QUAND ILS PARLENT WHEN THEY SPEAK
This project aims to apprehend the relationship between performativity and political expression, through a theoretical and practical exploration
of political speeches performed in public space.
I consider any speech-act as a performance, and try to highlight how they function, affect the audience, or else, to cite John L. Austin's book, “How to do
things with words”. Performativity, both in a linguistic and artistic sense, is the keyword of my questioning. Assuming that every speech is an answer, to another speech, to an event, to
a situation, I bring together discourses produced by the mainstream politics as well as alternative contexts.
Online exhibition, Vapori, Visual Container art platform, April 2021
Comment dire...
(How to say...)
Which are the discourses that shape our world ?
How can other messages be heard?
How can we raise our voices?
Participative performance
Ongoing, residency at La Maison des Métallos, Paris, October 2023
With Lorraine Alexandre, Sorana Delhommeau, Jasmine de Montanier,
Claire Gillet-Burzynski, Antoine Pasquer
This participatory performance borrows from the codes of games. Seated in a circle on chairs, participants are assigned the roles of speaker, scribe, listener and other.
The idea is, on the one hand, to invite everyone to formulate and share a thought aloud, in public, in a setting that can be confronting but also reassuring (roles rotate); on the other hand, to emphasize active, reflective listening to the other participants.
Comment dire..., first steps.
Inter Actions laboratory, La Boutique Culturelle, with Boryana Todorova
Place du Conseil, Brussels, September 2022, April 2023
Interactive dispositive
This intervention aimed at (re)activating the Place du Conseil as a space
for speech and engagement. The square is a historic gathering place,
where the words of demands challenge the words of power.
Five questions give the passersby a chance to reflect about their possibilities for political expression and participation. Throughout the afternoon, the answers collected unfold to occupy the square floor.
It's also about paying attention to how we appropriate language. How our thoughts find their way through language, how we can shape it, embody it, then amplify it, circulate it; how we can feel legitimate to speak; how our subjectivity inhabits words; how our body and voice carry them.
Performance
Our aim is to open up a space for people to speak out in the public arena and make themselves heard. Here, we say, sing, shout and whisper. Using the principle of the exquisite corpse, we collect what people hold back or share in private to create collective discourse. A discourse we utter then loud in the square.
When they speak
A performance, in progress
Kunstenwerkplaats, 2023, Workspace Brussels, 2022
First try out at Jeux Isthmiques Festival, Paris, June 2021
/ Quand elles parlent
An attempt to engage my own body with issues such as embodiment, (re)enactment, and exposure.
A montage of written, uttered, readable and audible texts by Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, Sophie Wilmès, Bintou Touré (La Voix des Sans-Papier), Queen Elizabeth, Audrey Lorde, Las Tesis (Chilean feminist collective).
Questions arise, such as : who is speaking, where, how speeches respond to each other, what are the connections between the words, the orator and the context, and what happens if these connections are missing or twisted?
In residency, Workspace Brussels, 2022, Kunstenwerkplaats, 2023
When they speak... in Romania
Participants : Elena Ghioc, Eugen Matei, Dorin Minea, Răzvan Pascu, Veda Popovici, Elena Trifan.
Când vorbesc...
Research residency, Bucharest, April-June 2021
While discovering and mapping this new political landscape, I have connected with several political
actors and interviewed them.
I invited them to give a personal definition of a list
of chosen words. Through the mingling of their
answers, the diversity of their approaches and experiences towards engagement and public
expression appear.
Goodbuy Gallery
I have designed specific spaces and installations to make, create and share new experiences of listening, watching, and speaking, by placing the public in a participatory posture.
The speeches re-activated have been selected according to my investigations and own understanding of the political context of the city and the country. I have tried to hear and disclose plurality and contrasts, looking for voices and bodies carrying alternate narratives and discourses.
What we call violence...
France—Chile. 2018-2021.
Calling things by their names. Knowing what these names mean. Claiming the use of these names.
On July 28 2020, the French Minister of the Interior, pronounced a speech in which he refuted the existence and the very term of "police violence", under
the pretext that such violence would be "legitimate". He even dares to use the expression "I'm suffocating" to qualify his own sensation hearing this term.
He justifies his statement by mentioning Max Weber, who proposed a definition of the State, as a "human community, which within a determined territory (...)
claims for itself and succeeds in imposing the monopoly of legitimate physical violence".
This declaration has obviously been very criticized, because of the indecency of the words used, in relation to several victims of police violence who died by
suffocation and because of the abusive misinterpretation of Max Weber's words.
It is also a dangerous declaration because it is an intent of stealing language, the basic means of expression, of violating the right of people to name
facts, acts and experiences they need to report.
If police violence can’t be called violence, how do we call it, how do we make it known, how do we fight it?
The dictionary definitions are clear, there is no contradiction between the terms “violence” and “police”, or “violence” and “legitimate”, and no equivalence
between the terms “police” and “legitimate”. Legitimacy in this case cannot be a justification and even less a negation of acts of violence.
About 12.000 km away, in Chile, on November 2019, the feminist collective Las Tesis denounced loud and clear, acts of violence and rape, committed by the Police and tolerated or supported by the State.
Facts are called by their name, no euphemism in their words.
The strength of their performance Un violador en tu camino has crossed borders, reached a number of countries around the world, and is still
performed today.
Video de la cuenta Youtube del colectivo Las Tesis.
Lyrics of
Un violador en tu camino
Speech by G. Darmanin
"Quand j’entends le mot ‘violences policières’, moi, personnellement, je m’étouffe!
La police exerce une violence, certes, mais une violence légitime. C’est vieux comme Max Weber. Après, elle doit le faire de manière proportionnelle, elle
doit le faire de manière encadrée. Que quelques personnes le fassent en dehors des règles déontologiques: la sanction doit être immédiate.
