Marie Voignier, Western DDR, Video DV 10 min.

Avec le Silo, nous avions montré Western DDR (2004), le film que Marie Voignier a consacré à un centre de vacances converti en parc d’attraction en Allemagne. Mélancolique, comme si la faillite du parc avait déteint sur l’entreprise même d’en faire le récit, le film était surtout, par l’oblique, une tentative féminine de réaliser un western.

On the Silo we showed Marie Voignier’s film about a holiday centre that had been converted into a theme park in Germany, Western DDR (2004). Melancholy, as if the park’s bankruptcy had coloured the very enterprise of recounting it, the film was above all, if obliquely, a woman’s attempt to make a Western. Clara Schulmann

Read in English

1. Dans son autobiographie, Kim Gordon reproduit un texte écrit par elle dans les années 1980 sur une tournée de Sonic Youth et sa place dans le groupe: « I like being in a weak position and making it strong », dit-elle. Comment parleriez-vous de votre position d’auteur et de cinéaste ?

MV L’avantage pour une cinéaste, c’est qu’elle est d’emblée en position de force. Elle est chef de bande sur son tournage, sur son montage.

2. En général, on écrit seule et on fait un film à plusieurs. Est-ce que cette différence est importante ?

MV Je fais souvent des films seule. La notion de collectif au cinéma est rare : on est plusieurs, mais ce n’est pas vraiment collectif. Les décisions importantes ne sont prises que pas une personne (ou deux), on se sent souvent très seule. La chaîne de production d’un film est fortement hiérarchisée, ce qui ne relève pas tout à fait de ma définition du « collectif ». Il existe des films collectifs, c’est un geste politique fort, il n’y en a pas beaucoup.

3. Dans un entretien, la poète Lisa Robertson dit : « … as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure. » Comment pour vous s’est opérée cette découverte?

MV Le féminisme et l’engagement politique ont largement précédé ma découverte du cinéma et de l’art. Ça ne s’est pas fait par des lectures au début, mais plutôt dans des groupes, dans des collectifs, dans des lieux. Ce qui m’a ensuite amené à lire, à photographier, à aller au cinéma, à m’inscrire dans une école d’art.

4. Cette question concerne les liens entre votre activité artistique et la gymnastique. Quels types d’exercices faites-vous pour écrire ou pour faire un film ?

MV Je lis et je vais au cinéma. Je bouge le moins possible.

5. Quel est l’arbre généalogique qui raconterait vos sources, ressources, références dans les deux domaines ?

MV Dans le désordre complet : Gide, Beauvoir, Cervantes, Balzac, Duras, Musil, Guillaumin (Colette), Delphy, Mbembé, Labou Tansi, Godard, Wearing (Gillian), Simon (Claire), Kramer, Jelinek, Rohmer, Bernhard (Thomas), Murnau, Haraway, …

6. Entre film et écriture, quelle place tient la lecture ?

MV Impossible de répondre, la lecture, c’est un peu tout le temps, ça me donne des forces.

7. Est-ce que la cigarette ou d’autres formes d’addiction accompagnent spécifiquement l’écriture ou votre rapport aux images en mouvement ?

MV Quand je suis stressée à ma table de travail et que ça n’avance pas, je nettoie toutes les touches de mon clavier, une par une. Mais de là à parler d’addiction…

8. L’écriture comme le cinéma convoque ou ranime les fantômes. Qui ou qu’est-ce qui vous hante?

MV Le prochain film.

English version

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?

MV The advantage for a filmmaker is that she is immediately in a position of strength. She is the leader of the gang on her shoot, on her edit.


2. In general, writing is a lonely experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

MV I often make films on my own. The notion of the collective is rare in cinema: there are several of you, but it’s not really collective. The important decisions are taken only by one person (or two), you often feel very alone. The production line on a film is strongly hierarchical, which is not how I would define “collective.” Collective films do exist, it’s a powerful political gesture, but there aren’t many.

3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” How did this discovery happen for you?

MV Feminism and political engagement came well before my discovery of cinema and art. In the beginning it didn’t come to me from readings, but more in groups, in collectives, in places. And later that motivated me to read, to take photographs, to go to the cinema, to enrol at art school.

4. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you do in order to write or to make a film?

MV I read and I go to the cinema. I move as little as possible.

5. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?

MV Here goes, completely at random: Gide, Beauvoir, Cervantes, Balzac, Duras, Musil, Guillaumin (Colette), Delphy, Mbembé, Labou Tansi, Godard, Wearing (Gillian), Simon (Claire), Kramer, Jelinek, Rohmer, Bernhard (Thomas), Murnau, Haraway …

6. Between film and writing, what is the role of reading?

MV Impossible to say, it’s sort of all the time. It gives me to strength.

7. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?

MV When I’m stressed at my worktable, and not getting anywhere, I clean all the keys on my keyboard, one by one. But as for addiction…

8. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

MV My next film.

Marie Voignier

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #17: Marie Voignier [FR/EN] est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and Fictions
(Semiotext(e)) by Rebekah Rutkoff

Rebekah Rutkoff specialises in experimental cinema. She has written on Robert Beavers and Gregory Markopoulos. She is also an artist and writes fiction. She has just published The Irresponsible Magician. Essays and Fictions with Sémiotext(e).
Clara Schulmann

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?


Rebekah Rutkoff I like forcing myself to locate clear forms in a vague and undifferentiated field.


2. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

RR The moving image work I’ve done has been solitary as well so the distinction doesn’t apply. For me the experience of loneliness depends more on the kind of writing I’m doing.


3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: « …as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure. » Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

RR In the late 90s I randomly discovered a book walking through the stacks at the New York Public Library: Women Analyze Women. This became very important for me – not only in offering examples of forms of authority grounded in deep psychic and bodily experience but in making clear that there was a constellation of women doing very important work for the rest of us: guardian angels of a sort. But Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was just as important. I’ve almost come to see them as companion volumes!

4. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you need to do in order to write or to make a film?
RR I can’t think of any I reliably need.


5. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?
RR It’s always shifting but some ongoing names are: Lee Krasner – Robert Beavers – H.D. – Marlon Fuentes – Marie Menken – Blaise Pascal – Renata Adler – DW Winnicott – Ludwig Wittgenstein – R.W. Emerson.


6. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?
RR No.

7. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

RR Rural Ohio.

COMING SOON: MARIE VOIGNIER

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #16: Rebekah Rutkoff est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

The Story of Milk and Honey, a video project by Basma Alsharif, 2011

I am indebted to Anaïs Farine for my encounter with Basma Alsharif. She had come to present her film The Story of Milk and Honey (2011) at INHA, in a programme that Anaïs had punningly dubbed “Contes à rebours au Proche Orient” (Backwards tales/countdowns in the Near East). The narrator tries to recount a love story with images and sounds, but the project is constantly failing. Here she answers my questions, particularly regarding her relation to feminism. Clara Schulmann

– In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

Basma Alsharif I like this question best, because I often have difficulty answering questions that are directed at me specifically as “a woman.”

My experience of being female was one of latent discovery. I never doubted my biological make-up or had any confusion about it but quickly became aware of discord between how I understood myself and what others saw – which is a rather common experience and not just a gendered one.

I feel as though I have been part of some kind of “art world” since an early age. It is clear to me, whether or not I knew it then, that this is the direction I was heading in: I wanted to make things. And for years and years, I didn’t realize that the majority of the artists and artworks that I was being shown, that were influencing me, that I was taught to respect, were made by men, curated by men, in institutions largely run by men. And not just any men: white, straight ones. Without getting into all the frustrations of what it is to simply be a woman in today’s world, let alone the working world, or specifically the working art world, I can simply say that it was disheartening initially to realize that I was going to have to work harder to seek out female influences but that actually, as soon as I did, there were plenty of (female) artists everywhere, making incredible work. The sadness comes in actually having to identity myself as a gender to begin with, which above all feels exhausting since I am constantly reminded that I am female anyway.

Maybe, without intentionally meaning to, I sort of rejected the idea that I should have to do this, since it seems much more important that white, straight, men acknowledge their genders and make an effort to not dominate as easily as they are allowed to dominate. I would, as with my national and cultural identity (the real place where I can’t find a point of recognition), allow for that line to be blurred, allow for my gender and my influences and the kind of work I make to not be defined so easily along gender lines, because aren’t we already far past the moment where we have to be either male OR female? I like to pretend that we are past that limited perspective and to act accordingly until the rest of the world, which hasn’t figured this out yet, catches up.

My will to keep making work comes from the fact that I am excited by other work and excited to contribute to it. It is not only based on other people making work but about all the other kinds of work that is out there in the world and largely unrepresented. I’d like for us to get to a place where we have a width swathe of arts of all kinds of genders and races, a place where, if you end up being influenced by white, straight men, it would really be because of a preference for a particular artist(s).

Basma Alsharif

COMING SOON: REBEKAH RUTTKOF

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #15: Basma Alsharif est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Stephanie Wuertz and Sasha Janerus, Calgon (film still), 2014.

I met Stephanie Wuertz very recently in New York. We walked around the Met together. She showed me one of the museum’s recent acquisitions, a huge fresco by Thomas Hart Benton, America Today, a portrait of the United States in the 1920s. Clara Schulmann

– In general, writing is a lonely experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

Stephanie Wuertz There are two strains of collaboration in experimental film. One is a kind of communalized, dehierarchalized sight of production. Filmmakers like Jack Smith or Andy Warhol who undo the rigid divisions of labour. The second type is where it comes closer to poetry or painting. The way Stan Brakhage filmed his children. The use of natural light, landscape or street films. In this sense, loneliness is another word for autonomy or a certain type of autonomy.

I tend more towards the poetic approach, which partly means the films tend to emphasize post-production, privileging the filmic over the pro-filmic. The tendency towards poetry or painting is an assertion of authorship that is something I need. To be able to assert a strong sense of presence and control in the world. That finds thematic expression in the sole female figures in works like Calgon or Serpentine. But in both films the figures split and multiply. That refraction of the self opens up to the multiplicity of collaboration. The self as multiple and unstable.

Stephanie Wuertz

COMING SOON: BASMA ALSHARIF

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #14: Stephanie Wuertz est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Quinn Latimer & Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, Some City, 2014. [Video_Still]

I got in touch with Quinn Latimer (1978) in July 2014, when the CRAC in Alsace was putting on one of her performances, “O Labor, Sister Continent,” in collaboration with Megan Rooney. The text took as its starting point Jean-Pierre Gorin’s film Poto et Cabengo (1979), and I was intrigued by the way the two artists interpreted this story of sisters and a shared, secret language. The theme is similar here: “Two Aunts,” the Thomas James poem evoked by Quinn, is a homage to his “dusky girls”: two drug-addict sisters on the prairies of North Dakota. Clara Schulmann

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?

