Fragments-images

The two boys

In this midday train in a quiet Paris neighborhood, metro sparse, a very loud voice on the phone. Two teenagers sitting side by side on two folding seats. The bored one speaks. He hangs up and asks his friend what he has planned for them to do, claiming that nothing is planned. He mentions a distant suburb where he could go that very afternoon, which seems to surprise the other.

The other is forbidden and has nothing to offer. The next station saw them come down onto its platform, unexpectedly, because Gare d’Austerlitz station is closed at the moment. On the platform, before disappearing from view, they stand facing each other, motionless, exhilarated by their troubles and indecisions, or rather their mutual vacuities. One waits, the other doesn’t offer.

12 March 2024

The carrots are cooked

In a small Thai restaurant, two retired women face each other, seated at a small table, in front of a small street window. Another piece of writing in a shopping area.

They feel very important, especially the one who talks the most, who shows the other that she is superior. She doesn’t listen to her at all, relying on her to unfold her story. She cuts her off all the time. In the restaurant, it’s like music, with the lead voice singing her song, driven by her inflections, her melody, her texture. And then, from time to time, a few wisps of a deeper voice, in counterpoint, providing the necessary softness for listening.

At first, the discrepancy between their image as old retired women and the social importance they gave themselves was striking: like an inconsistency. But as time went on, their words became more and more in tune with their image. They became more sympathetic, more touching, more real. Perhaps they wanted to make themselves more important to the other customers. The story focuses on their memories of the heroic past. They come here in public to relieve their seemingly abysmal boredom. The more the conversation progresses, the more the leader reveals her emptiness, stepping out of her initial role.

They hold up a mirror to our vanity. And little by little, the brilliance fades, they come closer to the human shadows that make up our consistency, our nuances...

Listening to them, I learn that when you’re not aligned with yourself, it shows, it’s glaring.

The second woman is ill today. Perhaps she’s different when she’s in her normal state. A thousand times, the other tells her to rebuild her intestinal flora. They resumed their discussion, full of Masonic jargon, I think. “Le droit humain”, the lodge open to women, which isn’t far from here. I think they’re part of it, but that’s just my guess.

They are systemically jealous. Their stakes are power, politics, hierarchical positions. “Caritas.”Harmonia. First names, surnames, functions, insults directed at these absentees fly in all directions. Almost all the others are upstarts. “All they want is to tour the world at the expense of the princess”. It’s all a question of place in a social space. Energy is entirely devoted to judging others, to making oneself feel important; there is no other subject. Everything is mobilized to make oneself exist by proving one’s superiority. All those richer, more influential others, who must be discredited as a matter of life and death, it seems.

Do I do the same?

What I find interesting is that they force me to judge them too. So I have to learn to love them, so as not to get caught up in their whirlwind.

30 May 2023

Skilled children

Eight fifth-grade children in a small bucolic school, to whom I gave the cameras, tape recorders, responsibility and autonomy to create films. Today, we are collectively editing their film. I am at the machine, we see the work being done on the big screen. They have suggestions. I have to receive them. My job is to listen to them. And if I listen to them, I discover that their proposals, in the meeting with mine, bring the film to places of meaning, finesse, sensitivity and relevance that I would never have reached alone. They impress me.

The teacher points out to them the professional capacities that I have, to arrange the sounds, etc., in a relationship of admiration-domination. But that is not what I am building. What I cultivate is a constructive relationship, a mutual enrichment. Of course, I have my abilities, but they also have just as many abilities, which will reveal themselves in the encounter with an activity in which they are given the space to express themselves. What counts is that I open myself to discover their richness. It is a work of every moment, of trust.

The referring adult is not a referent because of the overwhelming skills he or she has developed in the course of his or her life, presenting the children with a model of how to proceed (studies, professional experience, etc.). No, the referent adult is the one who is able, in the present, to go and meet the children, to share and complement each other’s contributions, in a common activity, which will mutually reveal qualities. It is therefore an accompaniment to the construction of the children’s capacities, through the encounter with those of an adult, who will also learn from them.

