Julie Boissonnault

DES CAILLOUX DANS LA BOUCHE
04.30–05.31.1998

Dialogue shaping thought through the excavation of voices. [1]

We say that words touch us, and sometimes even wound us. To say this is to acknowledge their material embodiment; it is, of course, to accept a figure of speech. Seeking to evoke the materiality of language, Julie Boissonnault occupies the space of a small room with an installation titled *Des cailloux dans la bouche* (Pebbles in the Mouth), a reference to a text by Valère Novarina. Composed entirely of aphorisms, this text lends its disjunctive nature—and its questioning of expression through speech—to the work staged here. A surface is populated by countless wax pellets, shaped in a meditative state; once spread across the wall and pierced with pins, they seem to manifest the violence inherent in expression—in the emergence of something long ruminated upon and deeply considered. Boissonnault makes literature stutter and branch out into matter; to this end, she selects mundane, everyday materials for their plasticity and fragility. Wax berries and floral shapes—scraped, pierced, and lifted from the surface of cigarette packaging—are coated in wax and arranged in a quasi-encyclopedic manner. The aim is to bear witness to a temporality in which the act of looking can align with the contemplative mode that prevailed during the objects’ creation. It is a matter of highlighting—through traces that stand in for written characters or punctuation—an inability to express oneself, manifesting as both silence and drama. Before this metaphorical herbarium of language, we are invited to gaze upon a form of speech—the emergence of an intimate, fragmented utterance embodied in minute, whispering shapes. Text by Patrice Duhamel

[1] Valère Novarina, During the matter, P.O.L., 1991, p. 59.