Voting in November 2024 is of the utmost importance. With Pierre Joris, we are steadfast in our mission to mobilize voters. In 2020 we did a series of Karstic-Actions and decided to reiterate the experience this year. This is what we have been doing so far.
From August 17-31, 2024 we had an exhibition: Karstic-Action: Vote 2024! at Stand4 Gallery in Brooklyn, Bayridge (Press Release). On display was the full documentation (paintings, videos, texts, photos) of our Karstic-Action 2020! (details here). Also on display a series of paintings I started in August titled: Birds Can’t Vote, But You Can!
Also on display the Karstic-Action : Vote 24! painting I did during the reading/performance opening (see videos below). We have also started a series of t.shirts, hoody & bags available here.
Full video with readings by Jeannine Bardo & Pierre Joris et a performance by Nicole Peyrafitte
Time lapse video performance Nicole Peyrafitte (60 seconds)
Extracts of the Karstic-Action: Vote 2020!
Karstic-Action: Resist-Persist-Assist 11/2020
Stand4 Gallery and Community Art Center 414 78th Street Bay Ridge, Brooklyn New York 11209 GOOGLE MAP
This Karstic-action piece is in solidarity with the Women of Iran. I am deeply inspired by their antediluvian strength resurfacing with force & clarity in their courageous actions.
The text I wrote & that plays over the video (with music by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte) is loosely based on a Hymn to Inanna attributed to the Mesopotamian poet Enheduanna, the earliest known named author in world history —c.23rd century BCE —.
Thank you to Sepideh Jodeyri for your activism & relentless work on relaying our support to our Iranian sisters. You prompted this action painting and I am so grateful you did.
Filmed in my studio in Brooklyn, NY on October 20, 2022
FREEE
Oh ! Oh ! Oh ! Women of Iran
Oh ! Oh ! Oh ! Women of Iran
ante diluvian women fighting for you rights inscribed in the Mes
our influence is mighty
your roaring makes the world tremble
your courage rings around the earth
your persistence is formidable all of you Enheduanna
all of you high priestesses of freedom
I deeply admire you
you exercise full ladyship over heaven and earth
let me praise your ways
let me praise your greatness
let’s call on Innana goddess of heaven & earthto power your quest
may a whirlwind of freedom be the onlymandatory garment on your hair
don’t be tired sisters
don’t be tired sisters
Khasteh nabâshid
Khasteh nabâshid
Merci!
آه، آه، ای زنان ایران!
زنانِ باستان!
ستیزِ بر حقِ شما نقش می‌زند بر کتیبه‌ها
با اثری شگرف
و غرّشی رعشه‌افکن در جهان
تهورتان گِرداگِردِ زمین پُرطنین
استقامت‌تان اِعجاب‌افزا
شما همه انهدوانا
همه کاهنانِ عالی مقامِ آزادی
من همه مدح و ثنا
شما الهام‌بخش
شما حد اعلای زن بودگی بر زمین و در آسمان‌ها
بگذارید مدّاحِ راه‌تان باشم
بگذارید ثنا‌گوی شوکت‌تان
بادا که اینانا، خداوندگارِ زمین و آسمان‌ها بخشد نیرویتان
Wishing you a smooth, loving & healthy flow in 2022 despite the complexities we are all going through these days.
So, onward into the new year & on January 1st, I performed a new Karstic Action: Be Like Water (video below) forthe Poetry Project’s 48th Annual New Year’s day Marathon. My three minute performance was live streamed at around 7:30PM EST. The piece is dedicated to artist Betsy Damon. Back in October I was privileged to perform a sound scape I created for her performance Listen, Respect, Revere presented at La Mama Gallery during her solo show PASSAGES: RITES AND RITUALS curated by Monika Fabijanska. Betsy’s radical performance practice from the 70s & her relentless worldwide eco-activism inspires, energizes, & prompts action. Hence the Karstic-Action Be Like Water, a performance precipitated by the proximity of great water in my close environment. I have lived on the shore of Shatemuc since 2007 (in Bayridge, Brooklyn) & before that on the shores of Mahicanituck (Albany, NY 1992-2007). Different names for the same river, whether it is the Mohican’s name upstream or the Lenape’s name downstream, the meaning remains the same: “the river that flows two ways,” — thus not just a river, but a tidal estuary, an arm of the sea where salty seawater meets fresh water running off the land. Today we call her Hudson River, after the English navigator Henry Hudson who in 1609 sailed the “Halve Maen (Half Moon),” a Dutch East India Company three-masted flyboat, upstream to Pem-po-tu-wuth-ut or Sche-negh-ta-da, today Albany, NY
These waters, these lands had long been navigated & populated by native peoples— for at least 10 000 years. But what is left of the 9500 years of these rich & complex layers of life, history, culture? Karstic-Action Be Like Water was broadcast from my studio in Bay Ridge — in the southwest of Brooklyn, located on a terminal moraine created by receding glaciers around 13,000 years ago along the Verrazano Narrows. This land belonged to the Lenape people & there is local evidence of their dwelling here since 4500 BC. The Lenape belong to the Algonquin civilization & spoke Munsee. Given their predominantly oral culture, early written documents are rarely accurate as they come to us from the first colonizers who knew neither their culture nor their language. Like the other Natives, the Lenape have been dispossessed, displaced, practically exterminated. The colonizers also usurped & changed the names of rivers, valleys & mountains which in their languages had held important geographical & linguistic information. From the beginning on the European infiltration started to obliterate the ecological equilibrium of their sustainable land- & water-based environment. Before Henry Hudson, the Florentine Giovanni de Verrazano visited the narrows in 1524, sent by the French king, François 1er. A Brooklyn Eagle article from 1911 reports that graves have been found on the Bliss Estate, or what’s now called Owl’s Head Park. “This is known as Indian Mound, for here Indian relics and bones have been found.” This mound —part of the moraine mentioned above, is my neighborhood park & I visit it almost everyday when I am in Bay Ridge.