17 May 2023

Smallest lie

A creative workshop session in a high school class in the Paris suburbs. I bring a lot of material. I transform the space so that the class becomes an animation studio: camera, lighting, video projector, graphic material, felt pens, scissors, colored paper, microphones, computers, many musical instruments... I arrive in advance, I move all the chairs, I create islands for the work teams... I’ve been in this class several times. The teacher is delighted with the creativity and motivation of the students. But the slots are short, and the teacher is always in a hurry after the session, to clean up the room, to go to her next class, which I understand very well. She asked me the previous time to finish early because she runs too much. This morning, when I arrived, I told her I would do my best to finish early. We have to be out by one o’clock. I organize myself with the colleague animator who accompanies me, I press the students, always nicely. The teacher begins to tidy up during the last recordings, we make less catches to be sure not to overflow, we botch a little. I ask again the exact time of the end of the course to the teacher, she lies to me of ten minutes. Finally, phew! One gained this quarter of hour, on a slot of one hour. The students wait for the bell. I understand that the teacher had not told me the real end time. We leave the classroom. I think to myself that the activity has still been disrupted by this change, and that the students have suffered a little from the previous session. We say goodbye, and the teacher tells us that she is going to teach another class.

Then my colleague and I leave the building and stand outside for ten minutes talking before we part. During our conversation, the teacher nonchalantly leaves the school, accompanied by a handsome young man. She gives us an embarrassed smile, and continues her way. We see them slowly leaving on the sidewalk. Two small lies. She got what she wanted with two little lies. But if she had told us the truth, we could have stood together, as I did, in trust, in sincerity about our mutual needs. I am sure that she would have obtained even better with truth and trust. I didn’t lie, I sincerely did my best for her, but she still lied. It’s hard to change habits. What should I have done, for the sake of the students? Stick to a quest for sincerity as I did, or assume that everyone else is lying and manipulating, so I should take the blame? I would rather lose and have my ethics respected.

But I also believe that without meaning to, I made the situation worse. Why? Because I had recognized the teacher’s request as a legitimate need. In reality, this request was illegitimate, because it is her responsibility to ensure that a workshop has the space and time to run smoothly, it is her choice to host this type of activity in her classroom, it is not my responsibility to take care of it for her. So, in an attempt to do the right thing, I had recognized as legitimate something that was not. During the session, I felt like she was playing some sort of role, to justify this so-called need. So she produced lies to validate the deceptive system that I myself had helped to set up, without realizing it. What I want to express by this is that these lies do not only come from a dishonesty which would be intrinsic to this person, or from a perverse collective unconscious, but also and much from a system of interactions, of which each one is an actor, including me.

15 May 2023

Anxiety disorders

A man is sitting in the Indian restaurant. He says he is waiting for a woman. I see him from behind. His voice is high. We are in Paris. He asks the waiter, who does not speak French, what is the exact address of the restaurant, because “she” will arrive. This address is an anguish, to which the two waiters who follow one another have difficulty answering.

Then I enter my world, I put my headphones on my ears, and I read anarchist texts. After a moment, I raise my head. It is a young woman, sitting opposite him, three tables away. I see her blurred, because I am short-sighted and I do not wear glasses anymore. I am surprised. She looks very young to me, in her twenties. I was under the impression that he was much older, as I understand that this is a love/sexual date with today’s dating apps. So I take off my headset, to figure it out.

She is quite strange, at the same time relaxed, with a young woman’s lexical field, and at the same time very neurotic, as she compulsively asks for details about the menu, so much so that the waiters have to come back several times and take turns to give explanations. She tells her interlocutor that she travels a lot, she quotes names of foreign cities from which she has just returned. So, yes, it’s a date. I think he must have lied to her about his age. He tells her that he is on an internship at the Inspection académique, that he organizes school trips and that he is told that he works very well. So I ask myself: isn’t he actually much younger than I thought?

And then... he asks her if she still pays little for the planes. She answers that her father has changed the codes, so she can’t anymore, because she has just had a falling out with him. And she urges this man to give her information about her own father. What was he like when he was young? So I understand that he’s an uncle, or an old family friend, he’s four years older than the father. I am reassured. Why am I reassured? Why was I making a judgment about these two people? Because I was projecting the image of a couple out of the ordinary, which disturbed my morals?

Finally, he told her that he was bipolar and listed the medications he was taking. I remember the Depakote, an anti-epileptic that is also a mood regulator. And she replies very naturally that she has anxiety disorders, that she is obsessive-compulsive and that she is also depressed. He stands up to look in his pocket, thanking her, because it reminds him to take his medication. Her more visible body, from behind, makes me uncomfortable. Like the feeling of a body that would not be “held”. She is also looking for her medication. I get up, I go out, not daring to look at them, despite the desire I have.

These “others” sent me back to my fear of madness, or rather to my fear of the madness of drug treatment. And then to my son Hippolyte, whose psychiatric dramas were cleverly hidden from me, until his suicide. In his letter, he evokes a painful medication course, without taking the time to specify. I think of this vision of oneself as a symptom to be normalized, to be regulated, to be killed slowly.

