An incomplete, subjective and partial thematic

Gunther Ludwig

 

Aleatory

Accident, margin of error, encounter, mathematics, uncertain, event, chance, statistic, bet, useless, uplifting!

 

Library

Experimentation is like a library of ideas or projects – all that remains to be done and to decipher, not to capture. It is important to always place yourself in this position of not understanding, which gives you a much more interesting perception of the world. This amounts to being in a library, where we find ourselves faced with far more books that we haven’t read than those we have. It gives us vertigo, such a horizon of possibility, which we only see the back of...

 

Sky

It is space, infinite nature, represented by a sphere, a recurrent motif in the work of Cécile Le Talec, in which visible and invisible stars evolve. It is the vault that we are placed beneath, a permanent expanse, a force, a field of action that is almost palpable. The sky is also the experience of the wind, clouds, rain, sun, and tangible atmospheric parameters in the perception of works of art.

 

Body

To form one body with space and architecture. They are not designed as receptacles, but are occupied, like a resonating chamber, a percussive cask that ampli es the currents captured both inside and outside. Space and architecture are musical, physical, and metaphorical tools.

 

Availability

The works solicit a state of perception in the spectator, reader, and listener that renders them avail- able to the world and attuned to its song.

 

Writing

Revisiting the various levels of spoken, whistled, written, sung and mimed language by finding a different form of writing, a plastic form, in order to create a dialogue, a kind of (im)possible equivalency.

 

Fragment

A part seized by the artist in order to set it into the orbit of a much vaster system containing these fragments, arranged according to a particular logic. A kind of dematerialisation of the visible world in order to arrive at a kind of convergence.

 

Gesamtkunstwerk

The total work of art! A concept created in the nineteenth century, instigated by Wagner. For Cecile Le Talec, beyond the result, it is a question of desire, a utopia. It is unsurprising that opera is associated with this, as the possibility of an ultimate form in which things find themselves restored within a communal time and space.

 

Heterotopia

‘There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites [...] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places […]. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror.’*

 

Hypothesis

Word that refers to ‘experience’, ‘laboratory’, ‘test’, ‘potentiality’. Supposition consists of a probability, which must be verified. But there are also propositions based on scraps of knowledge, which, once combined, manage to provide a plausible explanation. Forming a hypothesis is like being in a position of ignorance that yearns to sense and imagine.

 

Kaleidoscopic

The work of art suggests an encounter between heterogeneous bodies, the consideration of free alterities that are juxtaposed. Temporary proximity possibly creates a third form of encounter, which is kaleidoscopic in nature since it is shifting.

 

Kiosk

A minimal and modular architecture that composes and recomposes itself at will; open, closed, laid-out flat… A structure that is part public and part private space, which receives the sounds of natural flows and acts like the musical kiosk of the environment in which it is presented.

 

Book

The artworks, which are autonomous, form a kind of brain-repository, a space in which all of these structures of meaning that are inevitably related yet isolated can be brought together. It is like in a book, where page 42 could never be next to page 2 – yet its content exists in relation to the other page. Both pages exist together within the same object, the same thought, but under no circumstances can they merge. There is not necessarily a particular order in which to read the works. The reader will have read them one after the other, alternately, even when they remain physically fused within the space that the book-object represents.

 

Music

What we do not understand allows us to listen to the music of languages (untranslated, unknown) and not to search for meaning, but to remain in a state of ‘ignorance’. In terms of the artistic process, it is possible to find an overall system of harmony in the music of things once we do not have a deep knowledge of the subject. In this way, we are free of external contingencies. The works present this multifarious music to the eyes and ears.

 

Black

Black, which does not emit or reflect any visible light, is inseparable from white, which comprises all visible rays. It is its opposite, its flipside, but also its complement in this plastic world in which the rest of the color spectrum is virtually absent.

 

Score

All for one and one for all. Thinking about the place, about progression within the space, the interaction of plastic propositions made from sounds, sculptures, and images, like a form of writing that shapes a composition. Each ‘voice’, each ‘instrument’, together or apart, reflects the coherency of the assembled ‘staves’.

 

Quest

The result of a fascination for that which is incomprehensible and indescribable, but also for an exploration towards a treasure, the mystery of language and speech. When we arrive before an extraordinary landscape, when we experience something that is hard to describe, we can be both fascinated and at a loss for words, all at once. Fascination allows us a different point of view, fuelled by the path and the unforeseen alternative routes we’ve taken.

 

Research

‘The set of actions and efforts undertaken to acquire and obtain something, or approach it.’ (Source: CNRTL). It is therefore the act of gathering the impossible, a way of being immersed within a vast ensemble of things that we do not understand or know.

 

Spectator

Research is not only involved for the artist. It is also a programme offered to the spectator – the term preferred to that of ‘visitor’ – who must meet the artist partway. Spectators undertake a displacement, level by level, and end up in front of the landscape, facing the overflowing of elements reinfected into the works. It is the visitor’s body that must be intently watchful, and which, through the complimentary posters provided, will leave again, disseminating the exhibition and taking it elsewhere.

 

Carpet / Garden

Two microcosmic ‘places’, elements with parts connected to the interplay of transcriptions that the work invites us to explore: ‘The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its centre [...]. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity […].’*

 

Vector

It is the artist, that is the one who carries and transports something. The artworks are his/her extension. The spectators are its revelators. Two extremities in which a relationship (sometimes) operates.

 

Wind / Zephyr

A breeze blows on the scale of the panorama, the kind that causes the bell to strike high up in the tower, the kind that fuels proactive artworks, the kind that transmits the bass and treble frequencies that draw figures in the sand of Tapis Symphonique, the kind that participate even in Salon de Musique, and the kind that interrelates birdsong and human vocal chords.

 

* From ‘Of Other Spaces’, conference by Michel Foucault – 1967, in Michel Foucault,

Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n° 5, 1984, pp. 46-49.