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FRANÇAIS - ENGLISH - 中文
A performance 2023
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137 years ago, on March 5, 1886, a certain Charles Gallo threw a bottle of prussic acid into the Paris Stock Exchange, hydrogen cyanide. It was not very nice and a bit dangerous. He was an anarchist and then claimed to accomplish an act of propaganda by the fact. Either the idea that the period of affirmation by the text and the verb is over, that we must then move on to a period of action. It can go through revolt or, as I will use it, bicycle wheel revolution.
Today I call to Spin The tangents.
I won't receive any help from Bernard or his son, nor from François. So it is to you, the healthy ones to whom I am speaking. Of course, it's just you. You are so much richer and more numerous who can sincerely participate with love and sympathy in the successful completion of the project that I am launching for this beautiful and unforgettable summer of 2023.
A challenge.
A performance.
A whole poem.
Filer Les Tangentes is an artistic action that will last a little over two months. I want to see if, like Ulysses, but rather Erasmus, Sweig, Dürer, van Eyck, Vermeer or Vinci, Goethe or Van Gogh, we can still go to a few cities, meet some artist friends, scholars, researchers, inventors or poets. I take the road to see if we can cross some plains, rivers and mountains. I get on the bike to find out if discovery can be around the corner. If crossing neighboring countries we can meet other colors.
I therefore ask you to enter into the production of this work through a participatory collection.
Connecting València to Chambord is a historic race. Not a destination, but a loop to forge links. It also recalls that of a few other ancestors, in other times that are said to be more risky and deadly, but is today's weather so mild? As the roads are not straight, I will go up (in the direction of the planisphere) to the port of Delft to check if it is still as magnificent and luminous, or what the chemical revolution has done with it, the revolution of waterproof comfort .
The revolution of sedentary pleasures.
The revolution of individualism.
For the time of a flight to Beijing and for a higher price than an AR to Marrakech, I will have to reach my starting point, the Hermitage of the Saints of the Stone, by train. I also need some wild sleeping gear (a tent, a light mattress), a few restorative nights in hotels, washes and pounds of almonds and peanuts. And also memory cards and a sun sensor to film and photograph, record my encounters, our landscapes.
Vue d'exposition - Dagao art Center - Chendge, Chine. 2020
Filer Les Tangentes (Spin The Tangents) is an artistic performance. It spins in a concentric flag loop through a space whose borders are invisible to the residents and nationals of the countries crossed. This journey seeks encounters and inspirations in the first quarter of a century that will be upheaval. It dives into the roots, reproduces ancient routes, from the beginning of man to his intelligent robots, to his end. Faster than light, are there still links between each of us, real, between our so superior mind and our surroundings? I still have no answer or point of arrival other than a return to my roots in the land of castles and a time when the industrial revolution and the contemporary digital revolution were taking root, on the banks of the Loire.
Filer Les Tangentes recomposes a path after the performance CDG2CPH, in 2009, which had seen me connect the airport of Paris CDG to that of Copenhagen then an exhibition of notes and photographic or video recordings during the COP 15. This action had demonstrated the possibility, still actual, and more than ever necessary, to use another simple way, just with the strength of the legs and the courage to join a place of work. Almost fifteen years after this project, it is still obvious that we, or rather the political and industrial decision makers, have the will to find another rhythm to our lives than the one that, we are now absolutely sure1, destroys life all around us, influences the climate and takes us to an unknown universe. It is of course always an excitement to go towards the unknown, towards the discovery of a new world. This is what makes man since he walks on two legs. However, this universe that is opening up to our eyes and to our understanding seems to be devastated. It is called anthropocene, it is called extinction of species. Are we in it? In the image of what we have inflicted on all wild life. Populations are decimated while our species continues to grow (until when?). Biodiversity, the living as diverse as it is infinite, loses billions of individuals every year, thousands, millions (?) of species, it collapses, while we rejoice in not suffering any "casualties "2 in a few disastrous details.
Turning in circles, turning in flags, but turning the wheels to reach the source. A source. An origin. An originality. To find the history, nourished by meetings that were not foreseen, nourished by appointments that were prepared, with artists, researchers, inventors, farmers, thinkers, craftsmen, women, men. To underline the great mixture of thoughts that has made us walk upright. To return to the great genius who invented the world of today as well. Who represented the celestial beauty of the universe and the living beauty of our community. Leonardo da Vinci, inventor of our modern world, was without borders. He looked, observed, worked to understand more than the senses could give him.
