Summary

Archipelago thinking

Serendipity

The poetics of relationship

Outrages & delights

The untranslatable

Queer / Subaltern studies

The general spirit of the body of work is covered in the book "Nos vie comme événement  Ce que l'art et la science transforment en nous" (Our Lives as events - What Art and science transform in Us)

co-written with Elisa Brune and published by Éditions Odile Jacob in 2019.

the book on page PUBLICATION

Nietzsche claimed that he already had "in his head" the point at which he wanted his thought to culminate, in a dazzling impression. The words of inner thought give form to such an intuition, more slowly, at the risk of impoverishing it. If this thought is then put into writing, it risks further impoverishment that the genius of certain authors manages to limit. But only to a limited extent.

Is the essential silent within us, silent and at the same time thundering, rich and lively? Can we leave behind the discourse and the market of words, the flour of conversations, the sorcery of formulations, the grammatical net, and the compression of experience, to practice the great outdoors?

Fatality

A word is already a prejudice.

Friedrich Nietzsche 

Immense 

Almost everything that happens is inexpressible and takes place in a region where words have never been spoken". Rainer Maria Rilke

Guilty

Words have killed images, or they hide them. A civilisation of words, a civilisation gone astray. Words create confusion. 

Eugène Ionesco

Screen

Sometimes a dialogue in which they spoke only of their feelings made them forget that they had any.

Robert Musil

Further on

If these moments of extreme happiness, extreme danger or extreme unhappiness are so difficult to describe, it's precisely because language stops at a certain point and you go a little further.

Nicolas Bouvier 

Self-locking

Language is what allows us to get where we want to go and prevents us from getting there.

Samuel Beckett

Almost

There comes a time in the evening when the meadow will say something. It never says it. Perhaps it says it infinitely and we don't hear it, or we hear it, but that something is as untranslatable as music.

Jorge Luis Borges

Flavour

Only her own person could express to herself the inexpressible smell of raw fish - but not in words: the only way to express it was to smell it again.

Clarice Lispector

Sounds

Swann considered musical motifs to be real ideas, from another world, another order, [...] impenetrable to intelligence.

Marcel Proust

Brutal

On these innumerable, unspeakable, subtle and complex movements, conventional language immediately lays the cement slab of its definitions.

Nathalie Sarraute

It's not enough to say: Long live the multiple.

You have to create the multiple.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

The archipelago is the very shape of the contemporary world as we perceive it today. Galaxies, planets, ecosystems, living beings, cultures and cities are all constellations of stable elements in constant relationships. 

Extract of Mondialite or Edouard Glissant's Archipelagos

by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Editor), Asad Raza (Editor)

"What we call globalisation, which is standardisation to the lowest common denominator,

the reign of multinationals, standardisation, the unbridled ultra-liberalism of world markets

(a company conveniently transfers its factories to a faraway country, the sick can't buy cheaper drugs in a neighbouring country), and so on, as anyone can see;

It's a parade of hackneyed platitudes, repeated ad infinitum, but it's also the negative side of a prodigious reality that I call mundialite.

It throws us into the unprecedented adventure that we have all been given to live through today, and into a world that, for the first time, and so vividly, and in such an immediate, violent way, is understood as both multiple and singular, and inextricable. We all need to change our ways of understanding, living and acting in such a world. 

Hans Ulrich Obrist:

As Glissant told me, "it is in these islands that the idea of creolisation, of the mixing of cultures, has been brilliantly realised. For the continents refuse to mix, whereas archipelagic thinking makes it possible to say that neither the identity of each individual nor the collective identity is fixed and established once and for all."

(...)

Drawing the lace that links different elements of the world is a stimulating, hazardous and temporary exercise. It is the very object of all fundamental research.

Some have the privilege of shaping their own islands, of creating new ones. They forget the single axes, preferring evolving, multipolar forms, the reference-rich vision of the gradual enrichment of reality.

Relationships

Creating is not about distorting or inventing characters or things. It means forging new relationships between characters and things that exist and as they exist;

it means reworking the real with the real.

Robert Bresson

quoted by Laplantine

Living Nature

Copying the objects that make up a still life is nothing. What's important is to express the sensation they inspire, the emotion aroused by the whole, the relationships between the objects represented, the specific character of each of them, modified by its relationship with the others, all interwoven like a rope or a snake.

Henri Matisse

Lumps

Its heterogeneity is that of the mille-feuilles, the most difficult pastry to open, resistant to the fork by its very heterogeneity.

Michel Thévoz

Essay

Archipelagic thought is a thought of the essay, of intuitive temptation, which could be contrasted with continental thoughts, which are above all systemic.

Édouard Glissant

Serendipity is like looking for a needle in a haystack

and finding the farmer's daughter.

Pek Van Andel

Ironically, the best way to make discoveries is to use the wrong method, the one you can't control. Serendipity, or the art of bouncing back from serendipity, cannot be controlled any more than chance itself can be predicted.

Serendipity, or the art of using what happens by chance, can't be controlled any more than chance can.

On the other hand, an attitude that allows serendipity to bear fruit is one that

1) accepts exposure,

2) notices the unusual.

Embracing the brilliance of randomness, embracing coincidence, slipping into the orbit of the event, picking up the unexpected...

Availability

There's no shortage of opportunities. It's us who miss them.

