Tea ceremony, Miyako Odori, Kyoto, 2011

I was in Kyoto last year and was very impressed by the Miyako Odori Geisha dance, by the expressiveness and sophistication of its music, broken purposefully by exclamations that added to the feeling of restrained eloquence.

There are also great Japanese music concerts in Europe, I attended to one at the Japanese Culture Institute of Cologne (it was played by Kikuchi Naoko and Carin Levine).

Walt Disney Studios in Paris opened a section last year called “Toy Story Playland”. The area features a series of rides designed for children, based on the characters of the Toy Story franchise: RC Racer, Slinky Dog ZigZag Spin and Toy Soldiers Parachute Drop. Why choose Toy Story for a new theme park section instead of the many other Disney franchises? There are many good reasons to pick it up, such as its popularity and the obvious merchandising opportunities. I would like, however, to speculate on one more reason that might have led to that choice. In this instance, whether consciously or not, Disney performed a very subtle cultural exercise in promoting cars, consumerism, and the American army.

The Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Köln recently gave a series of lectures in the context of its Afropolis exhibition. I had the opportunity to attend one of them: “Envisaging New Urban Futures for Kinshasa” presented by Professor Filip de Boeck. It turned out to be somehow connected to a paper I wrote recently, and in which I defend a nomadic relation to space.