the Buenos Aires Review » Paris

The Teachings of Tour13

heather — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 05:25:20 +0000

Tour13 from Pont de Bercy

Caitlin Bruce

Tour Treize is a former HLM (Habitation à Loyer Modéré or rent controlled housing) building that has been turned into a 360-degree art space, covered floor to ceiling with graffiti and street art installations. Over a hundred artists from more than sixteen countries were invited to create site-specific works that transformed the housing development from living space to art space. A six month secret collaboration between Gallery Itinerrance director, Mehdi Ben Cheikh, the Mairie of the 13th, and the owner of the building ICF Habitat la Sabilière, the project explores, among other things, the relationship between ephemerality and urban space.

The nine-story building, one of many modernist style structures that went up during the second major phase of urban renewal in France in the 1960s and 1970s (following the 19^th century urban renewal practices initiated by Baron Von Hausmann) was, initially, a response to the need for housing for populations at the economic margins. Largely constructed on the periphery of Paris proper, HLM housing has since become a visual trope for instability, threat, segregation, and the failure to achieve social stability through modernist design.Tour Treize emerges, then, from a complex milieu where state-supported housing is aligned with state-sponsored art making. In France, unlike the United States, the government heavily supports the arts, enabling a large degree of experimentation and genre-transforming developments since practitioners are not (as) beholden to a profit model.

Ben Cheikh imagined the project as a way to stage the ephemerality that characterizes street art as a form and to create an aesthetic experience that was free, open to the public, and impossible to sell. Accordingly, the building was open for only one month, from October 1 to October 31, 2013. The Tour13 website, created in collaboration with website designer and filmmaker Lallier, offered a virtual tour of the building, replete with interviews from participating artists. The website would only exist for ten days after the closure of the building, and could only be “saved” by viewers clicking on the website content, pixel by pixel. Any content not saved would disappear after November 10^th. In suggesting an alternative mode of urban citizenship, less acquisitive and more inquisitive. the project sensitizes us to the plurality of worlds constantly in the making in plain sight and beneath the radar of more official urban production.

Visiting Tour Treize: Patience and Urgency

To visit Tour Treize, situated a quarter kilometer west of Bibliotheque François Mitterand, one had to brave a line of people that wound around a full city block. Because the building was slated for destruction and not as sound as it had been in its prime, there was a 49-person limit, meaning that the guards had to institute a one-person-out and one-person-in policy. Pragmatically, this meant that if one secured a place in the queue 50 meters from the entrance, a four-hour minimum wait was in order.

Waiting is Futile sign.

The wait on the queue tested patience, but also was a singular experience of camaraderie and excitement. I myself tried three times to enter the building, first waiting for two hours, then four, and then seven and a half. The third day I had learned what to do: arriving at the site three hours before full light, I had packed three meals, an extra scarf and hat, and a dense book to read. There was no movement during the several hours before doors opened, so people took a seat on the pavement, or on little foldable stools, and closed their eyes, listening to music, reading, or quietly eating breakfast. Some expansion occurred when the friends of early risers arrived, but there seemed to be an understanding that the place of those stalwart folks who had committed their wee hours to the line should be respected.

Pixaçao on façade of Tour13

Above all else, however, was the exhilaration of watching visitors exit the building. Beaming, laughing, stupefied, repeated encouragements were delivered to those still in line. “It’s just…wow!” “Incredible,” and more direct support, “Bon courage!” After seven hours surrounded by the same four to six people, a sense of communitas developed, conspiratorial smiles and nods were shared as the line advanced, and later on, glances of recognition were exchanged inside the building itself.

I linger on the affective experience of waiting because it pointed up the temporariness, and singularity, of the exhibit: if one didn’t see it now, it would be gone. This experience can be understood as a form of what Greg Siegworth and Melissa Gregg describe as “sensorial pedagogy” – teaching publics to be more attuned to practices through an emphasis on experiences of the senses. In the case of Tour 13, the experience of waiting instilled in the visitor an acute awareness of small shifts in the surroundings as one advances forward, inch by inch, hour by hour. Once inside, a variety of three-dimensional reappropriations of domestic space enabled the viewer to see crumbling walls, gutted bathrooms, and empty kitchens as potential scenes for creativity. The fleeting nature of the exhibit was differently articulated in the works themselves, in which a central theme was the relationship between temporariness and creation and destruction, as matters of both content and form.

