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That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed Fighting with heaven, fighting with earth, and fighting with human being, what a great pleasure!
POEM FOR A UNIVERSITY RUIN. I have a faible for ruins and stories of past glory and failure. So I really wish there would be something to tell in this direction. Truth is, there's nothing but an emptiness left, and the silence of this perfect vacuum has swallowed all voices. The Free University of Manoa has been started in 2003 and ceased its activities by 2008 the latest. In these five years some nice projects have been accomplished, and these three words - nice, projects, accomplished - are chosen consciously for all their structural idiocy. This is a formal funeral eulogy. Keepin the dirt low. THE LOST COLONY. In 1587 the first british colony was set up in Virginia. Some of the settlers sailed back to England, and when they returned they found the settlement deserted and couldn't find any trace of some ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children, nor was there any sign of a struggle or battle of any kind. The only clue was the word "Croatoan" carved into a post of the fort and "Cro" carved into a nearby tree. The end of the 1587 colony is unrecorded (leading to its being known as the "Lost Colony"), and there are multiple hypotheses on the fate of the colonists. The principal hypothesis is that they dispersed and were absorbed by either the local Croatan or Hatteras Native Americans, or still another Algonquian people. It has yet to be established if they did assimilate with one or other of the native populations; but it seems likely they just got fed up with colonization and started a new life. MANOA LA PALOMA. A recurrent narrative of our university has been the ship. Michel Foucault describes the ship as a heterotopia, a moving space fueled by both utopian ideas and economics. A vehicle of colonization. It is up to you to interprete the MFU and other contemporary collective endeavors in the field of arts and culture; are we collaborating in order to find new forms of life or are we building substrates for establishing upgraded versions of classical individual careers? YOU KNOW WHAT? I'M SICK. So I really won't go into all the details that would be necessary, like the dirty stuff, like the real stuff, like the feelings, like the accusations and self-accusations, like the sex, like all that shit, let's just pretend it never happened, right? Some day it will be a novel, right? So much not told... – but let me just briefly mention how sick I got of all the arty talk about education and knowledge production over the past years, the empty symposia, mailing lists, publications, you name it? "How is it possible to overcome the cynism, the one out there and the one in me?" OUT OF BUSINESS. In June 2007 I walked into a forest, carved three words into a tree and took a picture. The photo was printed as A1-posters for the MFU's contribution to some exhibition about being on the outside. It turned out to be the last official statement to be made by the Manoa Free University, and probably I sort of knew that already while carving the highly ambivalent message. I'd like to think of this message as a vector, a movement, a speech act, but perhaps it's really just a statement. And I also got the feeling that business is around more than ever. A MESSAGE FROM THE BIG EMPTINESS. I'm not sure if someone still checks on this site, especially from the ones who were involved in the MFU. I guess everyone still has the password for the server and could theoretically add another story or delete this one. If there is something to hope for, it would be future astronomers looking into the skies and discovering the light of a dead star. And the spectrograph of that supernova could tell them a lot and perhaps fuel a new enthusiasm in them, a spark that could lead to a new star. Does the concept of progress play a role in astrophysics? A few posters are left, if you're interested. Mail to the contact adress and hope to be discovered in the enormous amount of spam offering fake university degrees. ralo
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