cartographies 2. a terrible wind blows there

2015, HD video (3 min 10), sound

I recite until getting breathless the poem “Je suis né troué” (“I was born full of holes”), extracted from Henri Michaux’s book Ecuador (1929). The video shows the different attempts to declaim until the end of each stanza without breathing in while exhaling cigarette smoke, restarting each stanza in the same manner. In the montage, the takes of six successive attempts were superimposed so that the profile opens out, multiplies and the voices mount on each other, forming a kind of 6-voice polyphony.

This work is part of the series: “cartographies”.