Experiencing Tour13: Internationalism, Fragility, and Memory

The building was organized loosely around national and regional affiliations. Each floor contained the work of artists from two to three bordering nations, and floors were graphically connected by graffiti that ran up and down the stairwells and hallways. Because of the limited body count allowed in the building, the viewing experience was less crowded than one might have expected. Such intimacy also conveyed the experience of being an explorer (urban exploring, or urbex is a popular past time in Europe for street art aficionados).

Entering the first floor, one is confronted with a map of Syria on the floor, made out of pita bread, above which hover a cluster of bombs in the form navy-green paint cans with little wings attached.

Rodolphe Cintorino. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce

The metaphorical word play is critical. To do graffiti is also called “bombing,” a word used to connote the aggressive taking back of city spaces that some graffiti writers enact.

Portuguese artist Mario Belem’s “Je ne Regrette Rien,” an homage to chanteuse Édith Piaf, can be read as a manifesto for street artists and graffiti artists who produce on the street with the acute knowledge that their work may not persist for more than a few days, or even hours. “I regret nothing,” the piece declares, gesturing to the fact that the many months of production, all of which will be reduced to rubble in 2014, are still meaningful.

Mario Belem, Portugal. Photo credit: Caitlin Bruce

Pantonio’s flying/running rabbits, which also dashed across the exterior of the tower, creating a connective tissue between inside and outside, were one of my favorite elements of the project. The fluid motion was mesmerizing, and seemed appropriate given the scene of destruction (floor boards torn up) around the creatures, also pointing to something more sinister: the rabbits flee. From danger, from imminent destruction, perhaps from the patterns of urban renewal and revitalization that uproot and push out the very residents who used to inhabit Tour 13 and its surrounding structures.

Pantonio, Portugal. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce

A destruction-aesthetic figured in many of the apartments. Appliances filled with waste, paint cans, or foam, and floors entirely removed or reduced to dust implied immanent elimination. Katre’s room, which was covered with photographic images of architecture, lines extending from the images across the ceiling, and a breakfast table replete with a radio, glass and plate and surrounded by rubble referred to life interrupted. The radio suggests some of the rubble aesthetic of postwar East German cinema, but also the wreckage that continues to proliferate in the wake of acquisitive neoliberal agendas.

Katre, France. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce.

The ephemeral as haunting and haunted space was embodied by Tunisian artist Dabro. His figures, barely distinguished from their background, emerge as ghostly whispers from the walls. They suggest the erased histories and lingering memories of the building’s residents, or his own memories of home, laminated onto the space of Tour13.

Dabro, Tunisia. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce

Inti Castro, from Chile, further draws on tropes of memory, forgetting, and violence. The entrance to the main room has the words “Memorias” in legible typset print. Entering the colorful inner room, one sees a wall violently punctured, but the paint designs are not disrupted. Embedded in the hole in the wall is a photograph of a little girl. Shrine-like on the one hand, the jagged doorway and uneven floor also create a sense of unease, a memory not fully worked through.

Inti Castro, Chile. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce

Finally, in Brazilian Loiola’s piece, we are placed in intimate confrontation with anxious female figures. One notes “Don’t leave me in peace/alone.” Elements of the apartment (curtains, doors, a radiator, bathtub) remind the viewer of the everyday lives quietly, or not so quietly, lived in this building.

Loiola, Brazil. Photo credit: Caitlin Bruce.

Distinctions between ephemerality, memory, and forgetting begin to emerge. The ephemeral, as the Tour13 website attests, does not necessarily need to be forgotten, it just cannot be tied to physical existence. The forgotten and destroyed, however, are written out historically and physically, as Inti Castro and Loiola’s pieces testify.

Afterlives of Tour13: Ephemerality as Resistance to Precarity

In her recent text, Culture Class, Martha Rosler explores the problematic linkage between artists (who frequently live in precarious economic contexts for production, itinerant in the strongest sense of the word) and the managerial class, white collar workers in the IT industry, engineers, intellectual workers at universities. According to Richard Florida, these two groups, which he refers to as the “creative class,” are linked based on their affinity for the three “T’s: technology, talent, and tolerance,” a link that Rosler suggests is more than tenuous. Pragmatically, both artists and members of the managerial class ostensibly survive based on project-based and self-directed labor. In Florida’s formulation, such an arrangement is the result of a kind of freedom to choose one’s work, enabling “creatives” to remain unentangled by extended obligations and able to pick new endeavors, a kind of dynamic ephemerality of labor. However, as Rosler reminds us, such a conflation contains the seeds of its own demise, insofar as the labor economy that maintains white collar work supports neoliberalism, an agenda that has “created a capitalism that eats its young.”