Karstic Action: Be Like Water is the distillate of the geological, historical, environmental information I acquired over the years, succussed into a 3-minute performance. This work is in the lineage of the KARSTIC-Actions Paintings open-ended series of live performances I started in 2011. They explore proprioception (sense of body position) & kinesthesia (sense of body movement), as meeting points between painting, poetry, voice, music, ecology, geology, history. “Karstic” refers to the geological phenomena of dissolution & transformation at work in the formation of superficial or underground limestone topographies. By a similar principle of infiltration, language transforms into poem, breath into song and colored chalk become pastel into marks on paper or canvas. Always “in/quest of” equilibrium through an ecological consciousness in the literal meaning of that term: greek οἶκος / oîkos/ house, household, dwelling & λόγος / lógos/ discourse, thus science of dwelling.
The sound track was pre-recorded (recording & mixing courtesy of Miles Joris-Peyrafitte) to allow me to focus on the physical performance aspect. The text is an assemblage of the “Mahicanituck” song written for the performance “The Bi-Continental Chowder” in the early 2000s & of a second part written over the past week. The background of the live painting is a sheet of paper used as a floor covering & saved from a 2015 action painting. The pigments were a mixture of chewed charcoals burned in the fireplace of our house in my native Pyrenees, pure calcium carbonate (calcite), Ercolano red, terre verte Brentonico, Chefchaouen blue, French clay, bauxite de Tourves, sand from the Narrows; all mixed with water & applied with the feet while in headstand (Salamba Sirsasana II).
Sound file:
Text:
Be Like Water for Betsy Damon on New Year’s day 2022
Mahicanituck, Shatemuc
from lake Tear of the Clouds
she flows & grows
& grows & flows
to meet the Atlantic Ocean at the Verrazano Narrows
Mahicanituck, Shatemuc
great water constantly in motion
great water that flows two ways
they call you Hudson today
we cannot drink your water anymore
we cannot eat your fish or oysters anymore
we cannot swim from your shores anymore
but Mahicanituck, Shatemuc
I feel your flow
I feel your flow
I hope less
feel flow
hope less
feel flow
feel flow my hydrological cycle
primeval waters
primordial oysters
salty waters
fresh waters
with the bonobos following the Congo trail waking wading dwelling from canopy to water defying that water was “ubered” by an asteroid or comet
but steamed out 4.3 billions years ago
hope is not a strategy
hope is a belief
water was already here
immanent not transcendent
the crucible of non-living & living worlds
feel flow
feel flow
feed flow
feed flow
On the menu du jour: life’s origin
serving primordial soup
on original sea bed
paired with
water to restore the
intimate relationship with life
feel flow
feel flow
Mahicanituck, Shatemuc
great water constantly in motion
great water that flows two ways
we grow & flow
& flow & grow
Indeed, all of us are ready for a healthy 2021. Truly hoping you have all made it through 2020 ok. We can’t complain, as we stayed healthy & productive throughout. Like for many of us, travelling gigs were cancelled though most only postponed or “zoomed”. Below, what’s coming up in the new year & some of our 2020 highlights. May justice, peace & health be on everyone’s schedule. If you are in NYC, remember that we will have to vote again & it is an important mayoral election. There is numerous candidates officially launching their campaigns — the Democratic primary is this 22 June & the general election 2 November. It is an important one since the NYC police department still needs to see serious deep changes. Profound & structural reforms are essential to address systemic racism, brutality & basic injustice. The word “Defunding” may scare liberals but there are real problems (financial, cultural, etc.) Just look at the NYPD budget & its opacity. As an exemple:
— Portugal’s total defense expenditure for 10.28 million people: $ 2.53 billion in 2020.
