Tanzquartier Wien

Emmène-moi chourer des litres de vodka coco
N’arrête pas je veux me noyer dedans
Te fatigue pas je prends jamais aucun numéro
Entraîne-toi sans ton iphone cherche moi dans la zone

— Anne Lise Le Gac & Arthur Chambry (extract of Vodka Coco, song in DUCTUS MIDI) [1]

Anne Faucheret (AF): As the audience slowly comes in and sits, the performance is already going on. Two performers are busy on stage. The stage is meticulously composed, like a picture where shapes (more or less geometrical, always simple, circles, squares, cubes), colours and structures respond to each other. The tableau is not immobile but filled with movement or apprehensive for movement to come. White lines zigzag on the black marley floor, looking like drawings, nascent words, or grid lines (although altered) as if on a black sheet of paper. Anne Lise Le Gac creates these lines by letting a fluid material – which appears to be sugar – flow from a large bag (like an icing bag). Simultaneously, Arthur Chambry sings unaccompanied and devoid of words with a technologically amplified and modulated voice that becomes a hybrid between yodelling, electronic melody and aquatic sounds. The stage is vertically structured by a huge hanging white cookie-object as well as a piece of printed fabric – softly stretched between the floor and the ceiling. Objects, utensils, instruments, tools, receptacles or machines, as well as other props, strewn on the ground or suspended, populate the space in anticipation of future activation. The configuration evokes at the same time a work, play, and domestic space, or a workshop, stage and living room.

Up to four performers (travellers?) occupy this ambiguous space and cross it from one side to the other throughout the performance. They arrive one by one on stage, never to leave. Still, the intensity of their presence changes, as some of them fade away for a moment to leave space for the other bodies or incarnations – such as voices or projections. Gazes cross each other and bodies sometimes even rub up against one another. Even if the performers show attention to one or more of the others, they are mainly absorbed by their own activity, carried along by their own flow, concentrated on their own movements. Anne Lise Le Gac crosses the stage performing a certain everydayness through the making of objects, of movements, of stories. Cherishing the edges of the stage, Arthur Chambry walks, sings and communicates with devices. He also fabricates things. Katerina Andreou comes running on stage. Her electrified and even hysterised body and her stream of chanted words – fast and unintelligible – break the quiet linearity of the whole. Finally, Christophe Manivet enters the stage slowly roaming, singing and speaking like a bird, first immersed in himself and later in dialogue.

1/ Eye Wandering. Philosophical Peregrination.

AF: Everything invites you to walk around the stage with your eyes, everything prevents you from fixing on a particular place or action. The piece works thoroughly on the lexical field of walking, movement, wandering, peregrination, travel, passage, of a course that is more erratic than determined, more open than directed.

Is the overall movement taking place in the piece inspired by the situationist drift? Or rather the peripateticians’ philosophical walks? Discovery Journey? What can we discover through this kind of travel?

Arthur Chambry (AC): I find all three propositions quite valid. Personally, I like the term “drift”. If I embark on a movement or an action, and persist with it, I’m often faced with a drift, and a change of destination. The destination’s the initial plan: point B. The drift’s the road travelled. What situations are we likely to encounter if we set out toward a destination with this kind of toolkit, this kind of relatedness and thinking? What is it that flows/unfolds/overflows/comes/goes/supervenes? Discovery, for me, takes place in real time – in the present time of action drifting – though it’s often perceptible only retrospectively. “Okay, so this is where we’ve got to!” Sometimes the point is that for oneself the initial desire, in other words the destination, the fantasy, point B, is simply a motor to get oneself going. Which is quite something in itself. But the question isn’t so much that of arriving at point B as of figuring out the paths to be followed. To find the direction we’re giving things.

Anne Lise Le Gac (ALLG): Yes, it’s a bit of all three. Let’s say that the idea was to articulate our presences in the process of going toward… In Tim Ingold’s book “Lines: A Brief History”, which I’ve been poring over since writing the third chapter of La Caresse du Coma, there’s a difference between the TRAVELLER and the PASSENGER. They’re not treated in a judgemental, Manichean way, but given time to develop. And what you find, perhaps directly, is a body that GOES, which enters into a situation OF.

