1st highlight of François Durif’s writer’s residency, which will end on July 4, 2020.
With the support of the Conseil Régional d’Île-de-France.
François Durif invites you to meet him in front of the main entrance to Père-Lachaise cemetery – boulevard de Ménilmontant -, for a first “warm-up tour” to launch his writer’s residency at Le Générateur. It’s an opportunity for him to look back over the journey he’s made since leaving L’Autre Rive, once again donning the mantle of master of ceremonies and taking us on an unbridled and abundant narrative, based on reminiscences of his experience in the funeral industry. Anything but a guided tour!
Link to remue.net, where François Durif will be publishing articles during his ten-month residency at Le Générateur. Here, his first article gives an insight into the state of mind in which he conceives his walk through Père-Lachaise: https://remue.net/le-22-au-pere
Next walks as part of the residency :
Saturday, March 28, 2020, at 11 am, at Gentilly cemetery; meeting point at Le Générateur
Sunday, May 17, 2020, at 11 am, at Thiais cemetery, in front of the main entrance
Sunday, June 14, 2020, at 11 am, at Thiais cemetery, in front of the main entrance
RESIDENCE PROJECT
On the threshold of this residency, I present myself to you “as if I were a writer” and we’ll see if, in ten months’ time, I allow myself to call myself a writer. It’s this game with oneself and one’s vis-à-vis that I’d like to approach in my story: the different clothes and liveries donned over a lifetime; the artist’s posture and the imposture it implies. In the end, there aren’t that many moments when what I do coincides with what I am. So we sometimes need to pass through a fiction to act where we are.
In connivance with the Générateur team, François Durif decided to title his writer’s residency:The dream of a life is another life. Based on his professional experience in the funeral industry, he wishes to question the links between the work and the space of death, and more generally, the place we give to our dead in our respective lives.
His residency will be punctuated by numerous events: conversations around the themes that run through his narrative, walks in Parisian cemeteries inside and outside the city, workshops in funeral profession schools and two lecture-performances at Le Générateur (February 26, 2020 and June 26, 2020, with visual artist and improvised music composer Jean-Luc Guionnet).
Parallel to his residency at Le Générateur, he will be conducting writing and artistic practice workshops in selected wards of the Lariboisière, Saint-Louis and Fernand Widal hospitals in Paris, continuing his questioning of the use of the conjunction “as if” in our everyday conversations and what this says about our relationship to reality. These workshops are part of the “Culture à l’hôpital 2019” label.