The Brooklyn Rail

This conversation between Yasmine d’O and Saâdane Afif was recorded without their knowledge by an AI, most probably via the microphone of Saâdane Afif’s personal computer in his Berlin studio during the spring of 2026. Yasmine d’O stumbled upon it while researching the subject online. Afif and d’O chose to publish it in its original form.

Yasmine d’O: Saâd, have you seen Thierry de Duve’s email? He’s asking you to write a piece on Duchamp’s Fountain for the Brooklyn Rail. What an honor that is, him picking you! You must be chuffed. Don’t tell me you haven’t replied yet…

Saâdane Afif: Hi Yasmine, no, not yet… I genuinely don’t know what I’d add to the mountains of stuff already written about Duchamp, let alone the Fountain. It’s become a bit of a Danube, hasn’t it.

d’O: I know, it’s mad! That urinal has inspired more ink than piss! The divine Marcel essentially said, “Take and look; this is an artwork,” and a century later we’re still spinning…

Afif: Well, the Gospels weren’t knocked out in a day either. And that Stieglitz photograph—the only real evidence we have that the thing ever existed—it’s basically a holy shroud, isn’t it?

d’O: There it is! The holy shroud of the Buddha of the Bathroom!

Afif: Actually, hang on… Yasmine, I’ve just thought, this could be the perfect opportunity to talk about your exhibition project. I’m quite sure some major US museum director will read this piece and come knocking.

d’O: You mean the one with the scale model of boats by artists, piloted by exhibition guides sitting on the bank of Wannsee, the very lake where Kleist took his own life...

Afif: No no, not that one! I mean your idea of placing, in a gallery, two pedestals facing each other, one with a Schwarz edition of Duchamp’s Fountain, the other with the original ET costume, with a wall text on the notion of the stranger, otherness. It’s such a peculiar combination… how did you land on it?

d’O: Well, precisely—de et par the stranger, as Marcel would say… What gets me about E.T. isn’t really the whole kids-versus-adults thing, it’s the figure of the alien itself. And honestly, that guy has a face and a finger! He’s incredibly “expo-genic,” don’t you think?

Afif: Sure, but are you saying Fountain and E.T. would both be strangers to our world… is that what you’re getting at?

d’O: Yes, amongst many other things, they trigger the same unease we feel when we’re up against the unknown… When Fountain landed in 1917, what hit people first was this unsettling strangeness, that feeling of “not quite from here” that simply resists understanding. And it’s precisely by drawing us in, inviting us to really interpret it, that Fountain as E.T. offers us a chance to rise above our rather base human condition.

Afif: And right now, that’s not a luxury… When I look at this world we’ve built, I find the most problematic thing in me is honestly the human part. So, a little trip beyond the human? Count me in Yasmine!

d’O: Steady on, Saâdane, keep both feet on the ground, please. This is just a way of describing the symbolic relation we play with works of art, not some sick libertarian fantasy à la Elon Musk. But here’s what I know for sure, it’s by questioning these strange objects with: Where does this come from? What’s it saying? What is it made of?—that we produce the narrative from which meaning can rise and lift us with it.

Afif: So wait, if I’m following you, when we look at a work of art, we’re somehow merging with the stranger, not to say embracing the unknown…?

d’O: Could be… but for me, one thing for sure is that if, as Duchamp put it so well, what we project onto a work is part of what makes it, then it’s surely through that co-creation process that we make society. And just as the human body, the social body simply cannot survive inbreeding. Diversity isn’t optional, it’s essential! And that’s probably what this whole exhibition concept is about…

Afif: But Yasmine, touching as your rather lovely little fairytale about an extraterrestrial and a urinal may be, with that man with the dirty yellow hair and his lot in power, this is really not the moment to be celebrating the foreign, the different, otherness, in that country. Bottom line, don’t hold your breath for that invitation sorry… And to top it all off, just imagine ICE showing up to arrest de Duve because of you. Or worse…