— NYC’s Police Department: for 8.3 million people, $11 billion from the City’s budget are allocated to NYPD’s operating budget.
Voting locally is super important and please join us in keeping the pressure on!
1 billion may have been “reallocated,” but 80% of NYPD’s members belong to a Union that officially endorsed the despicable & democratically ousted Trump.
As Bryan Stevenson, lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative says: “We cannot build our safety on punishment.”
Meanwhile, keep in touch, stay healthy & together we can Resist, Persist & Assist.
Bon anada, e schéint neit Joer!
Nicole & Pierre
A CRÊPE-COOK-ALONG chez Nicole & Pierre
JANUARY 1st, 2021 8 AM EST
If you missed our Crêpe-Cook-Along video on January 1st for the legendary Poetry Project’s 2021 New Year’s Day Marathon, which this year was a 24-hour continuous online broadcast featuring readings and performances from a global cast of more than 200 poets, writers, artists, musicians, dancers, and theatre-makers – devotees of the avant-garde and demimonde, proud visionaries and iconoclasts working at the edge across language, time, and place you can see it here & please don’t forget to contribute here. And if you’re really serious about cooking along with the video, download the list of necessary ingredients here.
DOMOPOETIC KARSTIC-ACTION EXHIBITION June 4 – July 7th 2021 Nicole Peyrafitte & Pierre Joris’s new domopoetic works are based on three word-concepts: Les nouveaux travaux domopoétiques de Nicole Peyrafitte & Pierre Joris s’appuient sur trois mots-concepts
RESIST PERSIST ASSIST
Actions paintings/Videos /Textes Galerie Simoncini — 6, rue Notre Dame L-2240 Luxembourg
Pierre received the 2020 Prix Batty Weber, the Luxembourg national literary prize that is awarded every three years since 1987 to a Luxembourgish writer for the entirety of his work. Interview by Florent Toniello in Woxxx. His Fox-trails, -tales, & -trots: Poems & Proses was shortlisted for the Luxembourg National Book Awards.
The British daily, The Morning Star, named Microliths one of its two literary “Books of the Year.”
Friday April 24th was the finale our Live Cooking Videos—while confined.
First and foremost THANK YOU to all the viewers, & a very special thank you to all the regulars from literally all around the globe. During these 24 daily livecast rendez-vous, you provided sustained warm & joyful support which gave me a some sense of purpose in these trying times while we are all confined, waiting for the virus to pass.
By now, sadly most of us know someone who has succumbed to the coronavirus, and we are also all watching — or no longer watching in order to stay sane — the ineffective & disgusting political debacle. Even if most of us are safely at home, and in a somehow privileged situation — I sure feel mine is that — we still all go through the emotional roller coaster, so if the show helped make your ride smoother, I am super happy. You need to know that it sure eased mine tremendously, so gratitude to you all for watching & cheering! I really know that I also learned a lot from the whole process.
Do not hesitate to reach out via messenger at any point if you have cooking questions of just want to keep in touch; I would love that!
Meanwhile, stay healthy, take great great care & eat the best you can.
Much much love from the two of us.
P.S: The videos of all 24 videos from the last to the first below & they all have notes & links with useful information. Below the videos more cooking background info.
What do we eat/cook & why? A few years back for serious health reasons we switched to healthier, low glycemic foods & adopted the 16/8 intermittent fasting method that involves eating only during an 8-hour window & fasting for the remaining 16 hours. So we eat a variety of foods but avoid pasta, rice, potatoes, sugar, processed flour & we favor veggies, legumes, eggs, healthy whole grains, & responsibly raised meat, poultry, & seafood, some fruits…Well, you get the idea & you will discover the details in the videos below. We will keep adding them as we go. Never hesitate to ask questions or request foods recipes you would like to see demonstrated or talked about.
Voilà! Bon Appétit, stay home & healthy!