The 2011 Occupy events reminded urban citizens that space should be shared and radically public, protesting against the broad-based precarity that is naturalized by a neoliberal economic and social model. In France, where high unemployment numbers and economic slowdown have reinvigorated debates about the place of social welfare governance, this relationship between “creatives” and neoliberalism is not as tight as it is in the United States. Nevertheless, in a city still characterized by an astronomical cost of living that forces laborers, immigrants, and many artists to the periphery, unstable labor conditions (intermittence, lack of benefits, and the nostalgic narrative of the struggling artist who must hold one to four day jobs to support his or her craft) make it so that many artists are priced out of cities. Such precarity is often romanticized by businesses, city management, and media as an emblem of the “creative class” that heralds future growth benefiting all urban citizens, instead of a select few, downplaying the many who cannot or do not survive.

Tour13 affectively and aesthetically intervenes in such debates by engaging in a form of sensorial pedagogy that sensitizes viewers to the distinctions between ephemerality and precarity, memory and forgetting. It emphasizes that public aesthetic space can be shared without being commoditized and reveals the many forms of life, memory, and creative production that take place within and outside national borders, in highly visible spaces surrounding Centre Pompidou but also in dingier alleys in Belleville and in art collectives outside the city in Montreuil or Drancy. By inviting audiences to emotionally engage with work that is condemned to disappear, and giving them a chance to “save” it through memory, talk, and pixel-by-pixel mouse clicks, Tour13 offers a scene of urban pedagogy where the temporary is not reduced to the forgotten.

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Images: Caitlin Bruce

Bibliothèque nationale de France

heather — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 23:11:14 +0000

Victoria Liendo
translated by Victoria Lampard

To Charles Coustille,
guilty of making me love France,
he who declares himself innocent of everything.

Libraries very much resemble churches: there are some that can make you feel even closer to God. There are so many libraries in Paris that it’s hard to decide which to visit on a daily basis. There’s your neighborhood library, your university library, your country’s library, the Scandinavian countries’ libraries—more modern—the Grandes Écoles, the famous ones like Saint-Geneviève, the cool ones like Beaubourg, and then there is the official, unquestioned Cathedral of French Wisdom, immense, solemn, silent: the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Against all expectations, the lofty, serious BnF is the only place in which someone as restless as myself is able to sit down and study.

Before the main branch of the library was at Richelieu, near the Opera and the stock exchange and known as “BN” (Bibliothèque Nationale). They’ve since added an “F” (as in France)—apparently a needed addition—and placed it in Tolbiac, on the east side, right up against the invisible wall that separates Paris de rigueur snobbery from the banlieue. Its new location lent it freedom of form and expansiveness. The people who designed it in the 80s thought of everything. They must have said: “let it be on the riverside,” as a metaphor for eternity; “let it boast an esplanade thousands of meters in size,” in defiance of urban modernity; and—which they somehow managed to achieve—”let it take the form of a book.” The four buildings, each 80 meters in height and in the shape of an open book, form the vertices of a rectangular esplanade 60,000 square meters in size that extends to the bank of the Seine. At the center is a wild garden into which nobody is allowed to go.

To be admitted into the most exclusive rooms on the ground floor that surrounds the garden, the first step required is purification: you leave all your worldly possessions in the cloakroom, keeping only the bare essentials in a plastic briefcase—transparent, like the study rooms, the garden, and the cafe, the walls of which are made entirely of glass. Before passing through the final turnstile, you must open four enormous metal doors and go down two flights of an endless set of escalators. At times I feel as if I am following the descent of Orpheus, other times I find the Get Smart theme tune stuck in my head as I navigate the secretive doorways. Once inside, in your own area and with your materials brought from home, procrastination involves the bleak prospect of physical exertion which, allied with the guilt brought about by leisure time, quashes any desire to attempt an escape from your blank page. The bathroom is twenty minutes worth of carpet and four Maxwell Smart doors away. The café, the same again. You thus resign yourself to spending several hours under the blanket of silence.

For every room, a letter. For every letter, a mythological character. It is said that in V there are girls as beautiful as nymphs. The nerds in R will bring about good work. Their concentration is contagious, but you will fare poorly if mired in existential angst, for they are scientists, and know that we do nothing but invent things with our words. I prefer U. There is sunlight, there are friendly faces, and all the books we need are at our fingertips, although some have yet to arrive. You get all kinds of hubris in U. Dissertators flaunting piles of books they will never read. Computers abandoned for hours, yet monopolizing the only available internet cable. Latin-American work-mates who breathe heavily as they write, as if aroused by some unspecified excitement. We all need a bit of privacy when studying. To this end, many U’s secretly emigrate to S at the far end, or they cross the border—the impenetrable garden—along its perimeter, and after a long stretch of red carpet arrive at the other side, at P, at O, at M, where the frustrated or pretentious psychoanalysts gather.