In this performance, the path in the world will take me through, perhaps discovering and observing various secrets scattered in some corners of the continent. Through the discoveries and the retranscriptions in images and texts, further in stories and performances, in transmission, I want to deploy a net and show that experiences, of doing, of living, as many variations as the kilometers traveled, can link together and bring hopes, solutions, visions of our future, far from the useful but often outrageously destructive technologies in front of which we are absorbed, drowned, separated from each other.
In two or three months of travel, these weak and tenuous examples will perhaps be able to show a fraction of the immense number of tangents, modulations, alternative links, ropes, webs, possibilities for the future.
The end of this journey, between Chambord and Amboise, will be accomplished near the house where I was born.
Marronnier - photographie numérique - 2022 - dimensions variables
A note of intent
Engage the body. Engage the self. Engage the ego. Understand the surroundings. To land. To walk. Connecting, linking. To weave. Unveil the fabrics. Browse and show the layers. Documenting the complex and obvious uniqueness.
No sooner had we built a continent, it was already outdated by our tools. Too many conflicts must have prevented the loving functioning of our two-headed union.
The German remains the Kraut.
I don't know who I am. They never told me.
A grumpy guy with no discipline? So little exchange.
We know some of each other. But he is always another.
We each wear a pretty much waterproof raincoat.
Fortunately there are infiltrations. A few drops, a few cracks.
Why not enter and rediscover that link from before the borders - so regretted by Stephan Sweig1?
From the highway to the airport we forgot the journey. Let's start again some ballads, hikes, expeditions, wanderings, surroundings at a real body rhythm, helped by a nice tool, the bicycle.
To understand the Europe of artists and writers, from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century. Engage a loop, draw a flag, a rag. On this historical route, from Valencia to Delft, from Salzburg to Florence and from Vercors to Chambord, reread the history of culture. And to find also on this road from Paris to Cologne, Turin and Grenoble, the culture of the low tech, another counterpart of the search for humanity.
Sixty steps to experience the poetry of the encounter and the presence of the other. Is he really there? Still visible in some places or is it already and only replaced by a Zoom screen thumbnail or an AI image, invented by a robot to meet the standards of the constraint of beauty and still please? Is it already completely under the control of some American students, not cool and not young.
Leonardo da Vinci worked in his various inventions and always to connect the fluids of the imagination. All his work is only syntheses to reveal the proximities of the thought, of the poetry, of the writing of sciences, of the processes of creation and of the natural processes. Man does not invent anything that the laws of chemistry and physics have not already shown since the infinite birth of the universes. It will be only in the acute and deep observation of the world, in the manipulation of any natural element that, as in a work of chlorophyll rubbed on a sheet of Giusepe Penone, we draw from the sap and the pigment, the conditions of the creation.
It is in the path that the poem is generated.
I take it.
I will join him.
I will write it.
To return to the banks of the Loire that saw one of the greatest geniuses of humanity at work, after having gone around in Europe. After having met. After having recorded portraits, landscapes. After writing poetic stories. After having touched. After having been touched. To return to the banks of this river is to return with a thread of thoughts of craftsmen, engineers, farmers, artists, who are, each, a few fragments of time after the beginning of the Renaissance, today, as many inventors of poetry as the genius of the parachute and the Mona Lisa.
Digital proximity is a "dead positivity ".
To leave and roll, to roll and find, to get out of digital relations, out of time and distance. It is to seek the proximity annihilated by the screens in our hands.
