UM...HOW TO START? -she asks-
Always a hard question for me too, dear Pauline.
Perhaps a triangle’s vertex that progressively moves away from the others, leaving a trail. Just like the effect a plane would do when fading on the sky. Just like an arrow. And an arrow is a good start to something.
(Then she writes, I trans-late:)
-Is speaking an equivalent to publishing?
This issue constantly arches over the work of Will Holder, who considers spoken words, discussion and enunciation as an act of publishing and the very form of dissemination and editorial production. Through his investigation on language composition, he conceives the printed object as the result of dialogue and conversation; words as a handful of arrows that intertwine and materialize something, that point, order, begin.
I remember a lecture given at the ENSBA in Lyon in 2009, which I was able to consult in the school’s library. Holder explained that a text never stands alone, that it is always part of a language and echoes other voices. He spoke to his audience about what everyone had been waiting for, his work, but seized the opportunity to give it shape through words to play a game of oration, constructed from his current readings. During this instruction process, the writing takes on the form of a partition, revealing the rhythms of language from Holder’s books. The action can be likened to that of a translator, translation as transposition or moving from the metamorphosis of the published state to orality, the interpreter’s role being to narrate the space and form of words
But what if the words formed a space in turn?
CRYSTAL MAZE II: Free, Freak, Fake, The freeake library
In Le Crystal Maze, or “crystal labyrinth”, mirror reflections are encountered “that would carry the kaleidoscopic faculty of metamorphosing the vast territory of publishing into a myriad of things seen, read and rendered at a given moment”. The project initiated by Agence du doute takes the form of an evolving conversation in which editorial objects are put into perspective, a narrative and transmission space in which a visual narrative emerges. Like a guide, words and gestures play together in a posture of enunciation, and the books become protagonists containing the answers to the path of thought revealed by the projected editorial landscapes.
CRYSTAL MAZE III: The Crystal Mask
Hands are activated to carry and assemble expressive content: The table, the screen and the page are transformed into a space for oral montage. The very act of utterance, accompanied by all its extra-language gestural forms, becomes an act of editing. Our eyes wander over the objects creating analogies throughout the lecture-performance, with these narrators seeing language as material and knowledge as matter.
An example of this form of dissociation would be the Faire le Gilles lectures orchestrated by Robert Cantarella, where the lecturer repeats word for word the speech given by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze at Vincennes and Paris 8, articulating the same intonations, the same hesitations, the same coughs and blinks.
This new narrative format we’ve been addressing, through these “lecture-performances”, has a pedagogical implication: in mediation, we move from teaching art to teaching as art. From a lecture about books to a book-lecture.