Sometimes, while traversing the red carpet that connects the study rooms, the Café du Temps, and the bathrooms, I see rabbits on the other side of the glass; mother ducks with their trail of baby ducklings, flocks of birds unaware that they are no longer in the wild, but the most surprising creatures are seated on this side, in the study rooms, on the staircases in the hallways or in the café, where for five o’clock tea the intellectual fauna emerge for a sort of wild leporine display of their own. My favorites of these are the French lit folk, whose finest asset—besides their attire, taken straight from the films of Truffaut—is in responding in the emphatic negative to any question asked of them. Talking among themselves, they complain—in sly competition—about the page count of some dissertation or another, as if they were New York finance men comparing bank balances without the slightest inkling that they may well be yuppies too, in their own way. We faithful dissertators of the BnF are united by the shame of the plastic cases we carry that really look like the plastic trays you see in school cafeterias; by institutional rivalries; the certainty of an uncertain income; and academic desperation. We are divided, meanwhile, by a delicate and unspoken caste system built on the basis of literary tastes; the awareness of aesthetics or the intentional lack thereof, as evidenced in dress; by name-dropping, and by what I call “name-manner.”

Saying “béhène” (BN) is not the same as saying “béhèneffe” (BnF). The BNers—as was explained to me by a BnFian friend when I asked about the difference—are nostalgic old professors who were around during the times of the Richelieu location and who now flaunt antiquity like a luxury accessory or who put it on when they want a retro look. For our generation—said my friend, and I saw that it was true—the default was to be a BnFian, given that the acronym “BN” has been stricken from all official documents by now, the library’s employees all use the F, and the website is www.bnf.fr (it was here that my friend noted his allegiance to this group). But there is a third category: the under-30 BNers. Serious snobs or just imitators of their elders, these people affect an impossible agedness for the vile purpose of seeming to have academic credentials. “C’est très malin,” said my friend, it’s such a cheap way of basking in apparent authenticity for anyone who utters these initials in an academic conversation. Even among long-time BnF veterans, the difference helps to distinguish between the initiated—whose career paths will no doubt be admirable—and the profane—said my friend, gazing downwards—who are really shooting themselves in the foot when they say “BnF.”

But there is another type of BnFians, for whom my friend predicted a bright future (he belonged to this type). Though not belonging to any oral culture, these men of the written word insist on typing “BnF” and never “BNF,” as the vulgar do, or, even worse, “BNf,” as the posers do, hoping for a likeness to the NRf (Nouvelle Revue française). This overcorrectness can be compared with the use of “École des Hautes Études” (mark of the feisty connoisseur) for “EHESS” (mainstream), or, too, the use of “Ulm” (the name of the street) for “ENS” (École Normale Superièure), intended to make it quite clear that they, having graduated from the university’s Latin Quarter branch, are not among the icky offspring of Lyon, Fontenay, or who-knows-where-else. Even more serious is the distinction made by true perfectionists between the use of “à la Sorbonne” and “en Sorbonne” (it’s one thing to go to school there and another entirely to attend a conference held in the historic building). Here my friend refused to name names. “C’est trop grave,” he said solemnly. In sum, he said, the BNers are either ancient morons or super-duper ambitious; the BnFians are either very innocent and undereducated, or spineless and ignoble.

Entering the BnF is a real commitment; it is to engage in ritual, and to suspend the anxieties of the everyday—quite unlike studying in the swaggering Pompidou library, where pop, color, food, TV, clochards, hipsters and low muttering stand as trademarks of freedom and knowledge. In Beaubourg you feel as if you were in Brooklyn, but in the BnF you are, quite definitely, in France. Differences aside, at the end of the day we all find ourselves in the same purgatory, fighting to reach Paradise. Every dissertator experiences their own crisis of faith. Once, a despairing Italian came into the cafe crying: “I have no dissertation, my dissertation does not exist,” to which a French workmate answered, exhaling the smoke from his cigarette, “aucune thèse n’existe.”