AF: Beyond the idea of travel, movement itself seems to be the driving force behind a new way of being for oneself and for others. Could you say something about this need for constant movement – which is never only physical – and which resonates particularly strong during this period of (almost) global confinement?

ALLG: Hmm, I guess I’ll play my Wild Card, because I really want to mention a sentence +++<3 from another of Ingold’s books, “Making”: “[M]ovement is not just a ‘means’ of gaining knowledge: knowing is ‘in itself’ movement.”

2/ The title: DUCTUS MIDI

AF: Ductus, as you write in an introductory text to the performance, refers to a specific mode of reading that reads/understands/envisages the text as a (discovery) journey and not as progress. In linguistics, it also indicates the flow, rhythm, the scansion, or the way someone speaks. Language is seen as a ductile (and versatile) body that can be modulated and modelled, and also modulates and models itself: it has its own agency. Besides, Ductus is also a character’s name. The character talks and sings with birds and seems himself to be half-man, half-bird.
The other half of the title, MIDI (in French), is the hour that cuts the day in half. Written decidedly in caps the word is also an abbreviation of Musical Instrument Digital Interface – a language and format used for communication between electronic instruments and controllers, that is, an interface, something that links heterogeneous entities.

Can you tell me about the title? How did you choose it? At first glance, it’s quite mysterious…

ALLG: The word “ductus” appears in Ingold’s book, and I was intrigued by it. In “Lines: A Brief History”, he says: “In the meantime, we can simply conclude that readers in Antiquity and the Middle Ages were orientated by a trajectory rather than a plan. They did not interpret a written text according to a precise, pre-existent, self-sufficient schema, but saw it as a path marked by signals, signposts and stages that guided them through space and memory. In the Middle Ages, the term ‘ductus’ meant ‘directed, smooth guidance from one place to another’. As Carruthers says, ‘the idea of a dynamic is essential to the “ductus”.’ This denotes what leads the mind along its ‘path’ through composition.”
So I felt that it was a PATH for writing/composing in the here and now. Not sacred texts, but what we DO, what we SAY, what we SEE, what we TOUCH, what we TASTE, what we HEAR. The DUCTUS places the body in a relation in motion. This is the mantra.
MIDI, as you say, is a digital format for electro music. And in French it also means “midday”: a break, meeting up to eat, and it is the name of the part of France where we live, with Arthur, Christophe and Nils. Katerina’s just above “midi”!

3/ A language off the road & estranged

AF: Language, which is already at the heart of the title, is everywhere in the piece. Lines of sugar materialize its nascent written state on stage, before it makes sense. Later, language will appear in written form, legible but not audible – even if some sound, the sound of a writing machine, seems to activate the scrolling of the letters. Sometimes language is audible but not intelligible, as in Katerina Andreou’s crazy litany or in Christophe Manivet’s human-bird songs. Towards the end of the piece, language becomes a song with Anne Lise Le Gac. We thus encounter language in different states (spoken, sung, drawn, danced, projected), in different situations (monologue, conversation), but also in different registers (poetic or familiar) or rhythms. Languages and their embodiments sometimes encounter and exchange but most of the time simply cohabit, in a mutual benevolence. They short-circuit the common conception of an instrumentalized (and instrumentalizing language), impoverished by the imperative of making sense. Languages in the performance are no longer limited to communicating, to making people understand, to making them act. On the contrary, they feature to confuse, disconcert, and thus assume a poetic and poietic function. The registers of language are intermingled, favouring nevertheless contemporary common language, a language that is creolized, that plays with humour, diversion, détournement.

Does your work on language in the piece come from a desire to escape from fixed uses, social and cultural determinations, and thus avoid reproducing through them exclusionary and painful hierarchies?