Quinn Latimer I was recently visiting a friend on an island, and she had Gordon’s autobiography, which I read under the palm trees for a few days. I was really struck by how clearly compelled Gordon was/is by men, and particularly by men performing in groups or constellations with each other — men in bands, mostly. She studies them, she seems to feel less than, always exterior or singular, etc. What is the title of her book? Girl in a Band? It’s obvious that she considers the female position a weak one to inhabit — and it’s understandable, but it’s not my own. Anyway, I was interested in her fascination with guys as I read her book because although I love men, and I live with one, and occasionally make films with him, I am most interested in women. They’re who I think about as a writer and artist — they’re my subject, in the way that men appear to be Gordon’s. They’re also who I write for, who I make work for — it’s always a female reader or viewer that I imagine receiving what I make. Which is to say, as well, that I don’t think of the female position as weak. I would describe it as dissident, perhaps. It’s certainly not hegemonic. But I don’t like to be in a weak position and to consider it my job to make it a strong one — that’s exhausting. It’s really just the old exhausting story of being a woman in society, a story I’d rather not inhabit as an artist. I just don’t find it interesting. As a writer, I’d rather my position not be a relative one. If I were to use Gordon’s hierarchal equation, though, I’d say that I like to engage with one medium as though it were another. The films I’ve made, I’ve approached as a writer; and in my writing, I often think cinematically, as though I were the film crew orchestrating the text or directing the performance. I think it can be helpful to adopt forms — to swap and tangle them — outside of your specific medium. It interrupts the kind of conservatism and professionalization inherent to specific art forms that carry certain expectations (both from the audience and from yourself as maker or author).


2. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

QL Yes. Although I don’t think of writing as lonely, per se — it can be much lonelier to come up against another’s person’s expectations, needs, and opacities in the course of a collaboration, and to not be able to understand them or meet them. I’ve only made a few moving-image works, and they were all with my partner — and they were all made with an eye toward live performance or an exhibition — so the communal aspect of the work was implicit from the beginning. Whereas writing is a conversation with yourself, with your past and future work, and perhaps with the writers who you are under the spell of at that moment in time.


3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

QL My mother was a bit militant about both literature and feminism — and my father and stepfather were at ease in that militancy — so I was raised on feminist thinking and writing, our house was full of it, was made of it. I don’t remember a time when I was ever outside of it or in search of it. That said, as I grew up and moved to New York, and then to Switzerland­, which has a kind of unquestioned masculinist culture that I had never experienced before, and I began to make work in these places, I found myself in a very different kind of world, one where the voices of men and their work — whether literature or philosophy or art or activism or anything, really — were clearly dominant. Then, like Robertson, feminist thinking and writing gave me a place of respite, of home. It gave me not just the will to move forward, but a model of the kind of life I might pursue. And there was and is so much pleasure in that model. This work, then, became the world I chose to surround myself with — probably much like my mother had in the book – filled apartments of my childhood. Robertson’s writing, along with the work of writers and thinkers and artists like Audre Lorde, Hannah Arendt, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman, Rosemarie Trockel, Moyra Davey, Kim Hyesoon, Anne Carson, Elena Ferrante, Gayatri Spivak, Nina Simone, Bhanu Kapil, Ai, Françoise Vergès, Susan Sontag, Julia Kristeva, and so many others, has been really instrumental to my own practice, whether literary, moving-image, or performance, both for its pleasure and its criticality.

4. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?

QL I don’t smoke, unfortunately, but I think the memory of drugs and drinking and friends — addictions, all — or even just the idea of them accompany my work at times. Certainly the fluorescent haze and palette of the images in my writing and films have a druggy air. But I also grew up seeing how addiction can overcome your ambition, can overrun it, and I’ve tried to steer clear of that ever being a possibility. Still, addictions — or at least their consideration, as metaphors for desire or hunger — can make the most pressing, embodied art. I always think of this poem by Thomas James about his two great aunts, opiate addicts on the American prairie:

Two Aunts
by Thomas James

When I feel the old hunger coming on,
I think of my two great-aunts,
A farmer’s daughters,
Speaking into the dusk in North Dakota.
I imagine the dark baron
Riding out of their mouths,
Thick-skinned and girded
Against disaster, swathed
In cuirass and chainmail and a curse.
My hunger was theirs
Too long ago. It swims in my blood,
Groping for a foothold.
It is the dark I thrust my tongue against,
The wine and the delicate symphony
That makes my head tick so exquisitely
Tonight. My ladies,
My dusky girls, I see you
With your bustles puffed up like life preservers,
Your needlepoint rose garden,
Your George Eliot coiffures,
Your flounces gathered like an 1890s valentine.
You both took heroin.
Your father never noticed.
You sprinkled it in your oatmeal,
Embroidered doilies with it,
Ate it like a last supper
At midnight. I know what you meant.
There was always the hunger,
The death of small things
Somewhere in your body,
The children that would never
Take place in either of you.
You were a garden of lost letters.
A lust inhabited your veins.
My addicts,
The village spoke of you.
Under your parasols, two rose windows,
The world swam with color.
Riding the monotonous hills at daybreak,
You escaped the indecisions
Your blood has handed down
To me. You rode your father’s spotted horses
As if they might have ferried you
Over an edge, a dark mouth in the distance.
I see you ride the black hills of my mind,
Sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk,
Galloping
In your laced-up flesh, completely unaware
Of something I inherited,
The doubt,
The fear,
The needle point of speech,
The hunger you passed down that I
Possess.

5. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

QL My mother.

Quinn Latimer

COMING SOON: STEPHANIE WUERTZ

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #13: Quinn Latimer est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Adelita Husni Bey, Postcards from the Desert Island, 2011, 22’23 » SD video transferred to DVD

I discovered the work of Adelita Husni-Bey (1985) thanks to Vdrome, which showed her film Postcards from the Desert Island (2011). I was greatly impressed by the film. It was shot in Paris, at the École Vitruve, which offers children an experimental form of pedagogy. That was where the artist led a workshop inspired by the William Golding novel Lord of the Flies. The film describes the way in which children reinvent and debate their freedom, on a desert island, with adhesive tape and bits of wood. Clara Schulmann

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?

Adelita Husni-Bey I am interested in peeling away another layer and getting closer to the core: What is seen as constituting “weak” and why? If the “weaker” sex is a way of attributing fragility to women, of placing and oppressing them, then let’s ask: why did Kim Gordon feel she was in a “weak” position and had to make it “strong”? What does it say about patriarchy? About the music industry and the notion of the frontman?
I suppose the foundation of what I do as an author rests on trying to find ways to interpel/ interpellate, which derives from the Latin “to drive in between”. ‘Inter’- in-between, and ‘pellere’ – to drive. I like the way it has acquired, in its contemporary version, the quality of being able to interrupt, and how it is used in politics as a formal way to question a minister. Identifying myself as a woman and using this word, I would probably say: “I like being in a position from which I can ‘break through.’”


2. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

AHB Neoliberalism makes vacuums of our affections, (repeat darkly: “there is no such thing as society, there are men and women…”); whether you are working on a film or watering your plants, your ability to concentrate purely on your own shitty existence and be anxious about it has probably quintupled in the past twenty years. If you submit to the digital working routine, I feel, life tends to become thin, transparent; so “collaborations” don’t tend to make for a less lonely experience of life in general. It’s a systemic loneliness, which I feel non-working in the company of others can assuage. Meandering conversations, sex, touching others; that’s got to be humankind’s natural therapist. So I am teaching myself to do that as much as possible.


3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

AHB I’d like to think you “discover” feminist thinking only when you uncover your predetermined condition. You uncover what has been purposefully buried, discounted, neglected, pulverized, done away with. Women writers, artists, filmmakers, politicians, ironmongers: women, but also queers, migrants, people with different degrees of mobility. You discover this in E.1027, Eileen Gray’s house, defaced and then attributed to Le Corbusier, in Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s (until recently) unsung contributions to Dada, in the countless expressions of patriarchy from work to language, from shame to guilt production in the souls of others. It doesn’t take long to see that our metanarrative is being woven in the image of white affluent men and uncovering this fact can be a horrifying experience but also a pedagogical one. Uncovering my condition, seeing the varying detractions of privilege take their toll on our so called “freedoms,” is a journey on a razor-fast spaceship; when you look out of the window everything is far and formally silent but you know it’s a shit storm back on the ground. Most of my trip was mobilized by my peers’ talk and touch and the kind of love that makes your brain go quiet. Did it give me the “will to write”? It’s made me locate myself as an “ally” of certain struggles and feel I’m in the eye of the storm in others.
There’s a little wooden boat floating a few feet away from me right now, you couldn’t go very far with it but you could ride it across the bay.

4. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you need to do in order to write or to make a film?

AHB I do some weightlifting, or lifting my own body-weight which is practically the only form of physical exercise I enjoy. I suppose it would translate into trying to prepare as deeply as I possibly can for each project, trying to read around my perceived topic as much as I can. Trying to think of its problematics, its paradoxes, its face-palms, but all this does not necessarily constitute a “good” practice. I realized recently that it’s a pretty academic form of “knowing” and it’s fraught with being an impossible task. So I am learning to lift less and feel/listen more.

5. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?
AHB Sonic Youth is in there, for sure. Being constantly uprooted, first because of my family moving around and now because of my work (the flying, precarious artist), which is a way of saying that my points of reference are too many to mention and probably tinged with misunderstandings. I suppose roots could be firmly planted in radical pedagogy; different ways to think about “learning” that do away with a prescribed master – student relationship, from Freire, to Kropotkin, Bell Hooks and the Radical Education Forum. A nymph might be care, care–taking, systems of solidarity and cooperation, such as the Movimento de Trabalhatores Sem Terra (MST, Landless Agricultural Worker Movement) in Brazil, and recent articles on “Calling- in” (Ngọc Loan Trần). My teens and early twenties were spent in and out of occupied and squatted spaces which I still, to this day, find the most deeply radical, fun and incredible examples of struggles for co-existence. I suppose branching out into urbanism and sociology is directly related to these nurturing spaces. The subsequent demonizing and criminalizing of squatting, alongside the effects of mega projects, stemming from regeneration issues, or “accumulation via dispossession,” as David Harvey writes, have made quite an impact on me.

6. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?

AHB I suffer from a sort of expanded performance anxiety which makes me get obsessively distracted lately. The anxiety is probably partly due to a feeling of inadequacy, vulnerability or not being “good enough,” not being “deserving,” which is precisely how this S&M relationship to professional environments works. So I smoke things to cope. What do you do?


7. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

AHB The ghost of being able to survive doing what I love, the ghost of privilege, the ghost of take the money and run, the ghost of “how the fuck do people still expect you to work for free??” the ghost of DARPA, the ghost of I’ve been looking at this screen too long, the ghost of imaging Chris Kraus writing at a desk, the ghost of not having well-read enough, the ghost of there will not be enough time to read more, the ghost of how is it possible that I have language, that I can write to you and that you will interpret, that we are both “alive” on this “planet” now – I suppose that is the ultimate ghost haunting us all, and what would our experience be like without a common ghost?

COMING SOON: QUINN LATIMER

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #12: Adelita Husni-Bey est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Rosa Barba, A Private Tableaux, 2010. Film still
16mm, optical sound, 7min © Rosa Barba

Here Rosa Barba (1972) talks about one of her films, A Private Tableaux (2010), which we projected with the Silo a few years ago. The film was shot in the tunnel across the Mersey in Liverpool. On the gallery ceilings, the artist films white drawings that engineers have been making over the last hundred years as a way of observing the cracks made by the pressure from the cars. Ancestral drawings, grottoes – mysterious narrative. Clara Schulmann

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong”, she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?

Rosa Barba I see myself as conducting coherent performative entities – as a result of a process in which I tell my actors about the way of envisioning the narrative and the film. They are invited to (re-en)act based on who they are, what they represent to me and how they feel the narrative should be represented in the film. I invite people to come together and to perform their memories (through facts, documents) as a kind of collective performance; this determines and creates the fictional part of the films.


2. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

RB Yes, it is important to move between those different experiences in order to complete the piece with those different rhythms.


3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

RB Yes, I do share her position. Looking through the camera as I grew up gave me the freedom to position myself outside of the given standards and to realize my feminist approach.

4. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you need to do in order to write or to make a film?

RB Riding my bike through the city and stretching whenever I can.

5. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?

RB It is the possible explanation of a certain image. In my work A Private Tableaux (2010) I walked underneath the Mersey River recording the subterranean city pumping air through these tunnels. On the ceiling of these tunnels there are these handmade white drawings the engineers make to examine the pressure cracks made by cars overhead. They are like wall paintings or cave drawings. It is nearly impossible to imagine them as functional. They seem to follow a logic or make some shape or other. I wrote a narrative about these images and cut the film with this text, of these possible explanations. There is a sort of dialogue. A question and an answer.
I think we already carry inside ourselves what we are interested in and when you get to a place, you look for this specific thing, to see if you could find it there.

6. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?
RB Espresso…


7. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

RB Yes, there is always a certain concern that I feel a lot of people are sharing and often it is manifested in the landscape first, but it’s still not really super-clear, I like the fact that the landscape responds first, before it’s totally conscious what’s going on and that’s the moment when I feel very inspired to make a piece, so… and then trying to offer, not really solutions, because I can’t really offer a solution, but just different perspectives, and by suspending it, putting the concern upside down, I feel there is still a possibility that may be, at least in one’s thoughts.

Rosa Barba
“Back Door Exposure” at Jeu de Paume

COMING SOON: ADELITA HUSNI-BEY

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #11: Rosa Barba est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Jean-Baptiste Courtier, series “Natation Synchronisée” © Jean-Baptiste Courtier 2015

As she points out in her answers, the work of Elizabeth McAlpine (1973) is sculptural. The names Tacita Dean and Anthony McCall feature among her references. While they allow an emphasis on the importance of film installed in the exhibition space, they also accompany what “haunts” the artist – the thing that she evokes here: ghostly presences, hidden shadows, the stuttering of images. Clara Schulmann

1. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

Elizabeth McAlpine For me making a film is a singular activity. The films I make are very sculptural and simple in their form, they are studio-based activities that only require my hand to be present, not unlike writing, so perhaps the films can be seen as short sentences in a longer paragraph.

2. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “… as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what did it make to you?

EMA “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

3. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you need to do in order to write or to make a film?
EMA Synchronized swimming.

4. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?

EMA John Cage, Child of Tree 1975

Bas Jan Ader, Broken Fall (organic), Bas Jan Ader 1971

Tacita Dean, Majesty, 2006. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Anthony McCall, Landscape for Fire, 1972. 16mm transferred to DVD 2006, sound, 7 min. Copyright Anthony McCall. Courtesy Sprüth Magers

Elizabeth McAlpine, Cornerstone (mumbling), 2015. Black and white contact print, photographic emulsion, Somerset paper, steel, magnets, 61.3 x 47 x 26.4 cm © Elizabeth McAlpine

Elizabeth McAlpine, A Portrait, Installation view, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London, UK, 2012. Stuttering film frames. © Elizabeth McAlpine

Elizabeth McAlpine, The Raid (101 Minutes), 2015 found 35 mm film, and steel.
6 parts (each 118 x 1 3/8 x 3/4 inches) 1 part ( 88 x 1 3/8 x 3/4 inches) © Elizabeth McAlpine

Elizabeth McAlpine, Ends (Sprayed Sound), 2013, C- Type print, 85 x 120 cm, 100 x 145 x 6 cm (framed) © Elizabeth McAlpine

Elizabeth McAlpine, The Map of Exactitude (#10), 2012. Plaster, plywood and steel, 198 x 40 x 38 cm. © Elizabeth McAlpine

Elizabeth McAlpine

COMING SOON: ROSA BARBA

L’article Emotional Technologies Q&A #10: Elizabeth McAlpine est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Marcelline Delbecq, Oublier, Voir, Lecture avec projection d’images, 22′, Soirée Nomade à la Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 18 juin 2014. Photo projetée : Rémy Héritier / Photo : Olivier Ouadah.

Je me souviens d’avoir écouté les textes de Marcelline Delbecq (n. 1977) il y a quelques années, quand nous suivions ensemble une formation à l’université. Sa voix surtout m’a beaucoup marquée. Quand je lis ce qu’elle écrit aujourd’hui, je m’aperçois que ses références, ses méthodes de travail étaient présentes alors – déjà identifiées, au travail. Voici ce qu’elle se prépare à publier – entre autres : When a woman gets lonely (CDN d’Orléans, 2015-2016), Oublier, voir (éditions Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain et Manuella éditions, septembre 2015), Combien d’années-lumière (Crédac, Ivry sur Seine, septembre-décembre 2015).

I remember listening to texts by Marcelline Delbecq (b. 1977) a few years ago, when the two of us were at university together. It was her voice, above all, that made an impression. When I read what she is writing now I realise that her references and her working methods were already present then, already identified, in her work. She is about to publish (among other projects), When a woman gets lonely (CDN, Orléans, 2015-2016), Oublier, voir (Éditions Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain and Manuella Éditions, September 2015), Combien d’années-lumière (Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, September-December 2015). Clara Schulmann

Read in English

1. Dans son autobiographie, Kim Gordon reproduit un texte écrit par elle dans les années 1980 sur une tournée de Sonic Youth et sa place dans le groupe: « I like being in a weak position and making it strong », dit-elle. Comment parleriez-vous de votre position d’auteur et de cinéaste ?

MD Cette phrase de Kim Gordon est parfaite. Je ne suis pas cinéaste (ne désespère pas de le devenir), seulement auteure et artiste. Kim Gordon a d’ailleurs été une figure tutélaire de mon adolescence et a enregistré le texte que j’avais écrit pour elle, intitulé Rapture, pièce sonore où sa voix hypnotisante a une présence si forte. Je l’avais contactée quand je vivais à New York en 2007 et elle a dit oui tout de suite, sans rien connaitre de mon travail, uniquement pour soutenir une jeune artiste inconnue. Donc elle a activé cette phrase, c’est certain, m’a donné cette force née d’une faiblesse de départ. D’ailleurs quel que soit le degré de faiblesse de la position de départ, ce que nous construisons à travers l’image, le texte et la voix acquièrent leur propre force.

