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It was never my intention to ruin a work of art, but let's start from the beginning, the first person plural. We ^
We, all of us, arrived in the mid-eighties in spite of-or maybe because of-firm parental opposition. We said we were going to study fine arts, but really we came to walk in circles, to open up the city streets, to create spirals. We wanted to be modern and magical.
We moved into tiny apartments in the city center, lofts as well, twobedrooms in the Bohemian quarter (which became Bohemian the moment we decided to settle there), three- and four-bedrooms near the university campus; even, in the most unparalleled strokes of genius, under a bridge or in a shack.
We didn't come to learn; we came to prove that no one had anything to teach us, that the department wasn't cut out for us, that the professors didn't share our sensibilities nor the students our brilliance. We came talented, straight from home, our fathers truckers and farmers, our mothers hairdressers and housewives; as a matter of fact, we came talented straight from our mothers' wombs (hairdressers and housewives though they might be), artistic from birth, to bring the new light that would illuminate the essential art of the future.
We had youth and tobacco, hats and toilet paper, and youth again. We had everything we needed.
Our large group soon splintered into passionate, theoretical, naturally opposing camps. What mattered most was the knowledge that we were right and they-who were the same as we were, same age, same blue-collar father-were on the wrong path, with their laughably mimetic and pretentious art, their improvised shows on the streets and at bars of ill repute, their demonstrations at the university, waiting with bared breasts and penises for the police to break them up. We too created pretentious art, improvised street galleries, and waited with exposed tits and cocks for the arrival of uniforms at the university gates, but in our case it was authentic, triumphant.
Flare #3 was our first exhibition, the Wunderkammer of our formidable talent. All of us, eight, ten, eighteen-we never took a census of our guerrillas-installed our work in the broken-down house we called "The Cavity" because some poet had once...