Mais il est normal que les policiers et gendarmes soient armés, interviennent par la force, pour que justement la force reste à la loi de la République, et pas
à la loi des bandes ou des communautés.
Donc par principe, l’idée même de violence policière me paraît être totalement antinomique, d’utiliser ces deux mots, voilà. Il peut y avoir des dérives, qu’on
doit sanctionner, et je pense que le gouvernement les sanctionne et s’il le fait pas, il faut que la presse, les syndicats, les parlementaires rappellent évidemment, à la hiérarchie policière, au
ministre de l’intérieur, ce qu’ils doivent faire, et c’est bien légitime. Mais je ne pense pas qu’il faille comparer les violences."
A story of speech acts
Definitions. Larousse french dictionary.
Violence
nom féminin
Légitime
adjectif
Policier-ière
adjectif
"El patriarcado es un juez, que nos juzga por nacer
y nuestro castigo es la violencia que no ves.
El patriarcado es un juez, que nos juzga por nacer
y nuestro castigo es la violencia que ya ves.
Es feminicidio.
Impunidad para el asesino.
Es la desaparición.
Es la violación.
Y la culpa no era mía, ni dónde estaba, ni cómo vestía.
Y la culpa no era mía, ni dónde estaba, ni cómo vestía.
Y la culpa no era mía, ni dónde estaba, ni cómo vestía.
Y la culpa no era mía, ni dónde estaba , ni cómo vestía.
El violador eras tú.
El violador eres tú.
Son los pacos (policías).
Los jueces.
El estado.
El presidente.
El estado opresor es un macho violador.
El estado opresor es un macho violador.
El violador eras tú.
El violador eres tú.
Duerme tranquila niña inocente, sin preocuparte del bandolero,
que por tus sueños dulce y sonriente vela tu amante carabinero.
El violador eres tú.
El violador eres tú.
El violador eres tú.
El violador eres tú".
Brussels, April 5 2020. Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès.
Brussels, April 20 2020. Undocumented migrants protest. Rabia Benkh.
Brussels, June 7 2020. Black Lives Matter Demonstration. Bintou Touré.
Brussels, June 9 2020. Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès.
My practical approach consists in collecting video recordings of speeches, and re-activating them. By re-activation, I mean here, making visible and audible this speeches again, transposing them to different contexts and medium, including their re-enactment by other bodies and voices. The idea is to unravel the components of these verbal objects, and by shifting this components, improve their effects. I will focus on embodiment and enactment, considering the physical experience, that both receiving and delivering a speech implies, as a crucial aspect of its meaning and impact. I will wonder how voices are empowered, how words are uttered, how bodies are framed.
Un souvenir
Black Lives Matter demonstration. Brussels. June 9 2020.
In front of th City Court.
On a placard, I read : " I will use my voice to amplify yours".
It reminds me of the "human mic" used during protest movements like Occupy Wall Street (US) and Nuit Debout (FR).
When orators speak, people close to them repeat their sentences all together, so that people further away can hear them.
Since a few years, especially in the current post-quarantine context, we are assisting what seems to be a global political awakening. Many voices that remained un-audible, because of gender, class, or race issues, are raising. I decided to focus on the specific situation of Belgium, my residency country. From my collecting work, antagonistic figures arise, like the Prime Minister of the government, or the spokespersons of an illegal immigrants organization, both dealing with the Corona crisis. By confronting and commenting their speeches, I try to reflect on their impossible dialogue.
How to do things with words?
Currently, I am working on different forms of interactive installations that aim to re-activate a selection of speeches. They are based on audios, transcriptions and descriptions of video-recorded speeches, collected during and after the confinement between March and July 2020. The idea is to create the possibility of making the experience of these speeches in another context and situation, in an unusual embodied way. An invitation to hear, think and feel differently what is at stake in these speaking engagements.
I think of this bodily exploration of speeches, as a way of experiencing what can men do when they speak, beyond theoretical assumptions. I wish it might open a space for a creative and critical practice of listening, speaking, and engaging, for an encounter between poetical and political expressions, that are liable to empower each other.
It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.
For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality.
Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
What is public space?
Yellow : Undocumented migrants protest
Blue : Prime minister headquarter
While discourses of power are characterized by their uniqueness (body and location), discourses of protest are characterized not only by the plurality of bodies, but also of places. As if the multiplication of these "spaces of appearance" were the condition of this very appearance.
“the Polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and
speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.”
Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
When bringing together many speeches, produced both in the frame of state institutions or mainstream political parties, and in the frame of citizens associations or militant networks, the first thing that strikes is the contrast between bodies. On the one hand, single bodies, supported by a whole infrastructure, the media and financial means, on the other hand, collective bodies, supporting each other, creating their own means for visibility and audibility. If institutions representatives are hosted in dedicated spaces of expression, citizens and protestors have to conquer them.
In this context, concepts like speech-act or performativity, both originating from linguistics, can't be thought outside of social contexts.
Indeed, the performativity of speech-acts, depends on a lot of conditions that will allow them to be effective. And these conditions are not accessible to every
one.
Published in TYPP, the Yellow Press, Sint-Lucas, Antwerp, 2021.
The five people involved in this conversation are friends, part of what I have called my ‘talking constellation’. A constellation that started spreading questions and answers all around me in March 2020, turning into constant interpellation. These voices echo each other, directly or indirectly, through social networks, through my ears and eyes. The following text intended to share an insight into this constellation, bringing together some of these voices, their energy, tempo and velocity.
Just an echo...
How to reactivate words
that are not mine?
Can I reapeat them?
Can I reenact speeches of people speaking in their own name, whose reality is so different from mine?