a baroque day

We live in a world of baroque encounters: people, places, music, art, inanimate objects such as books, relics of our personal past or other esteemed items that call for a complex, ever-evolving process of self-fashioning. The multifaceted craft of human existence elicits our active and lively participation, the search of wonder, the use of artifices, fantasy and imagination. This is how we shape a place in the world and forge a space for pristine pleasures and possibilities. Somewhere along the line, I take the word “baroque” as a metaphor of this ongoing negotiation of love, and loss, and fragile things that human life entails. Initially, the term “baroque” was used to express elaborate artistry, multiplicity of plot turns and a variety of characters and situations; it is an “artistic style prevalent from the late 16^th to the early 18^th century” in painting, music, architecture, literature and philosophy. In modern times, beyond a certain derogatory meaning, “baroque” can still refer to works of art, crafts and design that are thought to display rich ornaments, details, and a complexity of line, as well as colourful conceits and complicated language.

Down to earth, in North America, in a city like Toronto, one might enjoy and live through a baroque day. What will then mean to open up to a bare baroque rendez-vous that calls forth something new and different, a new delight, a new kind of freedom and talent, and the ability to play and improvise, and make things up? Or, Toronto sustains well this creative experience. Saturday night at the Tafelmusik - Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Music, I had the piercing sensation of delicate balance between tamed and untamed aspects of existence that music allows to emerge. “Mostly Mozart”, under the baguette of the world-renowned conductor Bruno Weil and the virtuosity of the pianist Ronald Brautigam, one of Holland’s leading musicians, felt like entering into the flow of living and getting a sense of what it means to honour a classic period in music; and what it takes to share a moment of beauty and to be part of a powerful event that challenges the experience of becoming. This special soirée appeared as an occasion to touch and taste the polyvalent artistry of baroque music, doubly baroque, indeed: I came to think of the mysterious blend of inner gift, of discipline and hard work that channels an orchestra’s energy into life-enriching avenues (voir Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I haven't read it yet!); and I could not ignore the question of memory, the memory-transmission, and the musical legacies of a classical era that gives access to alternate modes of being, of loving and dreaming. It all felt like a refreshing dash of humanism that goes about sensibly bridging music and insightful thoughts as to recharge us to better meet the worries and vulnerabilities of others and the world.

The same day, my baroque playing experience brought me to the Alliance Française, where the young photographer Julia Martin – winner of the photo competition organized by the Ryerson University Visual Arts department – was presenting her works of art in an exhibition entitled: “This is Not Your Life” - A Fictional Retrospective of an Imagined Childhood. Photographs of small children collected through various means, were transformed. Julia Martin replaced in each image the head of a child with her own, clipped from a photo taken at her fifth birthday party. The major theme of the display was representing “disconnections”, and consequently figuring out a puzzle, making collages. In the heart of this baroque setting, it did not take one long to grasp the intersections between the patch photography and the life of the artist. The therapeutic aura of the project was suddenly no mystery to me or to the others that were slowly walking along the Pierre-Léon Gallery, almost gracefully stopping to take a longer glance in front of the first photo, or the second, or the third, as if to sense an instant more the intermingling of the past and present, and get a better feel of the juxtaposition of an unhappy child and an idyllic scene. One should know that the background photographs – in black and white – belonged to the first half of the 20^th century, around the Second World War, which granted the final body of work a somehow cryptic touch, a haze of ancient and modern. After all, it was no secret – the information was marked on the exhibition invitation: the artist came to explore the topic of “disconnection” subsequent to being clinically diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In the in-between of joy and sadness, melancholia and sublimation, this series of photos reminded me of Alice walking through the looking-glass to greet the performance of a normal childhood, and try and glimpse from a distance the dissociation on which one has to rely in order to survive.

In the end, if I may say, the “journey” of my baroque day convinced me that creativity and agency, loss and imagination, self-other relationships triggered by music, photography and literature contribute to the intensity of our lives by adding layer after layer of meaning, versatility and depth. We do live in A World of Fragile Things (2009), as Mari Ruti cogently states it in her book, but it is a world incessantly shimmered by prevailing possibilities..