After my visual essay and the exploration of telling story from found materials came summer, along with some great encounter. First this book that disturbed me. If on a winter’s night a traveler for Italo Calvino. A story that addresses you, the reader, who gradually becomes one of the characters in the story, which is itself made up of a thousand interlocking stories. A story of fragments, of superimposition, a puzzle.
(To begin. You’re one who said it, Ludmilla. But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race from a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest –for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both– must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.)
And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off this translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and starts reading. the second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on…
Many feelings distress you as you leaf through these letters. The book whose continuation you were already enjoying in anticipation, vicariously through a third party, breaks off again… Ermes Marana appears to you as a serpent who injects his malice into the paradise of reading… In the place of the Indian seer who tells all the novels of the world, here is a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remain suspended…
***
You look through the correspondence again seeking more recent news of the Sultana… You see other female figures appear and disappear:
in the island in the Indian Ocean, a woman on a beach “dressed in a pair of big dark glasses and a smearing of walnut oil, placing between her person and the beams of the dog days’ sun the brief shield of a popular New York magazine.” The issue she is reading publishes in advance the beginning of the new thriller by Silas Flannery. Marana explains to her that magazine publication of the first chapter is the sign that the Irish writer is ready to conclude contracts with firms interested in having brands of whisky appear in the novel, or of champagne, automobile models, tourist spots. “It seems his imagination is stimulated, the more advertising commissions he receives.” The woman is disappointed: she is a devoted reader of Silas Flannery. “The novels I prefer,” she says, “are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page…”
from the terrace of a Swiss chalet, Silas Flannery is looking through a spyglass mounted on a tripod at a young woman in a deck chair, intently reading a book on another terrace, two hundred meters below in the valley. “She’s there every day,” the writer says. “Every time I’m about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she’s reading? I know it isn’t a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space. I sit down at the desk, but no story I invent corresponds to what I would like to convey;” Marana asks him if this is why he is no longer able to work. “Oh, no, I write,” he answered; “it’s now, only now that I write, since I have been watching her. I do nothing but follow the reading of that woman, seen from here, day by day, hour by hour. I read in her face what she desires to read, and I write it faithfully.” “Too faithfully”, Marana interrupts him, icily. “As translator and representative of the interests of Bertrand Vandervelde, author of the novel that women is reading, Looks down in the gathering shadow, I warn you to stop plagiarizing it!” Flannery turns pale; a single concern seems to occupy his mind: “Then, according to you, that reader… the books she is devouring with such passion are novels by Vandervelde? I can’t bear it…”
in the African airport, among the hostages of the hijacking who are waiting sprawled on the ground, fanning themselves or huddled into the blankets distributed by the hostesses at nightfall, when the temperature dropped suddenly, Marana admires the imperturbability of a young woman who is crouching off to one side, her arms grasping her knees, raised beneath her long skirt to act as lectern; her hair, falling on the book, hiding her face; her hand limply turning the pages as if all that mattered were decided there, in the next chapter. “In the degradation that prolonged and promiscuous captivity imposes on the appearance and the behavior of all of us, this woman seems to me protected, isolated, enveloped as if in a distant moon…” It is then than Marana thinks: I must convince the OAP pirates that the book that made setting up their whole risky operation worthwhile is not the one they have confiscated from me, but this one that she is reading…
in New York, in the control room, the reader is soldered to the chair at the wrists, with the pressure manometers and stethoscopic belt, her temples beneath thein crown of hair held fast by the serpentine wires of the encephalogram that mark the intensity of her concentration and the frequency of stimuli. “All our work depends on the sensitivity of the subject at our disposal for the control tests: and it must, moreover, be a person of strong eyesight and nerves, to be subjected to the uninterrupted reading of the novels and variants of novels as they are turned out by the computer. If reading attention reaches certain highs with a certain continuity, the product is viable and can be launched on the market; if attention, on the contrary, relaxes and shifts, the combination is rejected and its elements are broken up and used again in other contexts.” The man in the white smock rips off one encephalogram after another, as if they were pages from a calendar. “Worse and worse,” he says. “Not one novel being produced holds up. Either the programming has to be revised or the reader is not functioning.” I look at the slim face between the blinders and the visor, impassive also because of the earplugs and the chin strap that keeps the jaw from moving. What will her fat be?
Calvino, I. If on a Winters Night a Traveler, p. 95-97.
My prompt was to make a 52 pages book and I wondered: How fragment can come together to create a story? I’ve collected things, made research.
And then, as I was once again inspired by materials of all kinds, I began by saying to myself that the best way to relate them visually in the book would be to draw, using illustration as a means of re-appropriation but also to put all those informations on an equal footing. I saw this project as an excuse to write and experiment with my way of illustrating things.
What’s the story ? What’s the content that you want to explore ?
I didn’t really know and was afraid of mine own shadow. My subject was too broad: fragment could be anything and everything. What did I want to tell? Frustrated I’ve made few terrible drawings (here is an extract).
And others, listening to podcasts about Adrianna Willis work which undoubtedly inspired me a lot. Not least in my subsequent desire to understand the importance of the audience I was addressing.
ADRIANNA WALLIS – THE READERS
Adrianna Wallis wondered about the fate of lost letters, those that could not reach their addressee or be returned to the sender. This led her to the mail processing centre in Libourne, France, where employees open lost letters in search of clues. It is in these lost letters, these bottles in the sea, that the artist immersed herself : letters of love, friendship, family stories, inner turmoil, hopes and questions… And she decided that, whoever the addressee, these crumpled pieces of life where the intimate and the universal meet, should be heard. Since 2017, she has obtained from the Post Office that it does
not destroy these letters and sends them to her. At a rate of one box every three months, she has collected
around 20,000 letters.
A real reading marathon, a dozen volunteers – the readers – will take turns for 12 hours to read all the letters contained in a box.
Wallis, A. (2019) Lettres à L., à G., à Mon Loup, Maman, Tante L., Monsieur et Madame P. et à nous.
Available at : https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/une-journee-particuliere/une-journee-particuliere-14-mars-2021. (Accessed : 8th November 2021).
But it then occurred to me that illustration was not the most successful medium to explore what I wanted to (this idea how constructing a story of fragments of stories). It did not talk enough about collection, the fragment itself and ways of compiling things. Indeed, I had realised that I’m always fascinated by objects made by designer (The art of looking sideways by Alan Fletcher, Stuff we Like by Music etc.) that combine all sorts of materials, heterogenous elements and manage to create links between them. I wanted to explore that, so I turned again to Calvino, observing how he had woven links between multiple stories. And then, looking more closely at the images I had collected, I noticed that together they could tell two parallel stories that from time to time intertwine. The story of these women and their representation founded in french archives (inspired by Calvino) and the story of all these other images I had: fragments of research, of personal interests that I never took further.