The development of the great means of digital communication makes us glimpse an optimized and radiant happiness. The one that is being experimented for the least executives, the least engineers, the low potentials, the happiness of distant relationships and virtual travels. Services have become competitive markets. The post office no longer delivers mail. University lecture halls are empty spaces. Trains are only accessible with a digital, smart device. Medical care is operated by software. The artist, the philosopher and the poet are no longer necessary because robots and AIs invent, write, conceptualize and create. Direct and even virtual contacts between people are obsolete and useless. We remember well the useless activities. The spring of 2021 is not far away yet and yet we don't know when, or if, it will take place. We have all been voluntarily confined. Since then, the brand new normal is taking its shape without rejection and hardly any protesting wall vomiting. Steering decisions are so complex and require so much soul-searching. One can easily imagine that we are, all together, in this century of general globalization, like this ship in the middle of the night and at full speed, one hundred and eleven years ago, approaching the iceberg. We may even believe that we have already touched it. So the skippers, obtuse and afraid, close the doors and the emergency exits. They go on, stubborn (the names are certainly not insignificant), talking about poems learned by heart, without a sensitive mind if not a given tune, and continue their work.
To tour Europe will be to ask the question of whether there are still individuals in any place capable of surviving, of meeting and welcoming the unknown that arrives in their home. Is it possible to meet similar people who do not have to ask a software to make decisions? Today employees are not thanked anymore. Today self-employed people are blocked by work apps. There is no more listening to bosses or colleagues. There is software that is updated every two months, optimized for the profitability of the boss, the owner, the shareholders, the investors. Certainly not for the independent users who have no choice but to hope for the best shifts. At four Euros an hour. Until death.
What seems to be paramount in the pursuit of the confinement of bodies and spirits, undergone, accepted, voluntary, is the greatest fear we have. The fear of injury, of falling, the fear of suffering, of insecurity. The fear of death. We have designed, we use machines with artificial intelligence that invent digital images and calculation actions to buy and sell on the stock market as fast and at the best price, separate platelets from plasma, extract blood, measure the wear of socks. All these tools make the living useless. They are added to the dust-eradicators and tomato-cutters, to the films that last a hundred hours, to the infinite parade of Realities. We don't even know when the brain will be unavailable. Tomorrow is the sale! It's the sales all year long.
So, the tangent.
You have to look a little to know if there is another choice than the globalized siphon. A whirlpool in which some languages and identities melt, little by little, into each other. Sometimes gently, but often rather violently and always financially. There is always a seller and a sold. We invented this black hole before we ever saw a real one.
But we are social animals, out of the competition in which it is necessary to eliminate, to make disappear, some enemy.
But nicely, no doubt.
Or else, leave for forty days, fasting in a desert. And afterwards? To lock oneself up in a monastery.
That's another lead. And a little groove in between? Between the juggernaut and the hermit? Between the diplodocus or tyrannosaurus and the mosquito or the virus? Before finding a few elected officials, narcissistic elites, Les Furtifs de Damasio on a distant planet a few months away, why not try to find on our known, original territories, within the same travel time, some nuggets, some seeds, young sprouts, wriggles, savages and nurturing barbarians? Aren't there some lights, descendants of Leonardo da Vinci, who invent a life of reason?
A curved tangent, which does not seek to flee to move away, but to weave, to bind.
A tangent like a needle with an eye. |
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Chardons 01 - photographie numérique - 2023 - dimensions variables
Spinning The Tangents
A poem
Should we know, meet, catalog
the living species of our world to preserve them?
The world was well organized and without cataclysmic damage
before we thought of organizing the manufacture of our food.
How can written laws save species from extinction?
How can we think that disturbing strangers can save them from our destruction?
From their disappearance.
Experience systematically shows us the opposite.
Death.
By its only presence and organization, the man kills, destroys, reduces to nothing, makes disappear.
The only survival of other, foreign species can only occur through the absence
of interaction, classification and research.
What defect can it be that not to have knowledge of another life?
Science, in this action is not good.
Neither for the man, nor for the ecology.
Only a random organization, anarchic, is saving.
Which life do we offer to the living in mineral, concrete, and
concrete, tarred, cleaned and organized for our only comfort?
We do not compete.
We do not regulate.
No law can be written.
If there are any,
they can only be flexible and changeable.
The number and the table tell us how many we are.
They certify to us who owns the biggest pile of wheat.
How big is it?
What does it matter?
What's after the billions?
What end?
The number, the optimization, the digitization, the spreadsheet,
are destructive.
We now know the story.
We have been running for ten thousand years.
We are running towards loss.
We have hardly evolved for 250 million years.
If not in power.
The third extinction was realized in a hundred thousand years.
