Since his graduation from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (1997), which he premonitatively titled “prétendument promenade”, François Durif sticks to a writing practice and continues to question the status of the artist and his prerogatives.
Depending on the exhibition context, his texts take the form of a work diary, a letter, a leaflet or a poem. His performative walks, meanwhile, are more akin to attempts at oral literature, between improvisation and random editing of fragments of writers’ texts that serve as points of support.
Of his professional experiences outside the art world, it’s the one in a Parisian undertaker’s agency L’Autre Rive (2005-2008) that has left the strongest impression on him, like so many “ordeals-exorcisms”, to use the title of a book by Henri Michaux to which he often refers.
Twelve years have passed since he left L’Autre Rive, and it’s as if he hasn’t finished measuring its impact on his daily life and artistic practice. Indeed, it was this experience in the funeral home that later led him to turn to performance art, in order to rediscover an intensity similar to that of the secular ceremonies he organized with bereaved families.This writer’s residency at Le Générateur – from September 2019 to June 2020 – gives him the opportunity to give form to the “after-the-fact” account of these undertaker years, by experimenting with fragmentary writing, made up of reminiscences and digressions.
In the end, it was the “diary” form that imposed itself on him during the first months of the residency. It was from the present that he decided to uncover little-known aspects of the life of an undertaker – a figure both fictional and real, fabricated and experienced over time. In order to open himself up to the intensities that ran through him at the time, he lets come whatever comes, without self-censorship, as close as possible to the flows of thought that run through him as he writes this true-false diary of an artist in an undertaker’s garb – of an undertaker in an artist’s garb.
If the conjunction “as if” was the tool he initially chose to distance himself from a strictly autobiographical narrative, today it’s the “ici remue” that seems to have taken hold of him in the very process of writing – echoing the distant “ici repose” that looks at everyone when they stand before a grave.
Each week, he publishes pages from his journal in the online magazine remue.net – a partner of the Conseil Régional d’Île-de-France in its writers’ residency program.
📸 François Durif, performance Ici-Remue, February 2020 © Louis Rollinde