By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/unart1comoros092209.html
UNITED NATIONS, September 22 -- While Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon held a tightly controlled press conference on climate change, accepting a mere four questions, none about poor countries, in the UN's lobby a small crowd viewed graphic art work about thousands of deaths in the sea between Comoros and Mayotte.
Artist Denis Balthazar, originally from French Guyana but focused in this work on the pieces of Grand Comoros, told Inner City Press that the UN does and says too little for the poor in the Comoros.
They live in shantytowns, the sheet metal walls from which Balthazar uses in his paintings. He also uses magnifying glasses and fragments of newspapers. He depicts the mercenary Robert Denard, and crying faces underneath a French flag.
The work has been shown in Paris, in Mayotte and now New York. Why not on Comoros, Inner City Press asked. That will be the next stop. First was to try to confront the silence, Balthazar said. Security guards milled around, eating the free sandwiches.
Downstairs, unreachable by the press much less thee public, world leaders had a "working dinner" about climate change. Their distance from those depicted in Balthazar's paintings couldn't be more clear. Yet even in the UN, during the General Assembly, sometimes there is truth. Watch this site.
