselves from that task and rdelegated it to professionals, their improficiency notwithstanding. We actively distrust ourselves in the task of handling emotions, disbelieving in our capacity to listen, to empathize, to determine when and what to advise. There is a certain vicious, self-reinforcing, cycle to this logic: by believing that professionals handle it better than us, we avoid further engagement with others, and thus place more responsibilities to the professionals, encumbering them in the process. Paradoxically, this occurs alongside the very recognizable and palpable fact that all we do is emotionally intertwined; everywhere we walk, we speak, we work – there are emotions that trail behind. Yet we cannot act – or more precisely, we believe we cannot act – upon them, despite our own lived experience with our own problems. In a strict sense, everyone is lonely, everyone knows everyone can be lonely, but no one does anything about it, a fact admitted to me by someone to whom I once talked about my issues. A case in point is the fact that everyone has presumed the cause behind our recent tragedy, and acted upon it without a moment of hesitation or suspicion despite no explicit official confirmation, seemingly already knowing why and how it has happened.

Ironically, it is here that professionals might fall short of effective help: they might lack the critical insight on how we go about our daily lives. They suffer from the same fallacy as we do. There is nothing but formality in their offices, evident in their degree hung on the wall, formal attire, notes and pens in hand, despite the fact that to our logic, all emotions are is informality. I find it unhelpful to approach my problems through speaking about my dreams, like psychoanalysis compels the professional to ask of me to do. I find it frustratingly difficult to convey my issues, be they my studies, my finances, or my inability to find fulfilling social experiences, to this professional psychologist but absolute stranger whose relationship to me I have to start from scratch. The communicative labor falls not onto the professional, but rather on me who, already in distress and need of help, easily finds myself unwilling to exert much more effort.

This labor gets more difficult especially when there is a language barrier. I speak and express myself in English well, while the professional do so with only French. The linguistic barrier suggests a larger cultural problem: What if my ways of approaching mental health is different? What if I find more fulfillment in community engagement than individual exchange? What if I have never talked about dreams, ever, to express my problems? Professionalism operates well through processes of standardization, and standards perform poorly in intercultural conditions. But we can take it further: What if I cannot speak well? What if I stutter, or am mentally handicapped? Effective mental health assistance in both cases are then inaccessible to me; I cannot attain it unless I have acquired a certain language, and a certain way of speaking the language. I feel there is a certain exclusionary character of “mental health” as expounded in official discourse here on our campus: mental health is not only defined by your capacity to work well, but the paths towards it are limited by your ability to speak a certain language, in a certain standardized manner.

We often talk of inclusion and mental health, but to whom does this inclusion and mental health belong to?

3. Beyond a collection of individuals, towards a community

The writing here contains without doubt my very personal, emotional motives. I have felt too well my feelings of isolation and helplessness here on campus, and a lot of what I have written thus far seems like an indictment (I admit the process was very cathartic). Nonetheless, I would like to restrain myself for a moment, and say that I am not trying to accuse everyone of being callus (not entirely anyway, cheek-in-tongue-ly). In spite of my critical view, I know painfully well the fact that everyone has their own priorities in life – perhaps the rent is coming, the civic engagement project or presentations have been procrastinated too long, the papers are long overdue – and caring for others sometimes takes a backseat. To quote from my favorite writer in Vietnamese literature, Nam Cao, who luridly described the selfish nature of pained individuals during Vietnam’s colonial period: “A person with an aching foot could hardly ever forget about their aching foot to think of anything else? When one is in so much pain, one could no longer think about other people. Their kind-hearted nature is obscured by their selfish worries and pains…”

But I must remind you all that we do not live in the miserable hellscape of French-colonized Vietnam; our feet do not hurt as much, and our kind-hearted nature still shows and glistens at occasions, to friends more so than to acquaintances. We need not religiously follow the liberal, individualistic logic of caring for yourself first and having sole responsibility for your own problems – it is this logic that formed the baseline of the toxic internalization of my problems that drove me to destructive suicidal ideation multiple times before and during my studies. Such mentality prizes independence beyond all else, and, in the process, anathetimizes seeking help.

