I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES...

* * * I heard you paint houses? Yes, I do my own carpentry also. Foreword by professor Gael Chabat In the days following the events of May 1968, once the barricades and overturned cars had been removed from the streets. Injuries bandaged and wounds licked, the noise had stopped and the smoke lifted. A city was reborn. Image and text festooned the surrounding streets; unclaimed art was everywhere to be seen, a public recording of the thoughts, feelings and events of the last few days. The city and its inhabitants had risen above constraints and breathed, unaided, for the first time. As normality slowly began to reclaim these streets, the text and images gradually started to disappear. The past was being erased. The following piece of text has been taken and translated from one of the only know photographs of this piece of work which has since been lost. The anonymous author voices concerns that still effect and worry us within today’s world. Today, the author’s work is gone. The author was never there. The rewards that you want, the rewards that you feel that you need, can’t live without, that you deserve are rarely given away. Work is required. The ability to forge ahead and create your own voice is vital. There are however, those who wish to undermine the gift of ‘free forming thought’ through reckless and frivolous actions. REFUSE to accept opinions of ‘experts’ whose only goal seems to be to twist and distort something that does not belong to them. LOOK DOWN upon the lazy work of a plagiarist who thinks nothing of trading their voice in return for idleness. TREAT WITH SUSPISION faceless voices spouting misinformation in distinctly vague tones. These few rogues are all around; they cloud your judgement and turn you into little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy. We are a nation of dummies, all marching to one beat; theirs. But there is still hope; we can turn it around yet. Strike back, Information, realisation and liberation. Purge yourself of these fiends and look again, retrace your steps and who knows what you will find? Never be afraid to step forward and give it another chance. Never be afraid to step forward and give yourself another chance.