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Images: Victoria Liendo

Zanzibar: an excerpt

heather — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 22:52:24 +0000

Thibault de Montaigu
translated by Lara Vergnaud

Some people will no doubt feel this work lacks precision and that it’s impossible to write a decent book about a criminal investigation while remaining comfortably settled at home sipping a Diet Coke as you watch rain fall outside the window. It so happens that I’ve always worked like this, preferring to take a back seat for the benefit of my readers. I find the telephone more than sufficient and only venture out of my house to interview the main protagonists of my stories. Except, in this specific case, there aren’t any. Klein and Vasconcelos have been dead for a long time and I don’t have any other choice but to rely on the copious documentation about them that’s been provided me. Someone will object that I didn’t gather this documentation and that I can’t consider it to be absolutely reliable. I will simply respond that I am not a journalist and that my sole concern is to fulfill an assignment, given by my editor. The text in itself doesn’t belong to me.

Certain facts, on the other hand, remain indisputable: Klein and Vasconcelos began their careers as fake reporters just after their eventful departure from the Grand Hotel Europe. A surprising career change to say the least, but one that would prove to be extremely profitable judging by the sudden rise in their standards of living. The two men very quickly embarked on one trip after the other around the world while the balances in their bank accounts remained inexplicably stable: +89.07 euros for Klein and -11,850.66 euros for Vasconcelos before they were definitively closed by the appropriate authorities.

Their last names alone sufficed to get them invited anywhere. An email or a phone call and the matter was settled. Nobody was thinking about asking questions yet. Little wonder: Klein and Vasconcelos passed for good guys in the profession. Eccentric perhaps, wild without a doubt, but good guys that no one could have ever imagined would one day become a sort of failed crook or third rate gangster whose photo appears on the afternoon I-Télé broadcast between a piece on Palestine and another on the new Tour de France route.

In the beginning, the two accomplices settled for latching onto group press junkets: the tourism office in Saint Lucia, fashion week in Tunis, Les Voiles de Saint Barth, the coopérative du jambon de Parme, the La Mamounia Literary Award, the Baros hotel in the Maldives, the Fiat 500 Gucci in Florence… It wasn’t the invitations that were lacking. They received new ones every day. The sole requirement: give the name of the magazine they were meant to represent. Klein and Vasconcelos’ only problem was choosing. They could claim to be affiliated with this or that newspaper with which they were used to collaborating, be creative by alluding to a possible international publication, even invent a magazine that nobody knew but wouldn’t dare question for fear of being taken for an idiot. Worse: certain press agents would congratulate themselves on thus extending their media coverage while others, paid by the page, sensed the possibility of making more money, counting on a lengthy report that the leading magazines, which never had any room, couldn’t guarantee them.

This was how Klein and Vasconcelos, in the following months, actively contributed to publications as varied as Paris Match, Elle, L’Optimum, Le Figaro Madame, but also utterly unknown magazines like Distant Horizons, the Professional Tourist, or even Sea Sex and Sun Magazine without leaving a single trace to be found today. Some people like Zivonjic spoke in this regard of “authors without works” or rather “works pending authors,” asserting even that Klein and Vasconcelos’ artistic corpus, composed primarily of promised reports, imagined articles and photographs to be taken, is one of the most important of the 21^st century. As for Alain Bernard, he violently protested against this opinion during a radio interview: That’s a perfectly ridiculous idea! Zivonjic is only parroting that old hoax invented by conceptual artists according to which the intention makes the work. But deep down that means nothing. It’s an excuse for the lazy and the incompetent who mistake their dreams for reality. The truth is that young people today don’t want to do anything anymore. They’re soft! Good-for-nothings!

Unfortunately Klein and Vasconcelos were never able to give their opinion on the subject since at the same instant one of them could be found in an encrusted porcelain funeral urn on the coffee table in his mother’s living room and the other was lying six feet under in a grave in a Christian cemetery in Zanzibar with as his only company red-crested monkeys that came from the nearby forest to nibble on flowers placed against crosses and to fornicate on the tombs. Were they aware of the esthetic impact of their acts? Was their aim ever to launch an artistic movement or carry out a kind of long-term performance? So many questions that we will never be able to answer.

Klein and Vasconcelos soon stopped gatecrashing these kinds of trips, preferring to choose their destinations and organize their own itineraries by talking to the press offices beforehand. Even if this work required more effort in order to convince their audiences – airline companies, hotels, tour operators, tourism offices – they undertook it successfully, aided by their notoriety, and very quickly begin to roam the planet as a team without having to put up with the endless press agents who coddled them like nannies or the other journalists, for the most part freeloaders capable of discussing their union problems or latest stomach bug on an atoll lost in the middle of the Celebes sea.