2. En général, on écrit seule et on fait un film à plusieurs. Est-ce que cette différence est importante ?

MD Je suis assez mal placée pour répondre car je n’ai pas encore réalisé de film. Mais dans les projets de spectacle vivant, pour lesquels j’écris parfois des textes diffusés sur scène, le groupe est totalement indispensable à la réalisation de l’objet final. Ce partage, cette mise en perspective de ce qu’on a pu élaborer en amont avant de le confronter aux pratiques et regards des autres est une expérience forte. Elle oblige à négocier parfois, à affirmer, à remettre en question, à croire en un objet commun, plus seulement à créer en autarcie avant de se confronter au public. C’est ce qui m’a éloignée du milieu de l’art, où la croyance en l’égo prédomine alors qu’on peut tellement travailler à plusieurs.

3. Dans un entretien, la poète Lisa Robertson dit : « … as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure. » Comment pour vous s’est opérée cette découverte?

MD Dans mon cas c’est la découverte de la photographie qui m’a conduite à l’écriture. Et c’est une photographe qui a produit ce déclic, Diane Arbus. Le Musée d’Orsay m’a d’ailleurs commandé un projet qui aura lieu en janvier 2016, autour d’une exposition historique de femmes photographes. Cela sera l’occasion d’interroger et mettre en perspective la part de féminin dans mon propre regard.


Longtemps je n’ai pas prêté attention au sexe de l’écrivain que je lisais. Le plaisir de la lecture n’a pas de genre. Mais c’est en vieillissant que je remarque à quel point le déséquilibre persiste chez certains éditeurs, dans les vitrines des librairies, dans les revues spécialisées, dans ce qui est enseigné à l’école. En France, et c’est aussi lié au genre des mots, au fait que le masculin l’emporte toujours au pluriel par exemple, on est encore sous la coupe du masculin mais nous sommes beaucoup à nous demander pourquoi, et pas que des femmes.

4. Cette question concerne les liens entre votre activité artistique et la gymnastique. Quels types d’exercices faites-vous pour écrire ou pour faire un film ?

MD Je suis une piètre gymnaste ! Je ne m’entraine pas du tout, je fonce tête baissée dans chaque proposition. Mais chacun des textes écrits est un entraînement pour le suivant, même si je n’ai aucune idée de ce qu’il sera au moment où je l’écris. Chaque paragraphe est un rebond. Parfois arrière, parfois avant.

5. Quel est l’arbre généalogique qui raconterait vos sources, ressources, références dans les deux domaines ?

MD Tout a commencé par la découverte de Diane Arbus quand j’avais 12 ans. À travers sa monographie chez Aperture j’ai découvert l’Amérique, l’étrangeté humaine et la photographie. On peut dire qu’elle m’a marquée au fer blanc. Puis j’ai entendu Kim Gordon dans Sonic Youth via l’émission l’Inrockuptible de Bernard Lenoir. J’écoutais l’émission chaque soir et y ai découvert énormément de groupes et de personnalités marquantes du rock (P.J. Harvey, Chan Marshall, …) À cette époque je me suis également passionnée pour la Factory de Warhol et pour le Velvet Underground. La voix de Nico y était pour beaucoup. On peut dire que beaucoup de choses viennent de là, de ce milieu du rock et de cette Amérique étrange qui m’a conduite à l’image d’abord, puis à l’écriture. Et bientôt, je l’espère, au film.


Ensuite, la liste est longue : Susan Sontag, Marina Tsvetaïeva, Marguerite Duras, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Chantal Akerman (j’ai vu Hotel Monterrey à 20 ans, une révélation), Barbara Loden pour citer les première qui me viennent à l’esprit pour l’avoir marqué de façon indélébile. Mais il serait injuste que cette liste ne soit que féminine, tant William Faulkner, W.G. Sebald, Chris Marker, Victor Erice, William Eggleston, pour ne citer qu’eux, ont également laissé une empreinte magique sur mon esprit. Et je viens de lire Au nord par une montagne. Au sud par un lac. À l’ouest par des chemins. À l’est par un cours d’eau de László Krasznahorkai, éblouissant.

6. Entre film et écriture, quelle place tient la lecture ?

MD En lisant, en écrivant. Gracq a bien résumé ce pouvoir de la lecture : elle offre un monde à penser, où se projeter, où se perdre, pour écrire.

7. Est-ce que la cigarette ou d’autres formes d’addiction accompagnent spécifiquement l’écriture ou votre rapport aux images en mouvement ?
MD Je grignote beaucoup car je ne fume pas et ne bois pas en travaillant. J’écris d’abord dans un carnet puis quand je passe à l’ordinateur, j’écris, je m’arrête pour boire du thé, j’écris, je grignote, j’écris, je m’arrête, je regrignote, j’écris, je bois du thé froid, j’écris, je vais courir. Je réfléchis également beaucoup dans les transport en commun, souvent les idées jaillissent d’on ne sait où le long de la ligne du RER ou pendant un voyage en train.

8. L’écriture comme le cinéma convoque ou ranime les fantômes. Qui ou qu’est-ce qui vous hante ?

MD La question des fantômes est très présente dans mon travail d’écriture, tout simplement car il puise sa source dans le photographique et qu’une photographie est un repère de fantômes. Je ne sais pas bien ce qui me hante, ou je ne cherche pas à le savoir pour ne pas le saisir. L’apparition et la disparition sont des moteurs d’écriture, c’est certain.

English version

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?

