Diane Pigeau & Marlène Perronet - Tolga Taluy
April 10 – 2009
Diane Pigeau
Despite the introduction of a common basis for the Group Discussion (GD), i.e. Emilie Pischedda and Valentin Souquet’s interview, this GD has revealed several pitfalls, in terms of the understanding and articulation of its complexity, which had already been observed previously, such as in the difficulty of a discussion with six people.
Marlène Perronet
I could notice as a moderator that we might have failed in the way we had brought the subject: we maybe could have better explained our definition of this notion and the one Projet Diligence (PD) had given us. Indeed, if the definitions of “mapping” were quite clear from the start, we really constructed the one for “modeling”. We gave another meaning to something that was just, at least to me, a technical word.
DP
I suppose there were several data-inputs, both internal and external, which contributed to this feeling of failure. This feeling itself also involuntarily participates in the definition of modeling, in our session’s understanding of this term.
The fact of starting our GD from a conventional definition could have consequently bridled subsequent definitions from the invited members.
MP
Precisely, I think that, instead of inviting them to give one by one a definition, we should have matched up ours with the one of PD, and allow them to evolve.
DP
Modeling, as we understand it, is foremost a non-static system of representation which precisely considers failures. It’s a system in constant re-definition, re-presentation, therefore in movement, in regards to both the building of a common project based on individual statements and the process itself interrupted and re-altered at different levels. In our case, we composed our project first with the ending of Catherine David’s collaboration to the Lyon Biennale and then with the rejection by the Prefecture of two participants of Session 18’s residence permit in France. These two facts are in themselves quite new in regards to both the Biennales’ and l’Ecole du Magasin’s histories - not to forget to mention that the latter precisely found its fateful conclusion the day of our GD, and once again destabilizing the group.
MP
We, though, took this constraint (Marianna and Yun-In’s distance) as a chance to put into practice our relations to the media. Till now, the GDs were resulting from transcriptions of oral conversation or chats over Skype of people who were all in the same room: it was just a way for the group to communicate with the outside. When Marianna and Yun-In received the rejection letter for their residence permit, we had to figure out an effective “mediated” dialog with each other. Thus, we would communicate by “packets”, making an economy of messages. Unlike PD stuck in Nice, we are subjected to the unwished migration of a third of our effective colleagues and definitively have to integrate this constraint in our upcoming work process.
DP
What brings me to PD’s advancing the idea of protocol and how to get free, experiment inside it. Actually, we followed this same principle through Season18. The blog operates as a protocol of editing where propositions intertwine by both referencing to keywords (tags) and a subjective navigation of the Internet user who models their personal quest for meanings inside of this system having its own structure and logic. Their progression itself inside the blog can resemble to a “flânerie” (in the acceptation introduced by Walter Benjamin in Paris, Capitale du XIXème siècle) or Debord’s theory of the “dérive”.
I can see all of this - except your use of the constraint’s notion in the sense of “going against”. How does each constraint suggest a coherent response in order to achieve the aim. Indeed, we can see this common aspect in several respects in PD.
First of all, there was an original gap between their desire of departure, of nomadism, and the fact of getting a space which settled the project and gave it its form during four years. There, the travel was expressed with much more complexity than initially predicted, by the realization of an extravagant modular structure in wood, full-scale modeled. PD is the expression of a counteracted wish, which goes beyond in the form and which finally opens itself on a “rhizomatic” project following Deleuze and Guattari’s definition (in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia) handling with the one of “network”, we get back in touch with a utopian trip, a relational trip - as a social link engaged from the geopolitics of a town to the scale of Europe.
MP
PD say with humor that their experiment helped them to realize they would not have been happy as travelers, eventually locked in their bus in a nomad life that would not have fit to them. What interested them was not the ride by itself (the coach, as a mean of transport at the scale of Europe is obsolete) but the residency, the steps. I have a mental map of their trip accentuating those stages to their connections, zones (free of outlines) and thin lines, that could figure both mapping and networks. In addition to it, they even mentioned the notion of “aura”. Networks are not schematized as electric installations with wires and connections but lively, including zones of porosity, immaterial aspects.
DP
We find again a kind of similarity with the “aura”, as introduced by Walter Benjamin in the sense of fleeting trace, ritual (word also used by Valentin Souquet), immaterial instant and non-reproducible, the aura as “expression of a distance whatever its proximity”.
MP
To come again to our GDs, I believe this structure with six interlocutors could not work any longer. We soon faced our incapacity to bring a discourse together by finding a common language, define words and inter-react on them. PD chose to mix “collective” and “collaboration”. Their core stays the same but each project brings the possibility of new inputs from new collaborators. What is new in GD7 is the dislocation by cells of moderators simultaneously to the apparition of interlocutors from the outside whom interviews get brought by the above-mentioned cells to the other members. The structure of the discussions gets more complex and plural, though it aims to clarify its contents.
DP
It’s also a normal curatorial process with a mind to the final realization. We needed to confront ourselves with each other in the conceptual exploration phase.
Today, we are in a transitional phase. Our discourse, enriched as we go along by our individual researches, by encounters with artists, researchers and historians will finally allow to place a curatorial proposal where gathered artworks will make meaning.
MP
But we should not forget it is about an “abîme” of the group dynamic made by its fictionalization. These GDs are getting built, revised.
DP
But it always starts from reality, as “screenwritten” it can be.
PD generated a real scenario from its desire of departure, through the bus-modeling phase and to collaborative experiences and todays’ development of a book recounting these four years of adventure.
MP
Sure, but I could always find a kind of gap between the level of discourse of our individual posts – that were reflecting our quests of meaning – and our GDs, more spontaneous despite the editorial work. These were the echo of our means to react the one to the other. They would moreover show what everyone was willing to make public, speaking about a “mise-en-scene” of each one’s individuality among the others. If we wish to make our process visible, make our research readable, we still fictionalize it at some point.
I am thinking now to the link PD made between their first drawings, their 3D model (realized in order to make the project readable for the institution and get a budget), for which they would convoke the idea of “fiction” (these plans and models didn’t fit to their practice, their true way of working) on one hand and on the other, the work for a catalog, an archive, they wish now to start. I noticed several occurrences of “fiction” in their discourse, in order to describe any fictive, fake thing or event. “Modeling” as a text, a 3D model and the 1:1 scale model are as many “fakes” and the final result, a kind of chimera.
Besides, they evoke an activity they want unsustainable. They want to “build a scenario destined to the others”, a kind of projection, a work of architectural “abîme” inside of wild-lands (insisting on the potential of these vacant spaces), committing their own lexicon: they deal with an “evolutive scenography”.
