Philippe Velez McIntyre , is a freelance photographer and social entrepreneur. Born in Paris, he grew up in Colombia and the United States. In the beginning of the eighties he moved back to Europe, first in Madrid and then in Paris. Since the early nineties he lives and works in Amsterdam.
In his work McIntyre combines an esthetical and ethical perspective while crossing artistic, social and political disciplines. He has been especially active in fields where nature and culture meet, like ecological architecture, sustainable food and agriculture, and urban city planning. Other fields of interest are public health and social wellbeing. His approach is at the same time educational and spiritual.
Philippe McIntyre can be reached at:
philippevelez@gmail.com
All Publications, photographs, books and objects on website are available via Boekie Woekie Books by Artists, Amsterdam, except when otherwise mentioned.
All Photographs and Publications © Philippe Velez McIntyre, © Philippe McIntyre, except when otherwise mentioned.
“We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their root.
Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other.
Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. Here’s a little outsider information , and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there , ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses . What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together and a forest grows aware.”
Richard powers, The overstory
Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo,
and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others.
In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about.
Everything happens through pure luck. Posterity is real bitch who cheats some,
reinstates others(El Greco) and reserves the right to change her mind every 50 years.
Aesthetic judgments, for Marcel Duchamp, are nothing but expressions of a limitless, incalculable caprice, he calls the whole traditional system of transmission into doubt. Art in his view, does not necessarily require a “public”. He once remarked that to him, “exposer” (to exhibit) sounded a bit too much like “épouser” (to marry). Both were things to avoid.
Rejecting the chance distribution created by the art market, Duchamp concentrated most of his works in one collection. “I always felt that showing one painting in one place and another somewhere else was just like amputating one finger or a leg each time”
In defence of the use of violence by colonized peoples, Fanon argued that human beings who are not considered as such (by the colonizer) shall not be bound by principles that apply to humanity in their attitude towards the colonizer.
Franz Fanon