Tonight I will be your GhettoMaster.

For several evenings yet, you have come to join here, European artists, who have displayed for you their works. As if learning children about a monkey in a tree, or of the flower and the bee.

The About Art Related Activities program aims to encourage discussion and communication among visiting and local artists and an interested public. Many aspects of the working process of artists, as individuals, or working together to create a piece of art will be the main issues. Participating artists are free to select any mode of communication to bring forward the appropriate information about themselves, their works, the collaboration and the working process. The program also hopes to make art more accessible, better understood and better appreciated among the wider audience.

But the GhettoMaster can only see white faces in the secluded world of the About Café. For all I have learned from this program so far is, that this is the place to be, the hot spot, the flagpoint, centre of the buzzing cultural life in Bangkok,... but alas, only for farang artists, to eat out the Siam Heart, to make the White Elephant bow, to prove nothing but our self-proclaimed image as The Great Artists.

The About Café is the Bangkok Cultural Ghetto, and every week another GhettoMaster can decide upon the rules. The rules are easy, because the power is neatly divided, tonight I am your GhettoMaster and you all obey me because next time you will be the GhettoMaster and you will then also rely upon my rationality, my understanding, my respect, as a fellow artist, as a collegue, as a trustworthy equivalent. Believe this not, as I would rather disappear from this earth, than taking part in something that is bound to crumble down to nothing in the end.

It's a shame that 13 supposedly high-ranked, European contemporary artists can do no better. We are pathetic in our claim of arrogating to ourselves extraordinary powers or supercultural wisdom. Even this GhettoMaster is unworthy of the words he is speaking at this very moment. You can cut the beautiful flower off a tree and admire its beauty in a vase, but then that is an act only for your own self-worship, the kind of worship we all love to indulge in. But just alike that you cannot restore the flower back to the tree and make it continue to bloom, it is wrong to tear away the artist from real life to put him on show and revel in the beauty he eventually has to offer.

I must deeply admire the Thai artists, for not showing up at the About Café Ghetto. I think it is about time we, the European artists, start to learn from that. These last weeks I have spent many times, explaining to Thaïs what a Ghetto is, because it seems to be a notion that is totally strange and unknown to them. And again I am, albeit not allowed and unworthy to myself, jealous.

The Bangkok Cultural Ghetto had been forewarned, through the high-tech communication means of email and the internet, that a 'crazy guy' from Belgium was coming. On the other hand, the European artists were directed to About Café, as a safe haven for the cultural farang. So here we meet, now comes the matter of breaking away.

The first work I have made in Bangkok, in commitment to the Alter Ego project, was on the 15th of January. It was generated by reading an article in the newspaper called "Pain Makes Man Speak at Last".

HANOI - A 32-year-old man spoke for the first time in his life after undergoing an operation on his abcessed foot, doctors from a southern provincial hospital said yesterday. A doctor from the casualty department of Binh Dinh Provincial Hospital said that Truong Van Xa uttered his first words to describe his pain on Dec 31. Although Xa had been injected with local anaesthetic, when the operating doctor made the first incision on his infected wound, he screamed. "Oh my gosh, it's so painful," Xa exclaimed, according to his doctor, Truong Thi Thom who performed the operation. Xa, who until that moment had lived his life as a deaf mute, astonished the doctor by then saying "thank you doctor."

At the same time I found an abandoned Land Rover, near the place where we stay, in Taling Chan. At home I also have a Land Rover, it is an old army-ambulance, to rescue the wounded from remote locations and to perform first-aid care in emergencies. I went into the abandoned Land Rover, removed my shoes, and made an incision in my foot. At last I had found, after being in Bangkok for 15 days, a way to utter my first words.

Just like then, there is also now only one way to break out of tonight's Ghetto, and that is through the way of suffering. Unlike the cutting off the flower from the tree, being sucked into the Ghetto is not permanent. A body has the power to regenerate, the skin will cover up the wound, and make the eyes no longer see, the suffering that is needed to make my way out from here.

(I cut the letters 'AARA' - About Art Related Activities into my left upper arm and left.)