ALLG: Hmm, it might be said that I see language as a liquid. It seeps in wherever it can, and even if the breach is small it can easily change shape. When I talk about language, I’m really talking about its use, rather than the syntactic and grammatical rules that predetermine it, and standardise it, because I get the impression that the way we use it doesn’t always anticipate the form it may take. It can be copied and pasted, unsung, unseen, deformed, sought after, twisted, travestied, caricatured – the list is endless. Let’s say that it’s good to feel free to PLAY. And that’s why it’s so strongly present/alive. For DUCTUS MIDI, language doesn’t escape from its own growth. And to pursue the analogy with water, I might say that it appears/disappears as pools, droplets, waterfalls…

AF: Your languages create another world, one on the edges of the globe in which we live. In this world, relationships seem freer and more open – how can we learn to speak that language – refusing to make everything intelligible? Should we be listening more to the birds and whales (I’m serious)?

ALLG: In reply, I’d quote Vinciane Despret, who I’ve just heard on YouTube giving a lecture at the Beaux-Arts in Marseille in January 2020. “It’s within reality that the announcement seeks, and in some cases finds, the conditions of its realisation. The truth is what will happen to the enunciation. An enunciation in search of truth partakes of an emergent reality. In doing so, it actively appeals, in the emerging reality, to the bearer, in a search for its truth. This is not the domain of proof. On the contrary, it is that of the ORDEAL. It is through an ordeal that an enunciation finds its truth.”
Finally, among the four of us, I’m the one who most strongly articulates an “intelligible” language for a French-speaking audience. But Arthur’s “yaourt”[2] song and Katerina’s avalanche of freestyle in Greek have been given the same status as narratives in French, because they’re attached to the medium through which language emerges, and not the contrary. In any case, let’s say we’ve tried.

AC: I don’t think that the main thing is to learn to talk that specific language, but to figure out how to face up to the unknown/the imperceptible/the unintelligible. What happens when I’m addressed in terms which, to begin with, evade me? In contemporary art, I often come across things that seem to have arrived here from another world. For me, it’s sometimes too hermetic, but in other cases “it speaks to me”. So what’s happening in my head when “it speaks to me”? I think that relations to these things are cultivated quite intimately. In each individual there’s a potential world that’s created in response to propositions which themselves come from other worlds. I think it has to do with the power of the imagination, and it functions both in passive mode (observer) and in active mode (creator).

4/ De-centre: leaving the anthropocentrism

AF: The method of de-centering plays a fundamental role in questioning the subject and the criticism of the modern rationalist project of anthropocentric domination upon the world, upon nature, animals, other humans (those who are not white, not middle-aged and who don’t speak a dominant language). Feminist thinker Donna Haraway, an American historian of science and feminist theoretician, whom you mention in your text, has forged and worked on various intellectual tools (situated knowledge, science fiction, kinship) and various images (cyborg, coral, critter, cradle game) to achieve this de-centering. Some of these methods are to be found in your piece as well: one can encounter various incarnations (voices that appear on a screen, performers, machines), where a certain agency of materials and objects is palpable (thermoplastic material, chair that stops wandering, battery that determines the scrolling of letters), and where the humans speaks technological and animal languages.

Could you tell me about Ductus/ Christophe Manivet, the bird songs? Which birds, are they real bird songs that we can hear or are they fictions of bird songs?

ALLG: Christophe’s from Marseille. He works in the building trade. And he’s been doing imitations of birdsong for ages. It’s his passion. But it was only a few years ago that he put himself INTO the score, the learning process, the mimetics, with another imitator, Jean-Paul de Filippi, who teaches the technique in Marseille, and who’s both enthusiastic and gifted. It’s in this “school” context that the scores and the practice emerge, because birdsong’s listened to, recorded, phonetically transcribed and constantly repeated. The songs are collected “in the hills”, from the local birds: thrushes, blackbirds, sparrows, partridges, larks, chaffinches… Fiction plays into the particular relation between imitators and birds. As Christophe says, “I don’t know what I say to them. Maybe I insult them, or say I love them. At any rate, the bird’s here. It comes up to me, and recognises me.”