MD Those words of Kim Gordon’s are just right. I’m not a filmmaker (though I haven’t given up hope of becoming one), just an author and artist. Kim Gordon was actually a really important figure for me as a teenager and recorded the text I wrote for her: Rapture, a sound piece in which her hypnotic voice has such a powerful presence. I contacted her when I was living in New York in 2007 and she said yes right away, without knowing anything about my work, simply to support an obscure artist. So she activated this sentence, for sure, and that gave me this strength born of an initial weakness. In fact, whatever the degree of weakness of the starting position, what we construct through the text, images and voice acquires its own strength.


2. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

MD I’m not very well qualified to answer because I haven’t made a film yet. But in my projects for live shows, for which I sometimes write texts that are performed on stage, the group is key to the creation of the final object. This sharing, this perspective on whatever you made earlier, before exposing it to the practices and gazes of others, is a powerful experience. It sometimes forces you to negotiate, to call into question, to believe in a shared object – you don’t just create in an autarkic way and then put it before the public. That’s what distanced me from the art world, where people tend to believe in the ego, when there are so many possibilities to be had working collectively.


3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

MD For me, it was the discovery of photography that led me to writing. And it was a woman photographer who made things click: Diane Arbus. Actually, the Musée d’Orsay has commissioned a project from me for January 2016, in relation to a historical exhibition of women photographers. It will be an opportunity to question and put into perspective the feminine dimension of my own gaze.

For a long time I paid no attention to the gender of the writer I was reading. The pleasure of reading has no sex. But as I get older I am becoming aware of the continuing imbalance at certain publishers, in bookshop windows, in specialist magazines, in what is taught in schools. In France – and this is also linked to the fact that the masculine always dominates when there is a plural – we are still dominated by the masculine, and a lot of us are wondering why, and not just women.

4. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you need to do in order to write or to make a film?

MDI’m a very poor gymnast! I don’t train at all, I just throw myself into each proposition. But every text I write is a training for the next one, even if I have no idea what it will be at the moment when I’m writing it. Each paragraph is a reaction. A movement that sometimes goes back, sometimes forward.


5. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?

MD It all started with seeing Diane Arbus when I was 12 years old. Looking at her Aperture monograph I discovered America, human strangeness and photography. You could say this was seared into my consciousness. Then I heard Kim Gordon in Sonic Youth on Bernard Lenoir’s Inrockuptible show. I listened to the broadcast every night and I discovered loads of important rock musicians (P. J. Harvey, Chan Marshall, etc.). In those days I was also fascinated by Warhol’s Factory and the Velvet Underground. Nico’s voice played a large part in that. You could say that a lot of things come from that, from the rock world and from that strange America that led me first to the image and then to writing. And soon, I hope, to film.

After that, there’s a long list: Susan Sontag, Marina Tsvetaeva, Marguerite Duras, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Chantal Akerman (I saw Hotel Monterrey when I was 20: it was a revelation), and Barbara Loden, to mention only the first ones to come to mind because they had such a lasting impact on it. But it would be unjust if the list were only female, because people like William Faulkner, W. G. Sebald, Chris Marker, Victor Erice, and William Eggleston, to name but a few, also left their magical mark on my mind. And I have just read From the North by Hill, From the South by Lake, From the West by Roads, From the East by River by László Krasznahorkai. It’s stunning.


6. Between film and writing, where does reading come in?

MD “As I read, as I write”: Gracq nicely summed up the power of reading. It offers a world of thought, of projections, where you can lose yourself, and write.


7. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?

MD I nibble a lot because I don’t smoke or drink when I’m working. I start by writing in a notebook, then I move to the computer. I write, I stop to drink tea, I write, I nibble, I write, I stop, I nibble again, I write, I drink cold tea, I write, I go running. I also do a lot of thinking on public transport, and often ideas spark I don’t know where on the RER or on a train journey.

8. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

MD The question of ghosts is very present in my writing work, simply because it is rooted in photography, and because a photograph is full of ghosts. I don’t really know what haunts me, or don’t try to find out because I don’t want to pin it down. Appearance and disappearance drive my writing, for sure.

Marcelline Delbecq

COMING SOON: ELIZABETH MCALPINE

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #9: Marcelline Delbecq est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Le passeur / The ferryman, 2013.
Performance and seashell, about 15 min, unique.

J’avais assisté à une performance de Louise Hervé et Chloé Maillet (1981) dans le jardin des Tuileries. Plus tard, un workshop à l’école supérieure d’art de Bordeaux nous a réunies quelques jours d’affilée. Il s’agissait de les faire intervenir auprès des étudiants afin de familiariser ces derniers à la prise de parole. Ce travail a été complexe, semé d’embûches, mais nous sommes parvenus à un résultat : l’idée d’une radio libre menée en live par les étudiants.

I had attended a performance by Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet (1981) in the Jardin des Tuileries. Later, I spent several successive days with them in a workshop at the École Supérieure d’Art in Bordeaux. The idea was for them to work with the students in order to familiarise them with expressing themselves publicly. The work was complicated, with all kinds of mishaps, but we got a result: the idea of a live radio broadcast run by the students. Clara Schulmann

Read in English

1. En général, on écrit seule et on fait un film à plusieurs. Est-ce que cette différence est importante ?

LH&CM La question est plutôt, pour nous, de savoir comment l’on travaille à plusieurs à toutes les étapes d’un projet : nous écrivons à deux nos textes, scénarios, scripts de performance. Régulièrement, nous tentons d’élargir le cercle, en menant d’autres collaborations au sein de livres et publications collectifs. Bien sûr c’est différent lorsqu’on écrit à plusieurs ou qu’on tourne un film où le rôle de chacun est plus défini. Ce qui est intéressant, c’est d’élaborer de nouvelles règles du jeu, à chaque fois.

2. Dans un entretien, la poète Lisa Robertson dit : « … as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure. » Comment pour vous s’est opérée cette découverte?