13 May 2023

In a cab

Late at night. Under the rain. The car stops. I run under the ropes to get in. I say my first name, so that the driver can be sure. But it is obvious to him. I don’t have to say it, I was the only one on the street. He doesn’t care. He speaks French, I think, but I don’t understand his words. In front of him, three huge computerized map dials. High-tech cars. He sits a little crooked, as if he were in a living room, rather than in a car. His phone rings. He speaks an unknown language, from which comes a French word, “client”. He quickly hangs up. No other words exchanged. He brings me to my destination, but a little far from my door. I tell him, he kindly turns around, and sets me down right in front. His driving is expert and light. He doesn’t show it. But he is generous. He is in his world, in his time, and I am in mine. So different! I run out into the rain, and rush into the building’s entrance. A beautiful and simple cooperation. Otherness.

7 May 2023

Bookstore

In the morning, the bookseller and his employee “take stock” of the books on the tables. The ones that are often bought, the ones that need to be moved. The bookseller tells her boss about certain books and their interest. She gives pictures of them, she makes “pitches” of them. I, a customer who is already holding a pile of books in my arms, an unusual customer, receive a shy look and a hello from the bookseller with his big belly. He is still relatively young, though. Not an assent from him, but a relationship as if to a stranger. We are mutually embarrassed. Because the books we choose tell us about ourselves, touch on the intimate. And too many books means too much intimacy, or rather an abnormal amount of intimacy. We should find a rational explanation for this quantity, for example gifts. Sometimes I pretend to buy gifts so as not to embarrass the person at the checkout with this quantity. Sometimes, I don’t buy such and such a book, so as not to expose my intimacy too much.

6 May 2023

Accepting death

One year to the day after I wrote this image of a young man filming an electric wire, on September 13, 2022, my son Hippolyte decided to die, he was going to be 23 years old. I am writing this today, on May 6, 2023, but I date this text from the day of Hippolyte’s death. Many numbers, dates, periods, anniversaries, along a thread, which is the thread of life. Life is defined by an inescapable death, I understand it all the more now. The length of life of each person is singular, why judge it? Why should my life be curtailed because I have not been able to curb my son’s death drive? Am I able to consider my son as another person, full and complete, who is of course a product of me, but who is not a part of me? The nuance is very important. My sorrow is immense, because I had given him life and I accompanied him in his life movement. The life. My life, mine, it is full and whole. It now contains a terrible void, but it is present, on this thread. And I realize to what extent Ippolit’s life was also present, a present. Temporary, like life. And of immense value.

13 September 2022

Filming the wire

A young Italian man, arms outstretched, a camera in his hands, filming an electric wire, recounting an imaginary telephone conversation that would take place there. Very beautiful movement, projection of the outside on what happens inside. What passes through the electric wires are data. They make us live. Electricity has become the flow of our lives. Our lives no longer depend on biology alone, but on the information transmitted by electricity. Information is what connects us. In fact, the transmission of information is also at the heart of our biology, of the functioning of our cells, which, thanks to information, create the proteins that make us live. When in the XXth century, following Jacques Lacan, a great number of philosophers affirmed that “the human being is a being of language”, well it is perfectly true. Even if we do not speak, we are structured by an interior and biological language.

13 September 2021

The wounded man

I am in a subway, isolated by music. I feel movement, and I see a woman who notices that a man of her age, in his thirties, is bleeding on his finger. She takes an interest in him, puts water on the handkerchief he is wrapping his finger in. They talk. They look at each other. It is beautiful. This mutual attention. She takes out of her bag a bandage. One then releases to him the place in front of her. And she looks after him. There is love between them, around the care, the attention to the other. A meeting. They have found each other. He is wounded in his soul too. His role as a man. I do not know how he formulates the request for love. She answers him that she has children, that’s why she has bandages on her. They will have to separate soon.

12 September 2021

Plural - Singular - Plurials

It’s the plural that authorizes the singular, and it’s the singulars that add up to create plurals. The singular is at the heart of the plural. There can be no collective, no city, no society, no cooperation if singularities are not encouraged and cultivated. When the plural becomes a system and forgets what its center was, when it seeks to “protect itself from singularities” that seem to endanger it, it forgets that its intrinsic nature as a plural is to be in constant transformation, as singularities emancipate themselves. Humans who no longer defend the surprising and always destabilizing singularities, in favor of a plural that becomes system, that becomes norm, believe they have a social and collective conscience, when on the contrary they are precisely working, out of fear, to destroy the beating heart of the common: plural singularities.

11 September 2021

Pigments

This powder is mixed. Made of tiny particles. It colors the liquid. Tiny fragments that merge into the liquid, which will caress the surface of the canvas. Of the skin.

11 September 2021