My Installation « Mille oiseaux messagers de la Paix » is now part of UNESCO’s Patrimonial collection.

Detail of my installation « Mille oiseaux messagers de la Paix », Executive Committee Hall, UNESCO. My birds of Peace are now part of UNESCO’s Patrimonial collection.

I am very proud to share with you this exceptional moment. I was born in Uruguay and from this 23th October, my installation « Mille oiseaux messagers de la Paix » is part of UNESCO’s Patrimonial collection, representing my native country.

General Director of UNESCO Audrey Azoulay, Alejandra de Bellis, Uruguay Ambassador at UNESCO and myself during the speeches.

I was very happy to be able to share this beautiful moment with Prof. Tim Mathews. I worked with him on the artistic project « Translation, Transcription, Oulipian Art from French to English » when I was in Residence at UCL French Department with a Leverhulme fellowship. As the reader knows this blog records the way my project progressed and the artwork I realised for it.

With Prof. Timothy Mathews at the Executive Committee Hall, on the day of the inauguration, UNESCO Paris

La littérature en Jeu(x), The 2015 exhibition at the Arsenal Library – the Clip

An important exhibition about OULIPO took place at the Arsenal Library in Paris, from November 18^th 2014 to February 15^th 2015. It was organized by Mmes Claire Lesage, head of the manuscripts in this library and Camille Bloomfield, OULIPO specialist and researcher at the OUTRANSPO. They were the curators of this exhibition.

It was a huge opportunity of better knowing the history of this group and all the OULIPO’s activities. I could interview Mmes Lesage and Bloomfield as part of my own project about OULIPO’s texts and their translation in English. I want to thank them here for their kindness and generosity with their time.

This exhibition allowed me to extend my research about the materiality of writing. The conversations with the two curators gave me another point of view, different from the one developed by the Oulipo writers I also interviewed.

I am deeply grateful to Mme Claire Lesage who made it possible for me to bring a camera at the bibliothèque de l’Arsenal outside the exhibition opening hours. Now that this remarkable exhibition is closed I am very happy this document exists and allows those who could not visit get an idea of what it looked like.

I hope you’ll enjoy it and find it useful.

Jackie Pigeaud on Théroigne’s last letter: the clip

My project on the Oulipo led me to unexpected discoveries, and one of the most inspiring was undoubtedly the letter Théroigne wrote to the French revolutionary Danton in 1801 from the asylum – seven years after his death- and the beautiful text Jackie Pigeaud wrote about it.

Théroigne’s letter of art resonates with my own research on so many points. What “happens” there in terms of lisibility/illisibility, the line and the stroke, the voids and the full, the bloches, is for me properly fascinating.

Hervé Le Tellier : Clip from the interview

My series of interviews with Oulipian writers closes with Hervé Le Tellier. In these interviews I was especially interested in two topics: materiality and translation. What strikes me now, after going again through the six films I shot, is how diverse the approach of the writers are, something I didn’t anticipate. I believe I was expecting them to share the same views on these subjects and that the Oulipian philosophy or method would have provided them with a common set of believes.

Olivier Salon : Clip from the interview

Olivier Salon

When I went to interview Olivier Salon, I knew I was meeting an Oulipian writer and an actor, but I had no idea I would also find myself in front of a translator! It was fascinating to hear Olivier explain how he understood his work as an actor as an experience in translation from a written text into spoken language. In the following video, he talks about the difficulties he faced as an actor and also as an Oulipian who understands the subtleties of the text when he was rehearsing for a theatrical adaptation of Georges Perec’s famous “W”.

Ian Monk : Clip from the interview

Today I am posting a clip from my interview with Ian Monk, a British Oulipo writer and a translator.

I was especially happy that he accepted to come to my place after a long flight from Canada to talk about his practice, as it was a unique occasion to talk to a member of the Oulipo who actually writes in the two languages I was exploring for the project and who also is a translator of Oulipian texts from the French to the English.

As he explains here in a very tongue-in-cheek way, Ian initially wrote only in English but after many years living in France, he decided to start writing in French too. He even has a work in both languages now.

Marcel Benabou : Clip from the interview

I am especially happy to post today this clip from Marcel Benabou’s interview. He is Oulipo’s provisional in perpetuity and in perpetuity provisional secretary and he was the first of the Oulipian writers to be so kind as to answer my questions. I am utterly grateful for that!

Marcel Benabou gives here important insights into his writing process. He explains what materiality of the text means to him and he describes his work with words. He actually handles words as objects, turning them in all directions, and simultaneously plays with the meaning of words and of the letters that form them.

Fournel Workshop in Pau University

This 27th April, a workshop took place at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour to celebrate Paul Fournel and I had the pleasure to present there for the first time the complete version of my interview of Fournel.

The title chosen by the organizers, Mmes Bérengère Moricheau-Airaud and Vanessa Loubet-Poëtte, was particularly appropriate: « Paul Fournel, goûteur de formes”, as Fournel has just published a booked inspired by his love of good food Le Bel Appétit.

The event was on the occasion of the literary award Prix Heptaméron, of which Paul Fournel was this year the president.

Frédéric Forte: Clip from the interview

As promised, here is the second clip from the interviews I made last winter in Paris.

I met Frédéric Forte as he had been working on the English edition of his collection of poems Opéras-Minute, published under the title Minute-Operas this January in the States. It’s after the publication of this book in France in 2005, that Frédéric was elected a member of the Oulipo.

Paul Fournel – Clip from the interview

As I already said in an earlier post, I had the great chance to interview several Oulipo writers for the project. I asked them about their relation with writing and the translations of their books, especially in English.

Here is the first clip from my interview of Paul Fournel, the président of the Oulipo. He discussed his novel, La liseuse, of which the English translation was published during my residency under the title Dear Reader. I was specially happy to have this English version, as it allowed me to put it in my corpus for the Translation Transcription, Oulipian Art from French to English project.