A body rises above its own chaos seemingly thrust by a complicated melancholy. A gaping identity, a pierced thought, a language full of holes, practiced from the birth of language. Murmured words, a new body, a project of exile, a dream in action right until the end.
The metamorphosis of a body’s raw material, like that of a verb questioning with pleasure and pain the link between two.
From his first until his last steps, all that man tries to do is remain standing. From the earth to the backbone, verticality as a principle but also a question.
If we try to become one with the word, then we become one with the world. Fury of the spirit and rage of the body. Recoupling words to the physical movements that gave birth to them is just the logical and discursive side of speech that has disappeared beneath its physical and emotional side, so that the words are perceived as movements.
From murmur to scream.
As if he’d never stopped being born.
THE SCARECROW
A poet of ancient times who still reigns from the corner of the field, it is difficult to describe the scarecrow: an impostor, a bogeyman, an ogre, a phantom, a protester, a crucifix, a no-through sign, a tower, an hourglass…
For me, a scarecrow is both a touching and contradictory figure, a lonely soldier of terror who has never scared anyone. He belongs to the imagination. This vertical being is man’s double, a self-portrait that does not speak its name, a no-through sign, and a protester who opens his arms to us when he is not hanged, crucified or bound.
This is a being of abandonment, in abandonment.
Giving life to a scarecrow is to become alive again, to revive, reconstruct, and to relearn. Trying to reach that place where the dual movement of vertical falling and elevation is produced, a contradiction vital to a living being.
The difficult birth of a body and a word that are linked and which begin over and over again, in perpetuity.
babil is part of the Scarecrow Cycle, after “Fidèle à l’éclair” and “havran”. The three figures reunite at last in the work “Humus vertebra”, the absurd encounter of the three.
A fourth solo, “Benedetto Pacifico”, joined the Cycle in September 2011.