I find the mentality incredibly frustrating, toxic, and cumbersome, and we’d do better not to think of life that way. And indeed we say we do not for most of the time, but I could not help but feel that we do not do what we preach. At times, I feel myself dismissed by others when I express my emotions, superficially or deeply, either through a blunt dismissal or suspicion of my feelings, or through a blanket statement that I would be fine, more reassuring to the speaker rather than me. No, I am not fine, and neither are many others, I believe, who share my sentiment, at times or always. Perhaps the problem in those occasions is that, while they do want to listen and help, they simply do not know how to do so well. But my deeper concern resurfaces when I ask them to do better than that, to listen better, to empathize better. They would be likely to defensively respond by saying they do not have to, or that they could not, do that.

We would do best by recognizing problems as they are, seeing that we all have a stake in it and we have the capacity to address it as a community. This does not necessarily call for a rejection of professional assistance to mental health, but it does question an overreliance on such an approach. If we do treat mental health as seriously as we do with physical health, then we would not advocate for an overdependence on medicine. Treatments of both kinds should be reserved, applied when necessary, not whenever a sign manifests. More importantly, we should first look to a simple vigilance and attentiveness towards others, expressed through each person with a handful of genuine statements of care and wholehearted exchanges, and through the entire community, a network of active support and positive integration, beyond faux-functionality.

In striving beyond my casual cynicism towards a kernel of hope, I urge all of us to care more as a whole, truly, lest we find ourselves regretting what we did not do or pondering we could have done, a trope that should have been put to rest before we received our most recent tragedy.

Photos: author

Festival Ono’u: A Meeting of Colours

Edouard Pack from our editing team writes about an important festival happening in Tahiti this month and what it means to him.

SETH and HTJ

I didn’t grow up in a particularly cultured household- we didn’t go to museums or exhibitions every weekend nor attend the opera or theatre on Friday nights. But art does exist around us, and learning how to find it and appreciate it under its different forms is enhancing and satisfying to me. Through the tahitian festival Ono’u, I had the chance to discover street art while seeing the face of Papeete being modified progressively year after year.

The name of the festival, “ONO’U”, is inspired by the fusion of the two Tahitian words “ONO” (action of joining one thing to another) and “U” (colors) to express the action of connecting a color to another and “the meeting of colors” in Tahiti through the art of graffiti.

The festival was created in 2014 by Sarah Roopinia, a young Tahitian entrepreneur who discovered Street Art while studying in Paris and Berlin. After four editions and dozens of international and local graffiti artists, Ono’u has become an important event in the world of graffiti. It is also a popular festival that has helped change the somewhat sad face of Papeete, turning the city into an open-air art gallery.

ASKEW

Since 2014, the festival has attracted numerous artists each year, but also a charming crowd; gathering workers stopping by during their break, students coming after school, or simple passerbys. During those ten yearly days of reshaping, the festival has often turned into a seeking game for my friends and I, walking through the city to witness the new pieces that pop up around corners, on the shop walls, or near our high school.

At a first glance, we used to gaze these ten meter high walls with artists lifted in front drawing some abstracts forms. But as days went by, the advancing street art started to take shape, the pieces of the puzzle coming together until the final work is completed. The initiative of the festival was very controversial at the beginning, with the local population being afraid of the normalisation of graffitis that would allow small “gangs” and youngsters to draw freely wherever they feel like.

TNG

But one of the announced objectives of Ono’u? To bring a form of well-being, joy and poetry into the everyday lives of Polynesians through art- a gentle escape that takes them out of their sometimes dull immediate environment and routine.

The challenge for the 6th edition of Ono’u, specially created for social housing in partnership with the Polynesian Office of the Habitat, is to transform one thousand square meters into works of art in less than 10 days. Four social residences are involved in this operation which takes place from October 15th to 25th 2019 and will allow the transformation of 7 large social housing wall façades with a selection of 9 international and local artists.

Students residence “Paraita”, by OKUDA & RIVAL

Comparing the festival Ono’u to “un été au Havre”, I am thrilled of the ephemerality of both events, attracting people because of their limited presence, but at the same time leaving the remaining works of past editions which continue to adorn the cities, giving a charm to them.

