Then, the intimacy of the where and when I belong to, embodied, and connected to historical, theoretical, critical currents. First, the intimacy of the awareness of oneself and one’s own agency. The inspiration comes from art historian Aby Warburg (Germany, 1866-1929), who saw himself as a seismograph, his function, in his own words, to “serve the watersheds of culture.”Īs I lay out the ridged grounds of my research, its sensitivity unfolds into a three-headed intimacy. Sensitivity is the way, but also, the point. Rather, it’s that its function is to serve as a recording and revelation of movement. It is not that it, in itself, shakes, agitates, sways, quakes, shivers, excites, sparkles (etymologically-speaking). The encounter becomes a layered form of meaning-making, and it can always be iterated further as my research grows. When these scraps meet, they play off each other’s imagery, language, format, size, and reference as well as with any other studio cut-offs or materials. I often resort to clustering them, translating the autotheoretical juxtaposition into physicality (directly inspired, again, by Aby Warburg and his unfinished Atlas Mnemosyne). There is something very tactile about these receipts, too, they beg to be handled. Consequently, they become tallies of the moment, work-wise and body-wise. This transfers to the texts, which inherit a certain air of practicality: I cannot help but see a receipt when I print my work this way, independently of what I may have written. Thermal prints’ common-placeness (they are extraordinarily familiar in their incarnation as store receipts), affordability, and frailty makes them a very un-precious material to work with. In consequence, whatever is printed on it is affected by weather and friction, and fades rather quickly (a feeling entity itself). Thermal paper, as the name indicates, is sensitive to heat- it does not need ink. Recently, I have been printing some of the texts with a domestic thermal printer. Printing requires some practical decision-making (often, to mediate an impending sense of guilt regarding resources and waste). When I need to make them exist beyond a screen, I print them. The immateriality of texts is simultaneously a huge advantage, and a disadvantage. With the exhibition approaching, LG decides to show the scenes already shot in one of the rooms of the gallery while continuing to develop the script during the five weeks of the exhibition.'' Excerpt: ''The script is unfinished, and the film does not yet exist. OoS was concerned with what is outside our field of vision but that nevertheless acts upon our perception. My last solo exhibition entitled OoS (Out of Sight), 2018, is an example of my artistic practice where writing, choreography, film and installation belong to the same constellation.
My writing practice plays an active part in my creative process. The fictional conversation brings the reader to the work of film directors Miranda July, John Cassavetes and their warm and fragile characters, the underdogs. Writing is like a walking practice for me. In Letter to Balthazar, I chose writing a letter to the donkey Balthazar of Robert Bresson's film Au Hasard Balthazar (1966.) I analyze how desynchronization works through the presence of Balthazar. My writing process is based on my choreographic background, inextricably bound to movement and to a strong editorial inclination. I explore other registers of communication: dialogue, fables, epistolary exchange and interviews in order to explore the multiple affective qualities of attention relate to the subject of my research, asynchrony. Now in a freer moment, I am pursuing my reflection in the context of a postdoctoral research and finally to my surprise, I continue writing letters. They include letters to Pier Paolo Pasolini, William Forsythe, Jean-Luc Godard, Alberto Giacometti, Ludwig Wittgenstein. I studied how choreographic asynchrony (my research subject) was at play in their artworks.
The project took the form of twenty-five fictional letters to various individuals-artists, thinkers and characters.
Over the time, I finally opted for writing letters. An artistic practice generates its own theory, just as it is possible to think while walking. I am exaggerating of course, and I am not disappointed to have done it, on the contrary, but I would say that I have worked too much when embarking artistic research in the academic world, exhausting myself trying to separate the process of analysis from the creation itself. As an artist-researcher with more than 25 years of practice, I have often felt inadequate when trying to write during the years spent in doctoral seminars, with the feeling of having to address books and ghost authors.