Les Rêveurs 2
Curation: Sandra Patron
April 21 - May 19, 2001
Galerie Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille
Marseille, April 20, 2001
Dear Virginie,
I hear you’re very busy. I hesitated a lot before writing to you, I wouldn’t want to disturb you. I also fear they might intercept my mail. With them I’ve learned to be wary.
I know you don’t want to hear about this story anymore. When we run into each other by chance at an opening, we get drunk, we laugh, but we never talk about it. There is that veiled shadow in our eyes, don’t pretend you haven’t noticed. I’m scared, Virginie. I refuse to go on pretending nothing ever happened. I want all this to end. That thing is here, so close to me, in Marseille. And there are so many of them.
The first time too in Nantes, I was afraid, yes really afraid [1]. It was night. I’m afraid of the night. There was this man. Probably a hitman, some kind of shady agent paid to do their dirty work. He had a gun I think, I couldn’t see clearly, there was only the sickly glow of the streetlights. Everything was so blurry, so confused, I ran like never before. I felt pain in my right arm, a sensation of being thrown forward, then throbbing, a deep and persistent pain. I clenched my teeth. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I didn’t want to feel anything.
I had to slow down because of my injury. He ran too fast, I couldn’t do anything. He grabbed me with such force that we both fell, his massive and disgusting body crushing mine. He pulled me up from the ground by my hair. I wished he would just die there, in front of me. I was thrown into an American car, it sped off. From the car door, I saw there were witnesses.
Of course I never should have gone to that meeting. It smelled like trouble. At 7 p.m. in the middle of winter, on the abandoned docks of Île Beaulieu, in a place like that only bad things can happen. Claire had convinced me to go, she’s always for reconciliation Claire, and very persuasive at that. After that, everything is a blur, the car ride, not very friendly, their questions I didn’t understand, then the fog, thicker and thicker, I gave in to it with delight, like finding an unexpected way out at the end of a long dark hallway.
When I woke up, I was in the hospital, a few bruises, nothing serious, just a memory loss that had short-circuited my brain,
The shock as the doctors say.
I left the apartment on Rue Kervégan. I found a job in Marseille. It’s funny, all my life I believed that by putting a thousand kilometers between my problems and myself, they would vanish like magic.
You were very present at that time. We would talk on the phone for hours and you would tell me stupid jokes that made me laugh. You said it would blow over, that I shouldn’t worry, so that’s what I did. I met great people in Marseille. I found laughter again, and dancing at night in bars.
When I read that article about that horrible man, Bill Turston [2], a new kind of serial killer, it set off alarms in my head. He killed obese people, removed their skin and used the material to create artworks he sold for a fortune. You were in Marseille and you laughed about it, called me paranoid. One of Turston’s victims wore big, flashy, ridiculous rings, it’s rather strange, isn’t it?
Apparently after that, the paranoia became collective. When Jim called me from Glasgow at 3 a.m., he was truly terrified, and of course completely high on his nightly line. He had seen something unbelievable lying there, ridiculous and disturbing, and next to it the infamous tape, you watched it I think [3]. No need to tell you Jim wasn’t feeling reassured. The whole gang was in Glasgow at that time, Guillaume and Claire, and Patrice too. Hard to believe now that it was all just coincidence, don’t you think?
Yes, you think about it. We all think about it so much it makes us want to scream.
So I refused to see the signs, laid out in the crime sections of four newspapers, all those bodies scattered throughout the city [4]. There was nothing to worry about, after all that sort of thing happens every day in Marseille, a few score-settlings between rival gangs, nothing more.
Nothing, except this fear slicing through my gut.
And then back to Nantes, with that dramatic incident in the window of the Beaux-Arts school [5]. The firefighters, the night, the terror in the city, the front page of the newspapers. The journalists thought it was a hoax. They’re really good at that, making us believe none of this is real.
Now for me it’s too much. That thing is here in Marseille. That multitude of things, to be more precise [6].
Oh of course Peggy keeps telling me they seem calm, floating, silent, lifeless and without purpose, as if waiting for some unknown conclusion.
They don’t look at me but I know they see me.
Please, I beg you, call me as soon as possible at 06 13 25 88 7X (I’ve changed my number…).
Sandra
1. Enlèvement, Nantes, 1999
2. Pulp, nouvelle policière, Edition de la goutte au nez, 1998
3. Oh! Margie!, Tramway, Glasgow, 2000
4. Pulp, Astérides, galerie Friche de la Belle de Mai, 1998
5. Agence Help, galerie de l’ERBAN, Nantes, 2001
6. Les rêveurs, Triangle France, galerie Friche de la Belle de Mai, 2001
Text by Sandra Patron in the edition related to the exhibition.
