project image
Marie-Joelle Parent
LEGAL MANIFESTATIONS

first performed on October 4, 2011
Occupy Wall Street, New York, NY
performed 20 times in 2011

YESIREE THE PUBLIC NOTARY

Brooklyn, NY
yes@yesireepublicnotary.com
yesireepublicnotary.wordpress.com

LEGAL MANIFESTATIONS
YESIREE THE PUBLIC NOTARY

A hole hath been ripped, opportunity is raw, and the future is unwritten! Yesiree the Public Notary spent October 2011 compiling and notarizing 300 individual envisionments of the future at Occupy Wall Street. Officiated with a necessary verbal ceremony, rung into reality, signed by all parties, and sealed by the State of New York. While the participant receives a copy, each original form is added to a document of present awakening and stirring sentiment. For optimum strength in esoteric legality, participants are asked to formulate: What it is they want, not what they don’t want. One part accountability, the other covenant, magical and judicial practice, these spiritually legal statements together create a strength and solidarity that the speaker personally is held accountable for. Whilst speaking, a magical and legal tether is created, whereby inexplicitly, by not keeping up their statement, they are, by law, committing an act of perjury. I, Yesiree!, do hereby ENVISION: “In the world I want to live, each person is accountable to and for themselves, not out of fear but out of good will and awareness of an equal power we each hold rank in. This is a place where trust begins in oneself and follows naturally to our neighbors and beyond.” On this day of , 20 , before me, (Yesiree), personally appeared X__, proved to me with satisfactory evidence to be the person who appeared before me, and bound with the succeeding verbal ceremony, swears or affirms: I am, yes I am, yes I am who I say I am and I say, what I say is true, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I do. Caren (Carrie) H. Dashow, is a legal notary public, commissioned by the State of New York through March 2014. A notary is a civil servant of the state, for whom the notary acts as official witness. A notary provides legal validation in the form of Oaths, Affirmations, and Acknowledgments. It is not a notary’s responsibility to judge the content of statement but the author’s belief, assurance and identity. As Yesiree the Public Notary, I mediate one’s inner voice to the outside, asking people to make statements they as themselves will uphold, in turn externalizing the internal to a legal one, reversing the power structure while questioning the need for this validation, both personally and legally. What questions arise from a distrust of ourselves and others? Is there an aversion of accountability in a punishment-based system. Do we need another to prove for ourselves what we know to be true? What permission does it take for us to acknowledge this? Each of us is not only accountable for our actions to the outside, but first to ourselves. Yesiree!