AF: The introduction of a bird song and its embodiment appears at first as incongruous and almost absurd. Then, far from being sung to attract the animal to observe or hunt it, this song becomes the voice of a “becoming-animal” (Deleuze), this manifestation of a deep desire for communication (or even communion?) with other species, with “nature”. In the piece, a dialogue – supported by a reciprocal gaze – is established between a performer (Anne Lise) and her human voice and the man-bird song. A communication is established, an exchange takes place, which partly escapes us. For Deleuze and Guattari, to become an animal is not to imitate or to play the animal, it is rather to work on oneself, it is to go far away from oneself, to leave home, to “deterritorialize” oneself, to experience the ecstasies of a being who opens up to otherness. One only becomes an animal by becoming other, other than oneself, other than the self, foreign to oneself.

Is it this “becoming-animal” that you are evoking in DUCTUS MIDI– along with respectful reciprocal relationships, kinship and even future symbioses (thinking of Haraway)?

ALLG: Yes, for Christophe it may be a question of this becoming-animal. In DUCTUS MIDI, for me, the bird as an ANIMAL entity isn’t so important. And I’d like to expand this into the notion of “relations between companion animals” or “terrestrial” species. These terms are used by Haraway and Latour. The word “relation” is essential, and the reference to the bird is a passage that INCLUDES the multitude of possible partners, both human and non-human.
What I mean is that, when Christophe arrives on stage, he’s firstly a human being who’s emerged from the audience, but his singing moves us towards a set of possible places that are outside the theatre, and can awaken/invent themselves in each individual’s memory. It’s the space of fiction that’s left in suspense. Everything isn’t stated, because language isn’t resolved between us. Birdsong’s a BIAS. And this is important. The whole project is built on a BIAS. I get to Christophe through birdsong. And I get to the blackbird in the garden through Christophe’s imitations. I see my mother’s tears when I do a thrush song, and she suddenly remembers her father doing the same one. What I mean is that stories of TERRESTRIAL COMPANIONS have never stopped being interconnected. It almost becomes an obligation to recognise this. As Donna Haraway said, “Obligation consists of asking oneself who is present and what emerges from the relation.”

AF: The overall movement shaping the performance seems to be centrifugal (to escape from the centre), and leading to diffraction. There is no evidence, no production of truth, no monolithic meaning, no simple reflection. Here again, Haraway is not far off. She proposed diffraction as a useful counterpoint to reflection: both are optical phenomena, but while reflection involves the mirror and similarity, and thus implies a fixed and essential (of course illusory) position, diffraction deals with patterns of difference and leads us towards a more subtle vision of things. Diffraction is present in the piece on a metaphorical level as well as in an optical way. While Haraway uses optical metaphors in her analysis of knowledge production, she nevertheless criticizes the primacy of sight and vision – the sense most involved in ultimate forms of control and the most commodified sense. She advocates the rehabilitation, particularly in the arts, of the other senses, especially to touch and hear. In DUCTUS MIDI, the surfaces of objects have a peculiar haptic dimension, whether it is the thermoplastic slippers or the gong covered with material (and transformed into a rice cake). Music, singing and sound are not only omnipresent but also structure parts of the piece. (Even the sense of smell is activated, even if through language only).

Can you tell us about the music, sounds and songs in the piece?

