Suspended Sculptures

- Pierre Giquel -

 

‘I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.’

Arthur Rimbaud

 

If I’m borrowing from Rimbaud one of his Illuminations, one of his mordant and inconsolable poems, it is perhaps in order to better hide myself behind a delicious and rare proposition that is as much visual as it is audio and plastic, drawing on my memory and body, an adventure that I’m complicit with from the outset. Because I never forget that the work of Cécile Le Talec orchestrates the thousands of fragments of a unique experience – the legendary, secret silhouette of the world. And that she addresses me at the very moment when she escapes from understanding, from the spirit of logic. The artist-sculptor continually plays with categories and boundaries. In both the literal and the figurative sense, she revolutionizes the status quo with surprising rigour. With great precision, she testifies to flaws, follies, and disorders.

 

For CLT, the artist’s studio is vast. This is why she seems to set no limits for herself; she would go looking everywhere, sometimes in the most hostile or improbable of lands, now with the beginnings of a radical enlightenment, and now, a sense of persistence. The materials that she finds are often the stuff of miracles. The miracle of encounters fuelled by perpetual research, sustained knowledge that never contradicts access to the strange, to shocks, to rarities. It is a question of welcoming and capturing worlds that are most probably doomed to disappear.

 

CLT became interested in the perceptive qualities of sound from the 1990s on, perpetually questioning spaces through sound. The voice also intrigues and even rattles her. A little over ten years ago, when she evoked the origins of her interest in the voice – and it’s now possible to say voices – she spoke of a ‘magical coincidence’, but she would never muzzle this adjective within an irrational perspective, quite the contrary. She discovered whistled language through an acoustics engineer, who, in the 1950s, had recorded two shepherds in the Valley of Aas who communicated to one another despite the distance separating them. She questioned linguists, phoneticians, and enquired at universities. Scientific support thus backs up this artwork founded on exhilarating research and discovery of the real.

 

CLT very quickly felt the need to physically explore the sites where these voices were found. With her partner, armed with a map and a few pieces of information, she went to look (virtually in the dark) for any sign of life of these cultures that verge on the prelinguistic, or that sometimes occur parallel to language, as languages that are solely transmitted orally. She records, films, and photographs. Language is her treasure. Make no mistake: these ‘mirror languages’ (based precisely on the musical and melodic dimension of a langue) are not codes, they are languages. In the light of these discoveries, it must be concluded that they may constitute an attempt by humankind to imitate birdsong.

 

The ‘Language of Angels’ (or Enochian language) and Shamanic practices thus also formed a part of the discoveries that were to permeate the works, containing a dark and mysterious dimension alongside the more visible and audible shocks. For CLT, the exploration was very slow, the search for a voice remained fraught and its echo was still approximate. Then all of a sudden the curtain opened: the light was blinding. When she met Professor Busnel, specialist in whistled languages, he was 99 years old. He admitted he had never found these languages in China, articulated by minorities who, from the 1960s onwards, found themselves in isolated parts of the country that condemned them to die out. CLT left for the province of Guizhou, in Central China, in 2006. Accompanied by a guide, she and her friend roamed villages and mountain ranges. CLT said that she felt ‘projected into a wash, a drawing. With shades of grey, we are really inside the ink.’ They met a young woman who had learned to whistle with her grandmother, in the caves. CLT wrote a text, recorded and directed the film Inverse, which lasts around fifteen minutes in its edited form. When she returned to Europe, the film became a score. For an exhibition, she made glass instruments that threatened to explode at any moment. She places, arranges, applies, and displaces, without composing.

 

She does not claim to be a musician. When she lends herself the skills of a composer, a singer, or a musician, she never forgets the exploratory dimension of her sculptural work. It is not a matter of competing with musical writing, as in the early days with literary writing. She is not a filmmaker either. She traverses media, which may only be created for the occasion. They are discreet, seemingly offered only for the experience – which I nearly qualified as ‘total’, and which is just as secretive. I have referred to her work as a great delight and rarity. The artworks – and this term seems almost out of place or outmoded – are clearly present, but it is as though they were insisting on evading and making room for the essentials. It will always be difficult, or even impossible, to name what crops up when everything has been settled and disjointed. Because these sounds, gestures, objects, images, films, drawings and photographs seem to only have been convoked in order to create a confrontation: a striking and very nondecorative one. Familiar and forgotten. Extinct and reborn.

 

This rebirth is conveyed in all kinds of ways. Gaining access to the most fragile aspects of humanity, visitors find themselves listening in to worlds. The earth remains approximate, like the place where they stand, between sounds, languages, listening but also remaining active,

sometimes choosing to write in their turn on the score that is proposed to them.

 

CLT powerfully affirms: ‘What I love: hearing languages that I don’t understand. When I understand, I don’t hear the music.’ What could be interpreted as a provocation appears to me to be just the opposite: a statement motivated by a very beautiful gesture of humility. We reach adulthood only through the fragments of uncertain thought, and the best aspects find themselves at the fine tips of our fingers, at the point where there are no limits, where the works in its pretention is finally exiled, allowing us to freely occupy a territory that we never even suspected was there, before witnessing one day its existence, development, and unfolding.

 

Le Salon de Musique creates a new order and shakes up a number of hypotheses. I came to lose myself. To lose even my name. And to work. To take pleasure, as well. Art is a wonderful fencing match. I’m not there to consummate something, but to measure myself against living surfaces, at the risk of fading away. Creating echoes. Provoking an echo, while knowing that nothing proves that it will exist in the following second.

 

But I cherish that second more than any other. In the same way that I cherish the acoustic wave that radiates far beyond the path it travels. The path that also formulates it. Complicity is murmured in the displacement of the wind covered by the birds that split the air and splinter the space, in a breath. The landscape, annihilated, recomposes itself in its own casual rhythm. Is this what art should always be? Or poetry.