Jean-Manuel

​    I feel like I inherited a precious cultural, political and artistic mixity.

​

    The bridges between my different identities build themselves — or rather reveal themselves — in me everytime I create.

    I encounter the pictorial touch of my uncle Danny, who I unfortunately never met, by comparing our paintings, created with the same essence, unconsciously, 50 years appart.

    When I adjust my spine in order to sing, it is all of the andean cordillera that I feel holding me.

    The words of my father and my mother, born in opposite sides of the american continents and however united today in their struggle and their researches for human rights in latin America; their words come back to me incessantly in my poetry, like a way that opens between what revolutionary singer Violeta Parra calls "the good so far from the bad".

    If I cry for Gaza, I also cry for my Irish ancestors; if I create to offer meanings like homes to the orphaned struggles, the unrevealed realities, it is because I can see in Wajdi Mouawad's play Tous des oiseaux all the humanity and suffering that, 3000 years ago, The Troyans by Euripide already contained, and that still needs a body, a canvas, a voice, a vision to cry the overflow of stolen times.

    And when I listen to "Latinoamérica" by puerto rican group Calle 13, I burst into tears at the simple evocation of the "desapararecidos" (the forced disparitions in latin american dictatorships). Even if I was not there, at La Moneda, on the 11th of September 1973. Even if I never lost a loved one to anti-humanity regimes. Even if it took time, I now feel many disparitions making their reappearances inside of me.

​

    When I create, I reveal myself to the world, and, in exchange, so many worlds reveal themselves to me.