AC: Sound and its manipulation occupy an important place in the piece. I’d been thinking about instrumental configurations for playing sounds on stage, bringing in formal elements, and, in particular, involving the body. Sound really had to be worked on live, like any other material. The autotuner (automatic corrective processing) allows us to treat vocal improvisation with a new degree of freedom. For Anne Lise, it’s a way of imitating a sort of saxophone. And this is also how Katerina found herself singing again. It brought about a refinement of her voice, conducive to uninhibited exploration. We noted, several times, that the autotuner is a highly “ductus” kind of device, in that it quickly and easily leads into freestyle. I like the fact that the effect can exist outside the identifiable framework of pop music, with another dimension and in a different aesthetic context. Acoustic sources are also in evidence: a fountain, adhesive tape being unrolled, a tablet, a snare drum and, of course, Christophe’s birdsong. An equilibrium was found between technical/technological features and things that were considered to be much more simple. The duo composed of Christophe whistling and me playing my “augmented snare” constitutes a meeting of two universes of sound with clearly distinct characteristics. Then there’s the electronic gong, both material and auditory, which has been there right from the start. It’s present in some of my projects, in different forms. For DUCTUS MIDI it’s a deep-sounding rice cracker. I composed the music that heralds the arrival of Katerina, with whom I discussed dance and music, notably house music, and footwork.

ALLG: To begin with, it was a question of producing music, sound, noise. Arthur had been making music and sounds for some years on a more or less daily basis. I might say that we model music as a milieu for an emergence of “Kairos”, an opportune moment. We don’t have musical scores, apart from motifs and instruments, which may have been manufactured in distant factories, or sculpted/assembled by ourselves. We get them going, and that leads to other things and situations. When you’re exploring, you return to these situations, some of which develop and stabilise, whereas others diminish and disappear.
At the end I sing a song that’s formally more identifiable and circumscribed. It’s also a frontal encounter with the audience. I recite a more personal sort of poem. It’s an additional feature of the landscape.

AF: What is your relationship to synesthesia – are you looking for synesthetic moments, and beyond the idea of a synthesis of the arts, what is their political dimension?

ALLG: For some time now I’ve been comparing what I do with the act of cooking. When you cook, you need all the senses your body can provide. Whether or not you follow a recipe, there are multiple trajectories that can affect your senses. Smells, tastes, sounds, textures and forms are in sync. But this is unstable; the components are mutants. Putting together a project the way I cook makes me feel satisfied, and it seems right.

AC: I think it’s also due to the spatial polysemy that we’ve formulated. And you analyse it very well: “The configuration suggests both a work space, a game space and a domestic space, or again a studio, a stage or a living room.” On the stage there are the kinds of object you’d find in such spaces: popcorn and an induction cooktop, plastic and workshop machines, mikes, props, etc. They constitute a heterogeneous multitude of materials that potentially echo and activate one another. Even in the domestic environment, when the radio’s on, or you’re heating soup, or doing the dishes, pretty much all the senses are stimulated at the same time. And the intention, I think, is that the terrain of DUCTUS MIDI shouldn’t be too different from that.

5/ Transmit, embrace and take care

AF: Anne Lise le Gac draws with sugar on the floor, she makes plastic slippers, then talks about pizza and Japanese restaurants – disjointed causalities and coincidences, wandering and habits, among other things. Towards the end, she sweeps (or erases?) the sugar drawn at first on the floor. At some point, the story deals with mashed potatoes, pickles (very briefly), chocolate, eating. The gong looks like a giant rice cake. DUCTUS MIDI is crossed by reproduction activities – making shoes, eating or going to get food, sweeping, paying attention to each other, starting a projection device. These activities of maintenance, care, reproduction, are inseparable from other artistic/production activities. And even: the former generates the latter. The image of the pregnant woman incidentally welcoming the child-spirit while walking – an indigenous Australian legend reported in the piece – can be seen as a metaphor for that. However, there is also a refusal to separate the production regimes in general: the making of a sculpture and that of a gong stick are of equal importance, craftsmanship is treated in the same way as poetry, pop song or choreography, with particular attention presented to what is done by hand. Similarly, there is no difference in treatment between a philosophical fable, a dialogue or an anecdote. The annihilation of the “high” and “low” categories goes hand in hand with care for broken, damaged, wounded forms. “I don’t want to let something die just because it’s broken”. It’s the exact opposite of today’s biopolitics…

What is your relation to feminism and how does it inform your aesthetic choices?

