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The dwellings of hundreds of African ethnic groups offer a variety
of conceptions and building practices that contradict the
widespread image of the primitive hut commonly attributed to rural
Africa. Each house or group of houses is designed not only to
shelter the members of a family, but also to enable intimate
communication with ancestors and divinities and to harmonize with
the forces of nature. Such an architecture thrives in a community
context where it is simply not acceptable to plunder resources from
the earth, and resources are used only in accordance with their
availability, in quantity, and at times of year that minimize
environmental impact. This cultural dimension and its realization
through different architectural practices are illustrated in this
work with examples taken from dwellings across numerous ethnic
groups in sub-Saharan West Africa. Drawings, plans, axonometric
projections, and photographs show the beauty and complexity of this
architecture that is a spiritual praxis -- as much place of life as
work of art.
The lush surreal illustrations of this book and its short
humouristic story telling make it a fun, quick read for all ages
and for anyone obliquely interested in our thirst for development
and the nature of who we are. Through a poetic parody of human's
desires for more of everything, we become aware that such a quest
does not bring us any closer to knowing ourselves or seeing, as
contemporary scientific or spiritual leaders are telling us: all
things and beings of our planet are intimately related, alive and
ultimately "One." While each colourful painting alludes to our
close relationship with the world, short lines innocently and wryly
comment on the predicaments of our lives pertaining to the
industrial world, where dream and reality often appear intertwined.
Through the shifting identities of forms, this album gives us a
glance at our own formless nature and how our excessive wish for
love, home, comfort, power, and productivity inexorably transforms
our worldview and make us bypass our deep infinite nature, which
cannot be contained through words. As some indigenous traditions
have taught us: "life is like a dream. One wonders whether it is by
living that we dream or by dreaming that we live."
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Body Mirror (Hardcover)
Jean-Paul Bourdier
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R1,346
R1,047
Discovery Miles 10 470
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This body of work is a contemplation of human beings' passage on
earth and their intimate interrelation with the environment. This
book attempts to bring humour to the things we are getting attached
to. It points at the invisible within the visible, the immaterial
within the material or the vertical nature of being (and its
mirror-like quality) within our horizontal way of living (where our
mind, time, and space condition our experiences). The naked body is
seen as our primary indivisible unit of perception which is usually
pushed and pulled by our thinking mind's desire to either get less
or more. In other words, our lives are coloured by our minds and
since body-mind is a single entity, most of the colours painted on
the body are an allusion to the range of our changing desires from
being invisible or transparent to wanting to be singular and the
centre of attention. The book's Interviews (the interviewers are
from Russia, Colombia, Korea, Germany, and the US) stanzas, and
photographs are not seen as being subservient to one another but
can be seen as an assemblage of three independent directions that
may or may not intersect following each reader.
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