Today we know that the decision came from Vasconcelos, whose asocial character was ill-adapted to group trips. If Klein, by nature rather curious and likeable, sometimes made friends with the other participants—as was the case with the woman named Anne S. in Venice—Vasconcelos quite simply ignored them. He would avoid sitting next to them on the bus and pointedly stop talking during meals, hidden behind his Ray Ban Aviators, which he liked to believe made him look like Pablo Escobar or any other sinister Latino gangster whom the rank and file were afraid to address. Sadly there was always somebody asking him his opinion or slipping in a remark in that exasperatingly friendly tone obligatory among groups of coworkers. He would then respond with a joke no one understood or launch into a horrific argument in favor of Franco’s legacy or the reduction of the age of sexual consent to twelve years old, which scandalized those listening and provided him immunity against any future attempts at conversation. Ditto for the excursions. Vasconcelos would stay on the sidelines preferring the silence of a book or a landscape to the chorus of historical-touristy redundancies coming from his colleagues. At the end of the trip, at baggage claim, he was the only one never asked for his cell phone number.

Is that the reason people have such a hard time talking about him, when asked? “Solitary,” “arrogant,” “troubling” are the words that appear the most often in the testimonies at my disposal. “Original,” “mysterious,” “seductive” are also used, generally by young women. Here and there some men might describe him as “crazy,” a “crackpot” or a “genuine asshole” but they remain isolated cases. Cases that would disappear as soon as Klein and Vasconcelos began to operate exclusively as a duo, fashioning their own made to measure trips.

This allergy to others is one of the most distinguishing traits of Vasconcelos’ personality. He didn’t limit himself to showing his animosity, like a mere misanthrope, but preferred, and by far, to remove himself in spirit, that’s to say convince himself that he wasn’t there, with them, but elsewhere, en route to his next destination or lost in the twists and turns of his future masterpiece, who knows? The main thing was to negate his presence. Suppress his being from the world. He didn’t simply give the impression of being absent but, after a while, of disappearing physically, creating a kind of black hole in the mental landscape of those nearest him. So they eventually forgot him despite the paradoxical attraction still exerted by this invisible power to whom they attached, in the way of a legend, a halo of mystery and terror.

The few who were able to penetrate his private life, like Klein or Alban Verhaeghe, succumbed to his charms, experiencing even a besotted fascination with him. But what was so unique about him? Was he really a misunderstood genius as some said after his death? Or was his silent arrogance just a way to evade the vacuity of his existence? An artifice to hide his fear of inhabiting his own life and risk being like everybody else, crippled by vanity and unfounded desires?

Alban Verhaeghe, in his documentary Looking for Vasconcelos, tackles this dark side of his subject. One of the scenes, which I re-watched last night, boils it down perfectly. In it, Verhaeghe describes how Vasconcelos had the habit, when he was a student at the Center for Journalism Studies, of staying alone in the classroom during breaks while his peers spread out noisily through the hallways or around the coffee distributor. In this short sequence, you see the camera advance down a deserted corridor. As background noise, student voices and laughter that seem to come from the hereafter. They gradually dwindle as the camera approaches the classroom then go silent at the exact moment that the director pushes open the door and discovers the room’s interior: white board covered with notes, a carpet of paper scattered across the conference table, in the back chairs piled up like Russian dolls and a silhouette filmed from behind that one guesses belongs to Vasconcelos. Then, amidst the silence, Verhaeghe’s voice interjects again, resuming the thread of his narration: “It’s coming back to me, that November afternoon when I went back to the classroom by chance and surprised Vasconcelos, alone as was his wont, lost in his thoughts. What was he dreaming about when he shut himself up in there? Was he thinking about the books he would have liked to write? Was he looking back at scenes from his past? Places? Landscapes? Other places or other rooms where, as a child, he liked to daydream, far from the tumult of the world? But on that day Vasconcelos wasn’t plunged in his reveries as I’d imagined. No. His attention was fixated on a sheet of ruled paper whose content he was furiously copying. I quickly recognized the handwriting as belonging to D., one of the best students in our class, whose style and inventiveness were praised by the writing teacher, Hedi Kaddour. What was Vasconcelos doing with it? Did he want to steal D.’s text? Draw inspiration for his own book? And how to explain the fact that he was bent over the paper whereas he openly despised D. and systematically attacked him during Hedi Kaddour’s class? I never knew. I bumped into a chair and Vasconcelos turned around, red with emotion, as if I had surprised him in the middle of masturbating or doing something equally repugnant. But he recovered his composure very quickly and, addressing me as if I was a servant, asked me what I was doing there. And now that I’m back here, years later, I know that his secret has vanished forever. I know that I will never see Vasconcelos again. Try as I might to imagine him, bent over that sheet of paper, blood coloring his face while the hallways echo with whispers of our conversations, try as I might to remember him shaking in his chair like a naive and frightened child, fearful of being discovered, I can’t do it. The illusion is gone. As if Vasconcelos had died a second time.”