Tibor Fischer

Active

There's an intermediate stage between the 'act' and the 'opportunity', where you provoke, where you attract the opportunity.

Franz Kafka

Windmill

To welcome errors is not to contradict chance but to corroborate it.

Jorge Luis Borges

Necessary

Even fortuitous elements were made necessary by the action they exerted afterwards on the whole. the whole.

Franz Kafka

Prepared

In the field of observation, chance favours only prepared minds.

Louis Pasteur

Cascade

If I don't understand Einstein, it doesn't matter. It will make me understand something else.

Pablo Picasso

I'm made up of parts that can fit into many mechanisms;

and elements that make up an infinite number of combinations.

Paul Valéry

The writer Harry Mulisch noted our common conservative tendency: "When you visit someone, you always sit in the same place you sat the first time". Many more details than you might think follow this tendency, this memory. You go where you've been before, you do what you've done before, you see who you know. Knowing this inexorable numbness is already putting a bit of a stop to it.

The needs and dangers of life generally ensure forced mobility, but if the environment is comfortable, natural inertia (that which maintains a body in its state in the absence of an external cause) runs the risk of insidiously fossilising us.

There is no more useful attitude than to get moving again, to follow an external soundtrack that invites the shaking of anything that is not marble. 

It's a case of putting your mind on wheels, electing anything but a domicile, pushing your head to the antipodes, going where the arrow goes, drawing the target afterwards, and being surprised at having aimed so well.

Tilt

Many people understand late that an arrow's destiny is to fly not to miss.

Roberto Juarroz

Elastic

The philosophy of relation would be not only an art of wandering but in the letter a wandering philosophy, whose poles and points of exchange would be constantly shifting.

Édouard Glissant

Dancer

I am a man of movement for whom immobility is a constraint.

Waslaw Nijinsky

Nuance

I don't evolve: I travel.

Fernando Pessoa

Locomotion

To think! I'd rather act on my machine of being (and thinking) to find myself in a position to be able to think anew, to have the possibility of really new thoughts.

Henri Michaux

The way forward

Fear is a passive state, and the aim is to be active and take control, to be alive here and now. The movement is from passive to active because if the past is not denied in the present, we don't live.

Louise Bourgeois

Weird

It's a special faculty, the wandering mind.

Samuel Beckett

Perpetual movement

All art is a search for the same goal; if we ever reached it, it would be over; there would be no more art, and everything would be frozen, immobile, absent. But in nature, everything is mobile, everything is possible.

Alberto Giacometti

Meridian

These are the inner landscapes of a man who left long ago for the pole of himself.

André Breton

I divide all the works of world literature into two groups: those that are permitted and those written without permission. The first are vomit, the others a bit of air stolen from the air.

Ossip Mandelstam

We are regularly touched by the aesthetics here and there, of the forest or of the people who strive to do their best in art and elsewhere.

Yet there are times when this pleasure becomes what it is: a soft wallpaper with no sparkle and no comparison with the part of the turmoil that intimate truth can transmute into deep emotion.

It's all about insulting received ideas, ordinary clichés and the banal, decorative comfort of the doxa of common sense and reason.

Something trembles and tries to survive behind the conformist glaze that submerges the collective sensibility.

No work of art will ever be as offensive as what reality imposes on us through the distressing spectacle of the brutalities we inflict on reality.

The concept of outrage can be seen as an antidote to everything that simplifies, obliterates, enslaves and fails to recognise the free and emancipating nature of the creation of the true self, that is to say the multiple self.

It's a question of refusing to be bound by conventional limits and ensuring that art remains a force for questioning and opening up new possibilities. The movement involved, sometimes disconcerting in terms of manners or morality, is always accompanied by an appeal to the viewer's intelligence and sense of humour.

Can we define or know the final word of anything, under the costume, find the essence of being or of reality slipping away like soap in the bath? In the end, all that emerges is a panoramic fog, a center absent from the circle, an optical delusion, an unreachable void...

Emulation

In any case, it's delightful, ironic and reassuring to see our individualities as decoys designed to dazzle us, to make us rush relentlessly towards the object of our desires, puppets waved by the vital Energy on the world stage, to create the essential emulation needed for Peripity!

Denis Grozdanovitch

Grow up

Not to the point where we no longer say I, but to the point where it no longer matters whether we say I or not. We are no longer ourselves. We have been helped, sucked in, multiplied.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatari

Point of view

"He who thought he was was only an orientation. From any other point of view, his life is nothing.

Henri Michaux

Extreme

These few words I've spoken have already been too much. I shouldn't have come at all, and even my name shouldn't have appeared in the catalog.

Yves Klein

Black hole

Today, I suddenly realised something absurd and right: I realised, in a flash, that I was nobody. 

Fernando Pessoa

Some of the works reflect the spirit of the Queer philosophy, which celebrates the diversity of gender identities and sexual orientation. They argue that each individual is made up of a plural identity that is not susceptible to restrictive norms.

Other works are close to post-colonial philosophy, which recognises that each culture has its own history, knowledge and wisdom.

The corpus presented here autopsies the dominant narratives, following the example of Subaltern Studies research. The critique of received ideas shaped in the past deconstructs and reveals the biases, omissions and distortions that have kept certain sensibilities on the margins.

Finally, the whole corpus resonates with contemporary museology. 

It works on diversity and representativeness through the diversification of collections and audiences, and cultural, social and generational pluralism.