ALLG: Well yes, you could talk about feminism, but we don’t focus on that – not collectively, I mean. There are feminist and political values that we all implicitly share, and I’d like to see them being expressed, wherever possible. This is the real issue for DUCTUS MIDI. It doesn’t impose any theme; it’s more a process of engendering and production. Our aim isn’t to create a feminist, or ecological, or whatever, kind of work. We start from the floor, the things we find there and pick up. And then we multiply their uses. We try them out. In a previous performance, GRAND MAL, what I said was: here are our TRASHURES! (A contraction of TRASH and TREASURE.) It was a key word in talking about matter whose value can’t be defined either from the TOP or the BOTTOM. The idea was to reserve judgement, and above all to deploy presences. So I’m convinced that there can be political and aesthetic “flows” over this type of terrain.

AF: During the piece, the audience is invited to participate in a series of rituals, conversations, gestures, that testify a peculiar focus towards objects, matter and towards the other figures in general – a very discrete form of attention, through gaze and temporary synchronicity. However, the performers notably pay no attention to the audience.

Does the piece address or take care of the audience in another way?

AC: In the first sketched-out version of the piece, we overturned the stage. The audience was with us, sitting on the edge of the stage, and we used the tiers of metal seats as a sort of platform/relief. (The performance took place in Dro, Italy, at Centrale Fies.) This allowed us to eliminate the distance between the stage and the seating, and in particular to invite the audience to share our experience, and to feel they were with us. For me, that just meant saying, “Come along to our terrain.” I don’t see the audience as part of the story we’re telling, and I don’t feel I have to pay them any particular attention. They’re witnesses of the narration, which I don’t regard as a problem. A concern for the audience, to my mind, means ensuring that they accompany us into what we narrate, not necessarily engaging in a direct relation with them. I’ve heard people saying, “I’d really like to be you. I’d like to be part of what you’re doing.” For me it’s great, this desire to be with us; with our gestures and actions.

ALLG: Yes, the audience isn’t the only object of our attention. We have internal challenges. They circulate. And the audience is caught up in these trajectories. But they’re not given any special or preferential treatment. Some of our actions seem to be aimed at the audience, others don’t. It’s not quantified in advance. We act the way we feel. My impression is that the attention we pay to the audience is generated elsewhere. It’s worked out in the “missing part” of relations. The missing part is what you don’t understand, what evades you. And, almost automatically, your mind fabricates it – a bit like when you tell somebody about a dream, and you fill in the gaps in your memory to make the story plausible, without even being aware that you’re inventing things. A concern for the audience, then, means giving them enough space to occupy the clefts and fissures in the narratives, even if it means they go off elsewhere and join us later.

6/ Fluidity or softness – the promises of a community to come?

AF: The performers fluidly share the stage. As already mentioned, they co-exist peacefully and pay discreet attention to one another. Their rhythms are different, as are their languages. They are together, but each one for themselves. Perhaps as if an assumed solitude would be the secret of a community to come. Towards the end of the performance the four performers are sitting in a circle, but not really facing each other. Two of them are in dialogue. Their temporary community disintegrates again at the end. Without any drama, without any sadness. Until the next conversation. DUCTUS MIDI sets up another mode of relationship between bodies, objects, time and space, involving freedom and reciprocity as well as embracing otherness and difference. The fluidity – of characters, bodies, space, time, relationships – has nothing to do with the fluidity promised by neoliberalism, where mobility, adaptability, and self-improvement are the agents of soft-control, and the catalysts of flexibilisation and deregulation.

What kind of fluidity do you put yourself in in the piece? What does it allow?

AC: A fluid’s neither solid nor dense. It flows easily, and adapts to any substrate. This is an important subject in DUCTUS MIDI. And it might make you see the video otherwise, with dripping forms at the end… You can feel a sort of fluidity between us, I think, because there’s a real questioning about “how to be together”. And here, Anne Lise plays an important role. She’s a carer, an exponent of communality and of being at ease with others. So if this fluidity between us runs through the piece, it also runs through the creative process. At no point is anything rigid or static. Nor have any roles been attributed. When I came into the frame, at the start, Anne Lise said I could occupy whatever place I wanted, and we soon found ourselves writing the project together. Things work out better when the choreographer-performer relationship isn’t directive. Each seeks out a place (in the work, in the piece, on stage), with gestures and methods, and what they want to bring back, in a place that’s fluid for the person in question. It makes sense to hear you describing each person’s solitude. For me, a common space is welcoming when individualities are respected, and when there’s both distance and closeness.