The one that we have caused, the sixth,
will be realized in a few centuries. Maybe less, one or two.
If we continue to be much more efficient than leeks.
There is a chance.
But there will be no one, right now,
to carve this into a picture.
What if we don't remember it?
What does it matter?
We keep old people alive who don't even know they exist anymore.
Whose mushy brain can only make grunts.
For the search of science and numbers, for the hope of beating the infinity of space,
For the hope of beating the body and the living,
We beat the records to save a few lost smiles.
To draw a flag, a guide, a standard, a butterfly net,
a net for stories, a net for ideas,
a farewell to my children.
To keep an optimism in a contemporary world
which has been reflecting itself permanently from its navel since Foucault,
Where the weakest parts are literally drowned,
Pakistan summer 2022, indifferently,
or burned,
Australia, Portugal, Congo, Brazil, France, United States, Siberia,
in total indifference, if not a brief emotion,
"It's sad for the little birds",
"It's a pity for our grandchildren, they won't be able to ski in winter ".
There is an 'animal' life force that still runs through humans everywhere.
These old evolved apes.
Filer Les Tangentes traces a path through Europe,
a journey between different mythical, essential places,
founding places,
of the history of art
of the history of humanity,
of the history of the tipping of knowledge
of the abandonment of God as the only justification,
of the discovery of the infinite power of man
thanks to technology, science,
to the last appropriation of natural resources,
after the great discoveries of fire, metals, agriculture.
Fossil energies.
A performance, Les Tangentes
traces a way at a similar rhythm
to that of the artists
in their travels across the continent three, four or five hundred years ago.
Three thousand years
It traces a path in their footsteps, in their encounters with differences, with others
cultures, lights, landscapes,
of the understanding of the man
of the understanding of the world at the scale of the finger and the eye.
Of the comprehension of the world to width of shoulder,
with the strength of the foot.
Under the sun and the aligned stars.
Filer Les Tangentes traces a flag which is not a mesh
but shows a part, a potential
through eight European countries
Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Italy,
this fragile and delicate fabric
but dense and tight
that are the relations of the life of proximity
living stories of sharing, exchange and welcome.
Everywhere.
Far from the race for efficiency, for optimization.
Far from the standardization of tables, of individualistic profits.
Far from the destructive envy and the devastating returns.
To draw a flag in the space of the European unity,
a standard of the economic and sober solutions.
Spinning Tangents draws a net to catch some butterfly
in the footsteps of Erasmus who understood on his way
the will of the men to confront a normalization.
Will I find a uniform covering all this landscape?
I do not leave in search of the same colors as the painters of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance.
Are there tears in the mountains?
The Mont Blanc is collapsing.
The storms in deluges drown the valleys.
Does the net hold some butterflies?
Can they all know each other?
Or do they have invisible but solid links
but solid bonds?
Forking over?
Return.
Restore ?
Revolutionize.
Return to the starting point.
We must have taken a wrong road.
Yet the further we go, the more we understand
our mistake.
But we say that it is the other
the responsible one.
The other one too.
The barbarian, the not white, the not male.
The one who does not look like the invented god.
We believe the word of the heart, while the hand
closes and tears away.
We are not separated however.
We are one.
We are unique together.
I went to China that first time four years ago,
I spent the first 10 days of my residency surrounded by
I spent the first 10 days of my residency surrounded by about 30 elderly people, members of a painting club.
All old people, the same age as my parents, or younger.
We only met at meals, in a huge common room.
At the beginning alone with Lin, my Chinese assistant,
Then we quickly spent the last week sharing
a big table with ten or twelve people.
They told me about their activities, asked questions.
There was not enough translation, it was going too fast.
Too much joy, too much of the unknown to discover, to share,
too much life entering theirs.
Too many strangers in a bad way, frightened by the stories of the leaders.
Yet of these hours to hear, to listen to an unknown language,
responding, sharing, discovering food, drink, gestures,
laughter, stories, oppositions, sufferings,
stories of landscape, feelings, sensations,
I was able to understand
a whole part of the character, life and culture of these women
of these women and men of 70 years.
The memories of a barbaric life.
But always new, in which the history of the nature, the landscape,
of the earth is greater than our lives. Always.
Included.