To me this scene seems to contain one of the keys to Vasconcelos’ character. As if within him existed a public self – derisive, haughty, self-assured – and another one, private, devoured by anxiety over being recognized and going down in history. Dissatisfied with himself, he felt obligated to rewrite the world and claim the lead role. That of a man whom no one can reach because he’s superior to everyone else. But this outward superiority wasn’t meant to resist the onslaught of reality for very long and Vasconcelos had preferred to invent a fable rather than give up his infantile enjoyment of narcissistic pleasures. It’s in this way that he invented a universe compatible with his desires rather than bending them to the reality of the world.

But what about Klein? Did he suffer from the same problem or did he follow Vasconcelos out of weakness? If Klein was able to be influenced by his partner, to the point that the former’s mother accused the latter of having “bewitched” her son, taking advantage of his “kindness” and his “fragility” to “drag him into this mess,” as she stated during an interview with the Daily News of Zanzibar, Klein was far from a puppet with whom Vasconcelos amused himself by pulling the strings. Let’s remember that he was nearly forty years old at the time of the events, and couldn’t be unaware of what he was involved in. The zeal he applied to charming press agents and the enthusiasm he showed once on site, cozying up to the hotel staff or showing an interest in the country’s history, proved that he was enjoying it even. As for Vasconcelos, if he cut an impressive figure thanks to his charisma, he didn’t have the status of a guru or a mafia boss either, despite the sartorial efforts he made to appear so. What’s most likely is that they both got swept up in the game without realizing it and when their faces appeared for the first time on the afternoon I-Télé broadcast, it was already too late to turn back.

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READ THIS IN FRENCH

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Image: Walter Andrade, from the series “The Ruin of Others” (magazines erased by hand).

I’ve Lost Everything I Loved (excerpt)

admin — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 17:00:19 +0000

from J’ai perdu tout ce que j’aimais by Sacha Sperling
translated by Addie Leak

I had decided that my name would be Sacha Sperling and that my life would be dazzling and spectacular.

I’d understood that the only way to exist was to become someone else.

I’d written a book.

The book was a success.

It was translated into languages I didn’t speak.

For two years, the foreign versions accumulated in my bookcase. My face was on some; on others, young Asian boys in suggestive poses. Most of the covers looked like the anti-tobacco posters stuck to the walls of school infirmaries.

The book was simple. It was a bunch of scenes telling the story of a lost teenager in love with his best friend. A fourteen-year-old boy almost mechanically recounting the dissolute lives of his little band. The book included passages later described as “off-putting,” “pulp,” or “hyper-violent.” (A chapter describing a thirteen-year-old girl at the heart of a three-way had particularly marked readers. Then there was the palace suite orgy, the weekend at Eurodisney on Xanax, a conversation about a man who was set on fire, etc.) It was the picture of lobotomized youth, passive and ecstatic. The portrait of blasé kids during the Sarko years, wandering from fast food joint to fast food joint, from easy pleasures to fast ones, in a sort of semi-coma. In the space of just fifteen minutes (I should say for fifteen minutes), I’d become a small-time literary star. In the space of just fifteen minutes, I found myself living my dream. Everyone wanted to meet me, to interview me. There were pictures of me in jeans in Elle, in a torn t-shirt in Le Grand Journal, wearing my Nikes in L’Express. The titles of the articles were “Hello, Melancholy” or “Monstrous Sacha.” There were pictures of me and my super-cool friends, at my super-cool party, in the super-cool swimming pool of the Hôtel Costes, filmed by the super-cool program Paris Dernière. They asked me questions on the phone, in cafes. And I said things like, “It’s an extraordinary opportunity,” or “It’s an incredible luxury to be able to write.” I was constantly repeating stupid shit like that. Today, I can think of a thousand other phrases just as insincere but much more original. At the time, I wasn’t trying to be original. At the time, I just wanted to “continue to have the chance to meet interesting people.” I’d written all these things that were so shocking, so vulgar, and my responses were so clean and neat that they threw the reader off the scent. The truth is that I didn’t give a damn about the questions or the answers. I was simply fascinated by the noxious golden vapor that seemed to float in the wake of my seduction.

