I was almost grown up when I read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and that was so much the better since I like to discover things. Like many readers before me, I could easily imagine myself falling under the spell of this adventure story, but I did not think that this bildungsroman – or perhaps I should say this obvious crystallization – would come to mind at the precise moment that my preoccupations brought me in contact with altogether less expansive features than those of the famous sailor. In fact, I was really fascinated (and remain fascinated) by those fictional characters caught in the labyrinth of Negation, so easily spotted once you have identified the best known ones, chief among them being Bartleby the scrivener.

It took the context of a residency in the Lot, with eight artists, to give me the idea of making a connection between the notion of inertia – which I had in fact studied and thought about since reading a classic of 19th-century Russian literature, Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov about the famously inert aristocrat – and the adventures of a solitary man on an island, whose existence hangs on physical proximity to the daily demands of productivity and efficiency.

This extraordinary period of three months in the village of Les Arques was ultimately a new way of defining the word ‘inertia’ as a state of ‘continuous variation’ and, thanks to this personal fantasy, of approaching artistic creation from the most varied and variable angles, ranging from dismal sterility to creative power.

This book was made on my return from this life close to nature and the exhibition that resulted from it. Images and text reconstruct part of this human adventure, the rest is in the books. For what this particular book accepts is the fact that a personal adventure is never as personal as you think; it must always be shared and form part of what has already been said, with the thinking of Lane, Thoreau, Stevenson, along with Defoe’s Crusoe, Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp, Georges Perec’s Man Asleep, Gombrowicz’s Princess of Burgundy and many others.

Cécilia Becanovic

date

July 2011

language

• English
• French

designer

• deValence

format

180mm × 270mm

pages

80 pages

ISBN

9782917855188

themes

• Contemporary art