For ten thousand years we have invented tools to control,
organize, civilize, de-sauce,
to make the best of what we needed in ourselves, in Nature.
But in the middle of the second millennium we started to slip.
We built such powerful technologies
that we thought we had extracted ourselves from this Nature.
It was a wish, a repeated prayer.
It is bad and dirty, wild - we want to extract ourselves from it.
Or just to enjoy it.
We have reached a strength,
for profit, efficiency and productivity.
Yet all this is useless, futile.
Only vanity.
Today we accept some witches. We tolerate.
Let them stay in their box.
First produce, harvest. To continue the heap of wheat.
The other is no different.
The balance, of the natural event,
of the whole of the living, the visible, the solid,
of the gas, is fragile and harmonious.
We are the other too, always.
We are the harmony.
We are a part of the energy.
We are only a part of the whole.
And everyone is a part. There is certainly no
one better, one stronger, one more indispensable.
To want to understand everything, to analyze, to master,
to classify,
we exclude, we visit, we corrupt.
We destroy.
Is it so useful to want to catalog everything?
Is it so useful to stop dying?
The more we postpone the end, the death,
the greater the life expectancy,
the less life there is.
All that remains is the fear of disappearance.
This is the first thing we have understood.
The rite of death has extracted us from the animal position.
And yet not.
And we invented the next thing. The escape.
The beyond. The farther than the stars. The infinite.
Yet everything is there. Within sight, within walking distance, within a breath.
The border is an imaginary. The country is other beyond the horizon.
The head. Where is the head that we have lost?
Since a man believed himself conqueror of the universe,
and then another, the celebrated, untouchable tomb,
decadence has followed at the same pace as the discoveries
of science, of growth, of power
vain.
"The progress of science unrolls a procession of successive discoveries that destroy each other and destroy themselves until the end of our poor little universe.1 "
The actions and works of the artists cannot resemble the general
to the general atmosphere,
they cannot be the reflection of the thought of the emperors or the scholars,
they are foreign to the universal rhythm.
Our history seems to be a march to nowhere.
Towards a frontier.
In the void.
Lydie Jean Dit Panel went on foot from New York to Nowhere in the summer of 2022.
She will walk the other way, from the Pacific next summer.
At the same time Ridah Dib walked from Paris to the Turkish border of Syria.
And Vincent Dieutre was walking, suspiciously, the streets of L.A.
Seul.es.
Walking along the path, alone, one pursues one's origins.
One goes back into past history.
We stir up the ancient thoughts to taste the marrow of knowledge.
We dive into the roots of art.
We skim the sources of humanity.
In this journey without goal, this loop without return,
I hope to find something other than the selfish bourgeois uniform worn everywhere.
I hope to find a welcome for a bipedal artist and cyclist,
I hope to find the same impulses as in the performance CDG2CPH,
which led me from Paris to Copenhagen,
in a late autumn.
Have we entered the winter?
Other doors, other tables, other gifts of pleasures
and energies,
will they still be offered on this new, longer road,
in this climate that has not changed its route?
This climate that is heading towards desolation.
Are there little glimmers of light, scattered about?
An absolute resignation?
A disarray already installed?
An abandonment of happy projection?
An insensitive concern for happiness?
Or hotbeds of warmth?
Researchers committed to sharing.
But sharing is scary.
It separates the heap.
It is rather a negative notion.
It is the division, the distribution, the splitting, the splitting
the dismemberment, the liquidation, the dismemberment,
difference,
the alienation.
The sharing is the end of the rent.
Sharing is not being oneself anymore,
when Instagram, all the social networks, the media,
only wants to expose the egos.
In pictures.
Always so simple.
Not to be oneself and yet
be a flat and icy mirror.
Who wants to surrender?
We defend identity.
Since the colonies we have a map that defines them.
Who wants to get out of their box?
Who can get out of their hut?
Who dares to leave his box and change color?
Abandon his identity?
An identity defined by codes, laws, measures.
What is the legitimacy of these laws? They lock up.
They certainly do not liberate.
Solarpunk
Punk Solidaire.
Do it yourself
Do it together. Do it with Other.
Goodbye my children.
Sunflower - Digital photography - 2021 - various dimensions
All Photographs © ADAGP - Guillaume Dimanche |
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