That’s how I became your little sister’s favorite writer.

I remember my editor: “Do you realize, Sacha—they’re ordering a thousand a day!”

“And is that a lot?”

I’d decided that my name would be Sacha Sperling, that my life would be dazzling and spectacular. I made this decision between two mouthfuls of orange juice. One morning, I decided to change my name, and then I went to brush my teeth.

I was eighteen and looked thirteen.

I’d decided that I had to become someone, and fast. I had to exist. Because on one hand were the complications of childhood, shadow, and frustration, and on the other, an infinity of illuminated paths. Street lamps, stars, it didn’t matter… There was something that looked like light. On one hand, endless waiting; on the other, all these people ready to love me.

But after a while, my life was neither dazzling nor spectacular. After a while, the lights went out and there was no longer anybody there to love me. In the blink of an eye, only the journalists and talk show hosts were left, as intrigued, annoyed, or aggressive as I had been in my book, and their interest seemed more and more like contempt. Because in addition to the stories of parties, above and beyond the laundry list of illicit substances, what put readers off was the profound apathy with which the book’s narrator seemed to watch the world burn around him. How could he witness all that without reacting? How could he be so young? That was what they started to reproach me for. As if I’d exaggerated. As if I were laying it on too thick. But when you’re eighteen, you don’t choose to reveal yourself. I was far too young to recognize the immodesty necessary to write. I had no filter. That’s why there was something terrifyingly sincere in the book that excited teenage girls and frightened their parents. On Monday, I was a promising writer; on Wednesday, the idiot puppet of a publicity coup; by Friday it didn’t matter anymore because the book was selling and that was the only thing that never changed, week after week.

For more than a year, they had a photo of me in the Virgin megastore. From the Champs-Élysées, you could see my head inside the store. Eyes that seemed to look you right in the stomach. The poster stayed there for what seemed to me an abnormally long time. Nothing justified it staying there that long. I think the Virgin employees just forgot to take it down. So every time I walked between Monoprix and Quiksilver, I passed Sacha Sperling, and his look said, “This is it, we’ve made it! We exist! That’s what we wanted. Look how bright the path is now. You achieved your dream, dammit, look at us! Come on, don’t screw it up by being moody. You wanted your mug blown up for a photo, well here it is! Order up, buddy!”

And I looked at this rather cute, slightly unpleasant guy with his little smirk. And every time I passed him, he smiled at me. And the more I looked at him, the more the smile scared me. Because it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t me anymore in the photo. It was him. He was the happy one who didn’t want this to end. He was the one who looked like a sated beast. The invisible little boy, made up as an adult, nasty as a kid the day after Christmas. I’d wanted my slice of eternity, the photo of my face blown up, and yet it was his that I saw on the poster. I wasn’t there anymore. In the driver’s seat, an ambitious young man yelled at me to open my eyes. He was saying, “No matter what, don’t stop. No matter what, remember you’re happy, that this is what you want.” But that voice was weaker and weaker, dreamlike, as far away as childhood. I started by scorning that voice, and I finished by completely ignoring it. I was going 200 km/hr in a blazing new muscle car, gleaming, loud, all in the body and nothing in the motor, and I wanted to throw myself out of the car. They talked about Sagan. Sagan, set in the paint and golden dust. Sagan so alone. The phantom that everybody comes across without ever seeing. And me, little Sacha Sperling, nobody, unwitting ersatz, splinter of media quartz. “You’re very Beigbeder, very Ellis, very Minou Drouet, very Minnie Mouse. Have you read Death in Venice? Larry Clark? Is this raincoat a tip of the hat to Houellebecq? Does your haircut look like Zeller’s? Are you gay? Is this a genre? What’s your lucky accessory? Your favorite book? WHO ARE YOU?”

It reeked of sulphur. I had the right face, the right book. The winning horse. Royal flush. And I couldn’t take it anymore.

I’d understood that the only way for me to exist was to become someone else.

I’d written a book.

The book was a success.

It was translated into languages that I didn’t speak.

One day, they took down the poster at the Virgin megastore. One day, I passed by the enormous doors of that old bank, and my photo was gone.

Sacha Sperling wasn’t looking at me anymore.

He had… disappeared.

***
read this in French
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Artwork: Luciana Rondolini “Justin” (2012), courtesy of miau miau