While I was also listening [...]

While I was also listening to Felicia Atkinson, Julien Bismuth and Yann Sérandour telling stories about artworks and exhibitions, I wanted to invite them to come and share at La Criée.

Yann’s a long-time Rennes resident, Felicia moved here a year ago, and Julien lives in New York. All three of them travel a lot. Julien and Yann were born in the 1970s and Felicia a little later. We started out by discussing narrative, orality, rumour, multiple points of view, exhibitions we hadn’t seen but had been told about. One of us mentioned Paul Ricoeur and his open-ended definition of narrative, which ties it not to a fixed form but to a relationship with time. Felicia, Julien and Yann enjoy being told stories and enjoy telling them. Somebody else found the title of the series. It comes from the American poet and performer David Antin, from one of his talk poems and their blend of improvisation and narrative, anecdote and philosophy, poetry and action. Felicia, Julien and Yann are inventors, activators and remixers of stories. So we opted for constructing a subjective, polyphonic narrative, one addressing the question of our relationship with books, statements and enunciation. We wanted to write a shared story, invented by some people then told by others, listened to by others still and then transformed by some of them. We wanted to develop narratives of real or imaginary exhibitions, using deliberately multiple, experimental temporal and spatial frameworks, ranging from publications to concerts and performances, fables and essays. Felicia, Julien and Yann like to invite other artists to work with them. And then we simply decided that each of us would have a solo show and that there would also be two group shows to bookend the series. The list of artists for these exhibitions is still a secret, but among others we were thinking of David and Eleanor Antin, Mark Geffriaud, Mariana Castillo Deball, Simon Starling and Zin Taylor. Felicia, Julien and Yann are going to set up an office at La Criée as their workshop within the exhibitions. In addition to the exhibitions we’ll invite other storytellers for concerts, talks, discussions and off-site projects. We’ve already asked, Élise Ladoué, Stephane Ginsburgh, Camille Bondon and Clémence Estève. And we’ll be celebrating a birthday: the Centre Pompidou is turning forty, and we’ll be running experiments in the Kandinsky Library there. Things will wind up with a book telling this story and building up on it.

Célia Houdart, Le Scribe et un sphinx (The Scribe is a sphinx)

the futuristic short story by Célia Houdart about the cycle, While I was also listening [...]