VOILA ! LUNCH TIME VIDEOS: 01 — Today homemade Soup & Granola 02 — Shrimp Saffron Cream sauce with Swiss Chards 03 — Falafel, Hummus, Coleslaw all from scratch all super healthy! 04 — Omelet 05 — Veggie Soup, Dairy free delicious dessert, 06 — Bacalao and Ayacotl. 07 — Nested Eggs & Baked Apples 08 — Grated carrots & Kimchee Miso soup & left over of Bacalao & Ayacotl (White beans salad) 09 — Poached Eggs & Beet salad w/ Goat cheese & Walnuts. 10 — Sardines Tartine + Quinoa patties 11 — Quick Lentil stew, Soup made with left-overs, Lamb tacos with homemade tortillas. 12 — Choux-Fleur Bechamel 13 — Our Anniversary Lunch, with Poulet confit & a scrumptious Sabayon! 14 — Œufs cocotte & Bok Choy & Poetry(2 videos) 15 — Monk Fish Curry & Manoomin (real wild rice) 16 — Croque Saumon, more Coleslaw, poached Pears. (2 videos) 17 — Oeuf Mimosa /Deviled Eggs and more https://www.facebook.com/632389305/videos/10158391781199306/ 18 — Tofu Joyeux but firm! More Wild Rice & Elegant Orange Salad. 19 — Sweet & Savory Crêpes (2 videos) https://www.facebook.com/nicolepeyrafitte/videos/10158399302394306 https://www.facebook.com/nicolepeyrafitte/videos/10158399515964306 20 — Chocolate dairy/sugar free dessert. Baked sweet Potatoes another Coleslaw & Oeufs aux plat.21 — Homemade Sausage from scratch )& SoldierBeans 22 — Œufs brouillés with Morels & Ramps for Earth day & quick made Oat Milk for an impro dessert. https://www.facebook.com/632389305/videos/10158419216689306/ 23 — The Ancient Grain of the day is: Purple Barley. 24 — Season finale! Gromperen Pla à la LuxoGascoRicaine & Healthy Apple Fritters.
“Voilà Lunchtime” were daily live-casted on FB & IG from March 24 -April 24 2020 M-F 12:00 EST
A little background:
Once upon a time I was a cook! I never liked the term chef, though I did run kitchens & was called one! I never really missed the restaurant business, but never stopped cooking. In the early years of this blog I posted more recipes & articles on food, I taught cooking & went as far as taping a demo cooking show, and filming several recipes. My aim has always been to empower people in the kitchen, not to impress them. I appreciate sophisticated techniques & truly enjoys highly skilled chefs but I was never into that kind of cooking. My background is in French regional Southwestern food but I have been in the US since 1987 and learned so much about food here. Getting together with Pierre Joris (here producer/dishwasher/husband) in 1989 was crucial for my artistic future but also for my cooking experience: it is through Pierre that I met Diane Rothenberg & Margie Byrd who are my mentors in many ways. Both are great cooks and had open tables for many years. Diane, an anthropologist, tremendously expanded my perspectives on the history of food; Margie taught me many American staples — the best corn bread ever! & then there is my childhood friend Ariane Daguin from d’Artagnan who is an inspiration has been incredibly supportive of my food related performance work. She was an early supporter of La Garbure Transcontinentale/The Bi-Continental Chowder, a performance that included texts, videos, cooking and sharing the result with the audience. Pierre & I went on doing more of these performance & a memorable one was at the Jardin des Cinq Sens et des Formes Premières in Provence; this performance included the making of a Primordial Soup, readings, vidéos, music by Denis Brun and a Karstic-Action Painting. Here are some pix.
But my cooking debut were really early! I was born in Luchon (French Pyrenees) into the 5th generation of a family of hoteliers-restaurateurs (Hotel Poste et Golf) & my very early cooking training started when I was 6 years old with my grand-father chef Joseph Peyrafitte (whose father Louis was also a chef). Later, when I took over the family kitchen, I went to intern at award winning restaurants in France –1982: Restaurant Vanel, Toulouse, 1991: Hotel de France, Auch. Both places had 2 stars at the Michelin Guide — then I got a few awards myself!
Anyway! forwarding to today: like everyone else we are trying to make the best of this imposed confinement & I always find solace in cooking & eating well. So Pierre & I decided to share the prepping of our simple & healthy home cooking live. We are live both on Facebook & Instagram Monday-Friday from 12 to 12:30 —sometimes a bit longer. Sharing & live-casting our cooking is really in line with our Domopoetic* practice.
* Domopoetics is our collaborative attempt to think, feel & make us respons/able to this/our world & it responsive to us. We do this via our private lives & public actions & performances that meander dialogically between Nicole Peyrafitte’s drawings & videos, voice-, textual & cooking work & Pierre Joris’ poems, translations & essayistic thinking.
Memorabilia:
Sitting next to a chaud-froid de volaille at the hotel Kitchen
Hotel Poste & Golf Bagnères-de-Luchon (here circa 1965)
My grand-pa Chef Joseph Peyrafitte
San-Diego 1990 : Nicole, Pierre Franey, Ariane Daguin
A little background:
