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Laugh and be gentle to unknown Fragmets from essay by Erwin Jans 1. Isabella's room contains a secret. It is the location of a lie. It is the location of the lie that dominates Isabella's existence. This lie is an image. An exotic image. The image of a desert prince. Isabella is the daughter of a desert prince who disappeared on an expedition. This is what her foster parents, Arthur and Anna, told her. They lived together in a lighthouse on an island, where Arthur was the lighthouse-keeper. Like an island, the lighthouse is a transitional area: somewhere between the sea and the land, between solid and fluid, between inside and outside. The lighthouse is built on the land, but it yearns for the sea. Isabella yearns for the desert, the desert prince, Africa, This is how the life-story of the blind old Isabella begins. But it soon becomes clear that a terrible, unutterable truth lies hidden beneath the story of the desert prince. Anna and Arthur cannot live with their secrets and escape into drink. Anna dies and Arthur throws himself into the sea. Isabella's quest for her father, the desert prince, does not lead her to Africa but to a room in Paris, filled with anthropological and ethnological objects. 2. Isabella is old and blind when she looks backover her life. She lives in her room in Paris surrounded by the thousands of exotic objects plundered from Ancient Egypt and black Africa. They belonged to Jan Lauwers' father, who on his death left them to his wife and children. These objects were separated from their cultural context by the view of a different era, one which was colonial and regarded them as exotic. They are objects in which a world - Africa - has come to a standstill, become petrified, stored, 'museumised' and fetishised. Isabella's life spans almost the entire 20th century: the First and Second World Wars, Hiroshima, colonialism, the development of modern art, involving such figures as Joyce, Picasso and Huelsenbeck, the journeys to the moon, David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, the famines in Africa and the Vlaams Blok in Antwerp. 3. Face à l'extrême: this is the title of a book by the French thinker Tzvetan Todorov about the concentration camps of the Second World War. But at the same time the title points to the attitude of everyone who lives in the 21st century with some degree of awareness. Every day we come faceto-face with the extreme. It looks at us with its Medusa's head and it is as if we turn to stone: in emotional indifference, in political apathy, in social isolation, in even more economic production and consumption. According to the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, we have in the meantime gone beyond reality and history. Things have already passed their end. We are living beyond the end. It is here that the apocalypse of our era lies: in the impossibility of the end. So what events take place beyond the end? Baudrillard calls them 'extreme phenomena'. He refers to the Latin stem ex-terminus : beyond the end. The characteristics of these'extreme phenomena'are ecstasy and involution. The ecstasy of the social: the masses (more social than the social). The ecstasy of