A Billion Stories

Recent genetic science research from Harvard, the Reich laboratory, to be specific, is the clearest basis for explaining my art and beliefs so far.

Migration predates and overrides nationalism at every turn in human history. Populations change genetically so drastically every few thousand years that it makes no sense for any group to lay claim to any piece of land on more than the most immediate, pragmatic grounds.

Moreover, migration is not just about moving, it’s about who is left behind: a billion stories of love and loss, of families moving away, willingly or unwillingly. We have written accounts of some of the most recent: Jacob and Laban, Makeda and Solomon and, of course colonialism was a mass-migration in the modern era that left us with the modern invention of nation-states, which we’re still working out, even as many treat this new idea as an eternal truth

Nationalism plays out against logic. It’s ironic that Brahmins in Northern India are more closely related to steppe people from eastern Europe than to anyone from ancient India. If time-on-the-land is to be a factor, then in fact the Dalit are more Indian than the Brahmin, if “who got here first” is a factor.

It’s a very human pathology, and nearly universal: those who are in power scapegoat those who are weak, or in the way.

Throughout history and prehistory, artists look at the art and make art in response. The ancient “fertility” sculptures that were most likely carved by the women they represent and given to little girls as dolls. We see this in modern tribal cultures readily enough so there’s no need to ascribe “ritual object” tropes to it. We also see it in the cave paintings and grave goods that echo stories that happened continents away. Cinderella, the Wabele forest spirit, and my current series of people in modern, overwhelming and bureaucratic migration settings. Ancient grave goods and modern passports. Captured slaves on wagons across the steppes and children stolen from those same Ukrainian steppes to go to an island owned by an oligarch; their passports legal and above board thanks to the same people who sow scapegoating hysteria about migrants.

René Girard is very popular with oligarchs right now, and yet his scapegoat theory has a clear irony: selfishness that actually hurts the doer, the victim and others in the group/world, for a short term, myopic gain. The hoarding and corruption of Epstein and his cohort are an inevitable historical outcome. Epstein died, probably at the hands of a “friend”, and Russia has killed more of its own people than any enemy ever has. Russia gives further examples as it continues to scapegoat Ukraine at the expense of its own people, its economy and the world at large, even though Moscow was populated by Ukraine, not the other way around, and almost every great achievement in Russia in the last 100 years was the work of Kyiv, not Moscow. And in what it terms “the west”, Russia demonstrably caused a refugee crisis, then whipped up extremists to stir anti-immigrant hysteria, helped by many in the Epstein-class and their political circle.

Perhaps DARVO ¹ works so well because the dynamic is often true. Looking at Popper’s “conspiracy theory of society” we see both truth and falsehood. There was a very real conspiracy among oligarchs to commit fraud, trafficking and treason, even as those same people funded media and political campaigns to create a false narrative of woke conspiracies, threats to free speech and parasitic migrants draining taxes. A perfect foil for the billions funnelled offshore to wealth managers and secretive trust funds.

This series of small paintings, sculptures and objets d’art, carries the humanity of it. The banality, the multitude of motivations or involuntary removals. The displacement, since many people fled in the face of incoming groups, or destroyed incoming groups who had lost their own homes. The bronze age collapse was only the most recent of hundreds of such collapses, chasing us and our migrations in waves around the world. We are far more related than we realised and far less entitled to claim any special status than we were taught.