Weekly – Friday 10.11.23
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Friday is weekly: a digest of what the team has seen, read and listened to, and wants to share with you.
After four days of madness during the recent KIKK Festival, the kingkong editorial team needed to take a deep breath. Not always easy when current events are experiencing rough weather. Whether it is linked to the situation in Palestine or just plain old solastalgia – this form of psychological distress which often flares up when you become aware of the climate emergency – anxiety can rapidly eat away at you. So, today, we will present you with two alternatives to calm your nerves intelligently.
It’s just as well!
Camille Teste, mean anything to you? A former journalist turned yoga teacher, it would be very simplistic to reduce her to this single label. She is also an activist, feminist, author, and now the presenter of the podcast Encore heureux (It’s just as well!) produced by Binge Audio and formerly called ‘Après la pluie’ (After the Rain).
As we all are, Camille is vulnerable to anxiety. Once every fortnight, her podcast gets down to the task of deconstructing the bits of advice we bombard ourselves with in order to feel better: go to sleep at fixed times, strengthen your quad muscles, do your daily 10,000 steps, communicate your emotions better, buy a shape memory pillow or see a psychologist. Advice? More like dictates which, when we do not follow them to the letter, sometimes give us the sense of being nonentities, symptomatic of the violences at work within our system. Because the real question is: can we genuinely choose not to wish to lose weight in a fatphobic world which holds fat in contempt? And yet, ‘it’s just as well’, it does us no harm to look for ways of doing better physically and mentally.
In the second episode of this first season, Camille and a series of experts look into creativity. They quite rightly redefine what creativity is and what it is not, along the way distinguishing it from art. At kingkong, that certainly pricked our ears up. What is the point of creating? Do you necessarily need to have talent or be an artist? Do I only have the right to be creative if I can justify this creativity by a form of productivity and the earning of money? Cannot creativity also be practiced in the small acts of everyday life? In each episode, a specialist even suggests a practical exercise for the theme explored. And if you are passing through Paris, you can also attend the recording of the podcast once a month, at the Gaîté Lyrique.
Our creativity spaces are fluid […]. Our room of one’s own is sometimes the size of our telephone, sometimes that of a large area. We are all creative, but the space to express this is constantly variable. Creativity is not a fixed power.
Nathalie Sejean in ‘Encore heureux’, artist and creator of workshops aiming for the development of creativity for all.
We Love You
To leave you on a gentle note, we also wanted to share with you an Instagram account which lifted our spirits. ‘We Love You’ is a creative multimedia project carried by Thomas Sullivan and Andy Min. Two Americans, if we are to believe their accents and the landscapes they appear in. Because even if these two young Gen Z people are everywhere (TikTok, Insta, YouTube, more recently, Patreon, etc.), they spend most of their time outside, in the great outdoors, and not on the Internet.
Between humour and poetry, these videos of short or medium duration have quite a touching goal: ‘We wish to inspire optimism, empathy, as well as a genuine reconnection with the living world through our videos,’ explain the two acolytes, friends in life. It’s simple, their reels make you want to get out and about in nature and shout with your best partner-in-adventure, or to become an amateur ornithologist in order to communicate with Picidae. From their ‘Hey man,’ to the little maxims on life which bring their videos to a close, we are lapping it all up, and we say to them, ‘We love you too’.
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