A Constructed World

I’m a traveller. Most Australians are travellers, they have just forgotten. I’m a performer in travelling Medicine Show, I’ve sold medicinal alcohol. And I believed I could change the world. Other people, in France, made me believe that too.

I come from a country that has a sexist art world. I work with a man who is a feminist, who works with a woman they don’t see. In France they see me.

We met a French girl in Italy who could see us both at the same time, and we did great things together, us and the French girl. We were the-new-fools-in-town, in Torino (the city of the Savoy Kings). We were getting closer to Paris. She told us we had to go there.

Then we met the director of an art centre in a suburb West of Paris and she could see us too. And then a curator who had lived in Belleville who could not only see us but he could translate what we had spoken to the eels and believed he could transmit that to others. Then we met a philosopher who could not only see us but knew that we needed to be cooked for and we were grateful. Then he joined our travelling Medicine Show and became a traveller.

We met a director of a regional art school who invited us to travel there with the curator and the philosopher, and to teach the students how to change the world. Instead of a cafeteria the school had an outdoor dustbowl with a few wooden tables and seats. For a few years the students listened, but then a new director came and he didn’t like travellers…

Sometimes we met people we admired and wanted to continue relationships with them. Some were women with short hair who invited us to speak at round tables. They liked us too, but then they misunderstood and thought we had stopped travelling, so they stopped being friends towards us. There were three guys, a bookstore and a gallery, but they already knew enough travellers.

The French girl introduced us to a young critic from the 17th who moved to the 18th, who was straight, and then he was gay, and we loved him…