On the occasion of the celebration of Le Havre’s 500th anniversary in 2017, Jace, a Le Havre-borned street artist called on Thai artist Alex Face to create this collaborative work. The piquant meeting of two emblematic characters of street art, the gouzou and the famous childish character in the costume of rabbit and the third eye.

During the floods in Tahiti on January 22th 2017, one of the graffitis has been photographed flooded, gaining a mystical yet realistic perspective, giving life to the Va’a (Polynesian canoe, ndlr) and the Vahine who navigates it.

SETH

The festival Ono’u is first and foremost a place of sharing colorful international artistic exchanges, and more importantly, a place of opening on contemporary urban art and culture in the heart of the South Pacific. I like to think that street art is crystalizing the essence of art, adding a more accessible aspect to it by mixing them with the architecture of the city.

KOBRA

My “favourite” theory

Our radio editor-in-chief reflects on her least favourite question.

When we introduce ourselves, when we do some primary school task or later when we learn a new language, there is always one question that keeps coming up: “What’s your favourite blank?”

I don’t have a favourite. Ironically, the only answer I could give you when you ask for my favourite is that my least favourite question is what is your favourite. I know. It gets confusing. You see, usually I can narrow myself down to a few favourites for certain things but getting the favourite – the ‘one and only’ – is my mission impossible.

When I was younger, I used to memorise which colour was my favourite. I felt this pressure coming down from somewhere – I needed to have one. For some reason I was also bothered by the inconsistency of my answers so I would try to come up with one and stick to it. Once I thought it was blue; I bought a pair of really bright blue glasses, which then of course I started to hate after a few months. Unfortunately, my mom did not understand my awkward teen embarrassment necessitating me to get a new pair, so they stuck with me (do not ask me to send you a picture with them on). It took me quite some time to give up on finding my favourite colour.

Let me explain where all of this is coming from. It is not that I am completely indecisive (even though I am close) or that I don’t like anything. I just haven’t found the answers to two questions: What is a ‘favourite’? And why do we need to have one?

What is a favourite?

Many people close to me have heard me go on a long rant after a question such as this one. Ask me any favourite-type question and I will deconstruct it for you. For example:

When you ask “what is your favourite food?”, are you asking me for the type of food I would eat every day for the rest of my life? Favourite food when I am sad or happy? My guilty pleasure or what I am always excited to snack on? Winter or summer food? For breakfast or dinner? Sweet or sour? Food is such a broad category which means every answer to a favourite has a different meaning to every person.

If a favourite can have such different interpretations, then does it have any meaning at all?

Once, my yearbook quote was “your favourite and least favourite Lithuanian”. It is easy to get a true favourite (with a least favourite) when there is only one of something to choose from. Two birds one stone, am I right?

Why do we need to have a favourite?

I hope at this point of the text you have lost at least one of your favourites. Maybe that song you swore was your favourite is actually your “Summer-2018-the-time-at-the-beach-you-spent-with-your-dog” favourite. That being said, I don’t want to say it’s not okay to have favourites. I just want to say that it is okay not to have one.

I love when people know their answer straight away, when their eyes light up as they get their answer ready: “My favourite number is seven!” Honestly though, why is seven such a popular favourite number? Their certainty is comforting. Their self-awareness is one to admire. However, I feel like it is often expected for us to have favourites. Faced with a-favourite-type question I start talking about why I dislike favourites but more often than not I just end up killing the conversation.

If I give you an answer when you ask for my favourite colour, that one colour will suddenly become very different to all the colours. It will become the colour. I won’t be even sure of what kind of the it will be. It almost feels unfair to all the other beautiful colours. I have no colour to embody that subjective feeling of favourite.

Maybe part of me is afraid that by choosing my favourite, I will be prevented from fully enjoying the alternatives. Once I settle that my favourite season is summer, will blooming springs ever look as beautiful as they did? In the end, what your favourite means does not matter as long as you stay open-minded. Keep the ability to change your favourites. Or if you change them too often like me, just don’t pick one.

Let’s call it – my theory of favourites (or my favourite theory?).