To close his writer’s residency Le rêve d’une vie est une autre vie at Le Générateur, François Durif swaps the dark suit of the undertaker for the lighter one of the plasterer-painter.
He gives himself two weeks to repaint the Generator’s walls. The opportunity to “take care” of the place that welcomes him and return to the material reality of the artist. Here, he repeats a gesture he made at Immanence in 2002, for his first solo show in Paris. Of course, this action takes on a different dimension in the context of the moment.
Friday January 26, at 8pm, the brand-new Le Générateur reopens its doors for a lecture-performance by François Durif, in connivance with musician and composer Jean-Luc Guionnet. For their first collaboration, the idea is to envisage this moment as a live montage that oscillates between François Durif’s improvised speech and the sound elements that Jean-Luc Guionnet will emit as he pleases. It’s up to everyone to slip in “between the confined, the non-confined and the confined”. No reason to get clever, just the desire to give the best.
Every 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.
Facade of the Générateur by François Durif © Lea Dasenka
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: Le rêve d’une vie est une autre vie. 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 has been punctuated by numerous appointments: conversations around the themes that run through his narrative, walks in Parisian cemeteries intra and extra-muros, workshops in funeral trade 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 has continued his writing and artistic practice workshops in selected wards of the Lariboisière, Saint-Louis and Fernand Widal hospitals in Paris, pursuing 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.