AF: Soft and elastic materials are recurring in the performance. Is softness a better characterisation than fluidity? Or plasticity? [3]

ALLG: Hmm, yes. The thing is that we had to stay FLEX among ourselves. We began by allowing desires to pour out. We trusted one another. In principle, we blocked nothing. We didn’t have a well-defined objective. There was an analogy with water, given that we drifted along together, with some things floating and others sinking. We talked a lot, and doubt was always present. I really trusted Katerina, Arthur and Christophe. And we gave great importance to SOFT physical matter – anything that wasn’t a definite object, and didn’t have a “primary” function. We began with clay, and a potter’s wheel. Then Arthur brought along this fantastic plastic (thermoplastic) material on which he’d already done some work. So, the adjective “ductile” wasn’t premeditated, but the idea was just right. Fluidity, softness and plastic are, paradoxically, our foundations, because they open up possibilities for manoeuvrings, tweakings, manipulations, and therefore a certain kind of free will – localised emancipation. We said to ourselves, “At this point, I’m in total DUCTUS!”

AC: Plasticity, in Catherine Malabou’s definition, corresponds to what we were saying: “The main thing is to be agitating, fashioning and wanting not to freeze up or arrive at a result.” Above all, let’s not be concerned with achieving results, which are illusory as objectives. In the first version of the project, there was a potter’s wheel on the stage. It was soon replaced by the thermoplastic material, with all its aesthetic and practical qualities. But the way we used it was interesting. We didn’t want to make bowls, sculptures or vases, just to familiarise ourselves with the technical, sensorial and gestural characteristics required by the use of the wheel. I loved that. It was really relaxing. On stage, the only relation we had with it was manipulation. At no point did we hold up or exhibit a form we felt to be complete/final. The clay went round, and sometimes it veered off-centre and broke apart. So we put it back on the wheel and recentred it. We talk about this in a dialogue at the end of the piece. Centring clay is something, hmm, quite existential, in a sense… The idea of plasticity and transformation that takes precedence over “fixity”, as Catherine Malabou puts it, relates to the wet clay going round, with your hands on it. This is the “T” moment of transformation: pressure, caress, tension of the fingers, palms, nails – these are production factors. It’s a purely formal moment. I think that the concept of softness, and of elastic materials, is important to us, in that it represents a potentiality. What’s soft can be transformed, or it can come into being. Softness, in a sense, is a promise of movement.

AF: Thank you!

ALLG, AC: Thank you!!!

[1] Take me off to swipe litres of vodka-coco; Don’t stop I want to drown in it; Don’t bother I never take a number; Train without your iPhone see you in the zone
[2] engl: Joghurt – “yaourt” language could be translated as “gibberish”
[3] “Plasticity is the fact that change comes before being. It is not that, to begin with, there is a fixed identity, then transformations. Rather, transformation takes precedence over fixity, which calls into question a certain number of things in philosophy itself. This means that shaping comes before being.” (Catherine Malabou in the podcast “les chemins de la philosophie” by france culture from  14.12.018 )

Anne Faucheret (geb. 1981 in Frankreich) ist Kuratorin und Kunstkritikerin. Sie arbeitete u. a. im Palais de Tokyo (Paris), im Museum Ludwig (Köln), im Grazer Kunstverein, und beim steirischen herbst. Sie ist seit 2014 an der Kunsthalle Wien tätig, wo sie u. a. folgende Ausstellungen kuratierte: The Promise of Total Automation (2016), Work it, feel it! (Vienna Biennale 2017) oder Hysterical Mining (Vienna Biennale 2019, zusammen mit Vanessa Joan Müller).