LH&CM Nous aurions peine à déterminer le moment exact de notre rencontre avec la littérature féministe. Il y a en tous cas une découverte qui nous a marquées. Dans les années 1820, le mouvement saint-simonien, du nom du philosophe révolutionnaire Saint-Simon, s’est attaché à défendre l’éducation et l’émancipation des femmes. Le mouvement était mixte, et les saint-simoniennes, dont beaucoup avaient été formées à lecture et à l’écriture dans les cercles saint-simoniens, tenaient une place très importante dans le mouvement. Dans les représentations de l’époque, « saint-simonienne » était devenu synonyme de femme affranchie, et elles étaient beaucoup caricaturées. Pour des raisons encore mal élucidées par les historiens (qui tenaient autant à la vie privée de certains membres du mouvement qu’à la peur du scandale), les saint-simoniennes ont été exclues du mouvement et se sont autonomisées en un mouvement non-mixte, qui a publié les premiers journaux défendant la « Femme Libre ». Les archives du mouvement, mal connu car les féministes de la fin du XIXe siècle ne s’en sont jamais réclamées, sont conservées à la bibliothèque de l’Arsenal à Paris, où pendant quelques temps Chloé apportait les livres aux lecteurs et restaurait les manuscrits des archives de la Bastille jetés à l’égout par les révolutionnaires.

3. Entre film et écriture, quelle place tient la lecture ?

LH&CM L’avantage en travaillant à deux, c’est de pouvoir doubler la capacité de lecture, et se faire des compte-rendu, des résumés, qui sont le point de départ de notre travail d’écriture. C’est aussi un peu une manière de redonner de l’oralité à la lecture (la pratique de la lecture silencieuse est finalement assez récente, quand on y pense).

4. L’écriture comme le cinéma convoque ou ranime les fantômes. Qui ou qu’est-ce qui vous hante?

LH&CM Il y a une anecdote connue à propos d’Horace Walpole, qui explique bien comment un fantôme peut être le point de départ d’une écriture. Walpole la raconte lui-même dans ses mémoires. Dans les années 1740, cet esthète fortuné venait de finir de reconstruire une ferme de la banlieue de Londres pour en faire un château à la manière gothique (le mot commençait juste à être employé à l’époque). Le château néo-gothique était l’écrin d’une collection d’objets divers et d’éléments architecturaux liés au Moyen Âge et à l’histoire d’Angleterre. Un jour, alors que Walpole méditait au milieu de sa collection, dans sa bibliothèque tendue de papier-peint gothique et remplie d’objets gothiques, il vit soudain la main gantée de fer d’un chevalier gigantesque s’abattre sur son escalier gothique. Et tout à coup, grâce à ce fantôme, Horace Walpole comprit que ce qui manquait à son château et à sa collection, c’était justement d’être hanté. Il a donc écrit Le Château D’Otrante, plein de spectres, de jeunes filles persécutées, de souterrains terrifiants, pour créer le récit qui animerait la demeure. Le roman, présenté au public comme un récit très ancien et véridique redécouvert par hasard, eut un énorme retentissement, et fut à l’origine de ce que l’on appelle le roman noir ou gothique dont on peut tracer la descendance jusqu’aux films d’horreur contemporains.

English version

1. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

LH&CM The question for us is rather how we work severally on all the different phases of a project: we write our texts, screenplays and performance scripts together, and we make regular attempts to broaden this circle, by collaborating elsewhere on books and multi-authored publications. Of course, it’s different when there are several of you writing or you’re shooting a film, because there each person’s role is more defined. The interesting part is defining new rules every time.

2. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

LH&CM It would be hard for us to say exactly when we got into feminist literature, but we were certainly marked by one discovery in particular. In the 1820s the Saint-Simonian movement, named after the revolutionary philosopher Saint-Simon, worked to promote the education and emancipation of women. The movement was mixed, and the Saint-Simoniennes, many of whom had learnt about reading and writing in Saint-Simonian circles, played a very important role in it. At the time, being a Saint-Simonienne meant being a free woman, and they were much satirised. For reasons that historians still struggle to explain (no doubt it had to do with fear of scandal as much as with the private lives of certain members of the movement), the Saint-Simoniennes were excluded from the movement and formed their own autonomous, and unmixed movement, which published the first newspapers championing the “Free Woman.” The archives of this movement, which remains little-known because feminists in the late nineteenth century never referred to it, are kept at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, where for a while Chloé used to take books to the readers and restored the Bastille manuscripts that had been thrown into the gutter by the revolutionaries.

3. Between film and writing, what is the role of reading?

LH&CM The advantage of working as a duo is that you can double your reading capacity, and make each other notes, summaries, which become the starting point of our writing work. And to some extent, too, it’s a way of putting a bit of orality back into reading (if you think about it, the practice of silent reading is actually quite recent).

4. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

LH&CM There’s a well-known story about Horace Walpole which explains how a ghost can be the starting point for writing. Walpole himself relates this in his memoirs. In the 1740s this wealthy aesthete had just finished converting a farm outside London into a villa in the Gothic style (the word was just coming into use at the time). This Neo-Gothic building housed a diverse collection of objects from the Middle Ages and English history generally. One day, when Walpole was musing amidst his collection, in his library hung with Gothic wallpaper and filled with Gothic objects, he suddenly saw the iron-clad hand of a gigantic knight come crashing down on his Gothic staircase. Suddenly, thanks to that ghost, Walpole realised that what was missing from his castle and from his collection was precisely that, being haunted! And so he wrote The Castle of Otranto, a book full of ghosts, persecuted young women and terrifying underground passages, in order to create the story that would bring his residence to life. The novel, which was presented to the public as an ancient story rediscovered by chance, was a huge success, and was the origin of the Gothic novel, the descendants of which can be traced all the way to contemporary horror films.

Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet @ Marcelle Alix

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