'CUZ WORDS
Performances and readings, organised by the duo feeelings (Anouchka Oler and Camille Gerenton)
As part of Anouchka Oler’s open studios, at Triangle France, supported by Wallonie-Bruxelles International.
Program :
Saturday, November 18, 2017:
2PM : Catalans’ beach, 13007 Marseille. Bus 81, 82, 82S, stop : Plage des Catalans.
Readings by Jane Fawcett and Cave Club guesting Eugénie Zély.
6PM : Studio 2Y1, 2nd floor Magasins, Friche la Belle de Mai, 41 rue Jobin, 13003 Marseille.
Performances by Simon Asencio and Eleanor Weber.
“A man plucked a nightingale and, finding but little to eat, said ‘You are just a voice and nothing more’.”
Plutarch, Moralia : Sayings of Spartans
If the first architecture we inhabit is most likely the body then the first tenant is invariably the voice. We are capable of welcoming many more. The five artists gathered this day have heard this. The various voices that they come across and collect are carefully scrutinised: from their roots to their echoes, their shiverings to their other fluids. They state the strengths and weaknesses of which they are made, the privileges and the disfavours, the power structures which animate them.
We have to think them over a few times before really understanding what words want to say. That is to say, to great depths. To delve into disruptive forces. But to imply that language is a passage also assumes that it slips.
Its presence in a body – namely the individual voice – is seized upon by these artists in an attempt to catch this slippery thing; this is the stake necessary to the articulation of what is passing through them.
Whoever comes with their own resources – intellect, desire, anger, translation or unease – invites multiple voices to make up the lines of force, vibrating, collective. These voices that penetrate, surround, inhibit or support us.
‘CUZ WORDS is a rough and ready translation into English of a throwaway line of Jacques Lacan’s (‘les mots par ce que’), taken from his seminal ‘On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge’; it might be alternatively – more accurately – translated as ‘by way of the words’.
We can imagine him, a sagging cigar in his hand, terrible eyes carried along by the intense stream of his dense speech, dismissing the crowd with a gesture, uttering these words with the authority of the Master: “LES MOTS PAR CE QUE.” And then, perhaps, a silence in the room?
