Thinking of new ways to make the world connect with art when everyone is confined in their homes, the Galerie Michel Rein has put together a project called Confinement Notes where each of their artists submit a piece of drawings, work in progress, poem, text, video, studio image, statement or cooking recipe that symbolises their state of mind during the quarantine. For this first week of Confinement Notes, you’ll find a text by Jimmie Durham, a painting by Michele Ciacciofera, a drawing by Enrique Ramirez, a piece by Anne-Marie Schneider, a photo by Elisa Pône and more! In these uncertain times, it’s vital to hear what the artists have to say as they often capture perfectly the movements of the society they are living in. Discover Jimmie Durham’s text accompanying the photo and some of the other artists’ notes below:

Early this morning
(please do not imagine the reference is the time when you are reading about it;
That is, don’t read the phrase literally but instead, perhaps poetically;
As you read it is actually ‘the future’ to ‘now’, maybe even quite ‘far’
Into this imagined future.
Won’t it be interesting if you are reading it early in your morning, though?
As though there might really be some connection
Between the reading and the writing.

Although it is just as salubrious to imagine it is now your evening,
As you try once again to decipher the old
Language of the semi-mythical peoples of the dim past.)

I stood upon the spinning earth
Imagining the day ahead and the sun not-quite ‘above’
And the few clouds scudding, i guess, by and why
The dream from last night’s last hours stays so long in my, as they say, head.

(there could still be a connection, couldn’t there be?)
Anyone in a similar position, that is, situated on a level physically or meta, i guess, physically
Above the normal of an area while witnessing the growing visibility
Of the rising (seemingly) sun might imagine at least a short future
In which some clouds or something will scud by as the day grows, as they say, longer.

The sun is larger than we can truly conceive of, but it is only one
Among millions even larger in this not-exactly-large- galaxy as galaxies are ‘measured’.
A cluster of large galaxies quite far away from here, luckily,
(how might a ‘cluster of galaxies’ be imagined?)
Has been recorded as having had an explosion at the ‘edge’ of a ‘very large’ black hole.

This explosion, it is written, is/was so strong it made a dent of sorts in the cluster.
This event, if that word makes sense at all, will have occurred so long ago
That even you, reader –in- the- future (if such a phenomenon were to come into being) will
Not have been born yet nor me nor my ancestors or friends.

Perhaps the ‘event’ (if the simple act of standing on a small hill can be called an event)
Of standing on a small hill obliquely because of the danger of damage to sight, watching
The sun as the earth turns
Was witnessed by a bird (they see everything we do)
Or even a bird and a (not so much timid as careful; understandably, given the situation) small, By human standards, mouse.,

Leave me alone. I want to be alone.
Don’t leave me alone. Essentially, we are each alone.
WE ARE NOT ALONE

Well, as the day becomes evening (see, that didn’t take long, did it?)
Thoughts about how one might attempt to speak to you become, if not more ‘mellow’,

Jimmie Durham 2020 Napoli

Michele Ciacciofera – Confinement Notes #3 Untitled, 2020

Franck Scurti – Confinement Notes #5 SOLEIL POURRI
19.03.2020

Enrique Ramirez – Confinement Notes #7 El rumor del naufragio (part 1)
20.03.2020

Anne-Marie Schneider – Confinement Notes #14 Fenêtres, 2020 Acrylic on canvas