Luckily I Had the World Around Me. 2005
(Heureusement qu’il y avait le monde autour de moi)
Cities are made up of complex, changing groups of people. At the same time, they are sites of memory, language and desire, and territories of exchange filled with signs of continuous interaction. Strolling through these segmented places everyday stimulates the imagination of those who venture there. Spaces of movement, peregrination and wandering, the city becomes an imperceptible background for stories that begin, expand and then slowly fade into anonymity.
With this perspective, I am proposing a series of photographic diptychs titled Luckily I Had the World Around Me (Heureusement qu’il y avait le monde autour de moi) in which the back and forth movement between the photographic space and that of the text is expressed in the same image. These are photographed interior and exterior spaces, devoid of all human presence. As for the words, they are set out in the photograph, and go considerably beyond the usual role of a caption: They function like snapshots, literal texts narrated with detachment, without any affect. In the proposed corpus of work, these little stories are the result of strolling about and stopping here and there in public spaces. Remarkable situations and ineluctable drawings jostle together when visiting these anonymous places. The words take the place of the camera, attempting to capture a “snapshot” in which the protagonists, kind of antiheros of an urban theatre, act with fragile dignity. This narrative then is introduced into the work, punctuating the visual sequence.
By appropriating these incongruous situations of “la vie qui va” [life as it happens], the double register of the visible and the written are combined, alternating the documentary and the poetic. The narrative juxtaposed with the photograph becomes a plastic component in relation to the image, examining the representational effects. In this proposal, the split between the two images of the diptych acts as a “suture:” yet, an insert filled with words –– recounting what is invisible in the image –– proposes a semantic connection, another view of the captured reality. Following the example of Virginia Woolf who “wanted to write four lines at a time (…) because it seemed (to her) that things always happen on many different levels simultaneously,” this coupling lets me transcribe the real with its prism effect, the same one that comes back to us daily in reduced meaning.
This project infers a simultaneous work of text and image, drawing its source from my notebooks compiled during trips to cities here and abroad. This time, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Rome et New York served as substratum for wandering, roaming, distraction and the notion of displacement that turns out to be an integral part of the creative process. Differents cultures, continents, cities where the solitudes coexist in indifference, provoking private little dramas like bubbles bursting discretely in the maelstrom of urban life.
This viewpoint of the surveyor has been practiced by many of the cultural avant-garde in the 20th century. The city as “inspiration” is a spectacle without restraint and where I move around as a nomadic spectator “(…) in order to bring art to interstitial areas in which another city exists and is constructed, in which another reality is taking place.”Thus, another patched together narrative emerges from this mobility to question our relationship to an organized and settled world.
Just like Aristotle who already in Antiquity, had found that taking walks was a way of developing ideas, the man of cities and streets that he influences perhaps also tends to introduce a creative tension within the strongly anchored spatial contexts of both fiction and lived reality.
This is how the displacement happens to those who physically survey the city and let their minds wander.Translated by Janet Logan
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