Fiat Lux - Zazie
To observe is to qualify as love is to caress with explosives with diffusion and sidestepping sudden poses, to quizzical lizardry. To formulate the nones and the ides, the flower of fierce derivatives, the life cycle of diving chambers.  Stops in the center of an unsettling arc...

Minerva-ratcheting of orientations flipping coins and wick sputtering maneuvers, if and when the magnetic impulse to water-shaping becomes a weapon.

Hostile terrains to link or cocoon with lyrical grappling with perturbations and with others, the assassin dreams of figure eights and the dark cloth of blue eyes bleeding bright webs that are never unwoven... To elucidate is to quicken a peril of antlers rotating pentacles the future origins of formulating an ancient caprice. She is the possibility of effacement and rude fragility hanging by a thread. She is the scattering...

In black and white the gongs under fire throwing reverie of dreaming water, for double the flame and its body of ash, an unthinkable desire of the world. The intuition of the body for the flame, a window turning soot into compelling lifeforms, into the agony of scent, to exchanging words for both resistance to and against. Seizures of erratic conjunctions in the hive of short circuits and a fatal conference of absence. You are the taste of a knife blade and knife edge of disappearing into honey and...

A moon fetish frees the sundial from slander.

When you maze the amuser, the feathered exciter. Raptor of rapture. Rupture for the immoral, molting, playing shadow with reflection. While the night windmills for the brides and... She splendors through the hood of widows and invisible words not spoken, passed through mind-glow and neuron-splinters and warm summer evenings of cascading bicycles taking turns with olive groves and phantom limbs. Fluid that way, dancing...


                
J. Karl Bogartte
Surrealism in Middle East and North Africa
Click on the image above to access The Room, a Surrealist Magazine in Arabic
From the beginning, light and darkness wrestle, the light of freedom and imagination and the darkness of oppression. But even in the darkest moments of darkness, in the longest night of existence, the victory of darkness is not complete. […] The Room is the first surrealist magazine published in Arabic since the early 70s, and the first surrealist magazine published in the Middle East since the 50s, like the phoenix that rises from its ashes, loaded with all the flames of creativity of leading surrealists from around the world. Warning: You will not be the same person after reading this magazine.
Surrealism has come back to the Middle East in January 2020 through the publication of a surrealist Arabic-language magazine The Room edited by Arab and non-Arab Surrealists. The magazine is published by Rê Platform, a platform and institution of cultural production in northern Syria.  The Rê Platform cooperates in the production of the magazine with a group of surrealists from around the world.

The last Arab Surrealist activities were in the seventies in Paris by the Iraqi Surrealist poet Abdul Kader El-Janabi and the Arab Surrealist Group in Paris.  As for the known Surrealist groups within the Middle East, the most recent was the Art and Liberty group in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Room seeks to educate the Arab public about the intellectual, literary and artistic activities of modern Surrealists and link their production to the production of Arab Surrealists.

Editors: Mohsen El-Belasy, Craig Wilson, Thomas Tympaldos and Ghada Kamal.
More information and introductory texts
about The Room
and surrealism in the Middle East and North Africa...
J. Karl Bogartte
Essential Acts of Folly - J. Karl Bogartte
Light in gelatinous tics, when you pass the sign of No Admittance, the vanishing point releases its grip on what is real is not. And yet... As the orchid-bodied staircase slips through the quicksilver eye unraveling the parapet’s sudden vantage point, the liminal kingdom gyrates, unwrapping the lotus-table of spinning projectiles... unfurling your own hidden high-jinx’s enshrined in panoramic bloodletting. You telescope out of sight. You cover signs with forbidden grace. No one notices. Freedom to prowl and hatch.
Tout l'art réside dans l'éternel retard

                                       Annie Le Brun
This website contains part of the previous La Belle Inutile website, but adds a large number of texts and images that have been produced over the past 10 years and disseminated in a restricted way to a few friends via Google Docs, or a bit more widely in Facebook.
It is still largely under construction, but already usable.
As may be seen texts in English language have Dark Red descriptions, while texts in the French language are in
Dark Blue.
Ce site web reprend une partie du site précédent de La Belle Inutile, mais ajoute un grand nombre de textes et d'images qui ont été produites depuis les 10 dernières années et diffusée de manière restrainte à quelques amis via Google Docs ou parfois plus largement via Facebook.
Il est encore pour une bonne part en cours de construction, mais déjà largement utilisable.
Les éléments descriptifs des texte en Anglais sont en
Rouge Sombre et ceux associés au textes en Français sont en Bleu Sombre.
La Belle Inutile - 2020
La Belle Inutile Index Page