until the words are erased | Reims 2oo4

“The word only has one or two meanings and it keeps its sonority prisoner. If you break the form it is embedded in, new relations appear.” Ghérasim Luca

To reply to what the poet called “mouth theatre”— a work transgressing the formal boundaries of language — I should like to explore the transformation of sense and sensibility, using a visual intervention involving object-words. Taking this track with the wherewithal of visual languages, proposing a “theatre of the eye”, in a way. This is how Malte Martin introduced his work “until the words are erased”. The installation involved three large projections. On the ground, somewhere between nature and decomposition, sweet-smelling leaves and earth made a carpet of humus for visitors to walk on. On the screens, smithereened letters exploded on a yellow background in an extremely slowed-down disintegration; on a black backdrop words appeared, combining to form the term “après-guerre” or “postwar”, then breaking up. The third screen discreetly traced a few white words on a floor littered with red stains-petals or exploded pieces of flesh? The music, composed by Patricia Dallio was inspired, in each sound loop, by one of the films. Music of drips, whispers, syllables, murmurings and cut media-related sentences, faraway blasts and explosions, outdated fairground music, music of rarefied instruments… The three loops mixed together and formed an endless track, accompanying, moving apart, and misinterpreting the images.