Certain soirées, or avant de m'endormir, je m'étais mis à revivre notre voyage passé à Florence, avec la sensation que jamais nous ne connaîtrions à new pareils moments of inspiration and harmony. Ils appartenaient à here, without espoir de return. Ce sentiment de perte m'oppressait. Nous avions vécu comme une experience normal ce qui ne l'était pas. One of the moments of our lives d'avant, without the person being alerted. Personne à moins que Marina A, with these performances énigmatiques aux apparences gratuites or absurdes, nous eût montré une voie aux contours énigmatiques. The fragility of the corps face à des dangers insaisissables, notre mortalité de feuilles légères accrochées au fil de la vie quand on nous promettait l'éternité bionique.
Quelqu'un avait dit, j'ignorais son nom, que la vie n'était qu'un rêve, et que la mort sonnait notre réveil. I arrived back and returned to Florence without Maud and Lisa. C'était le même voyage que je revivais, à this différence près que me retrouvais seul dans les rues du vieux centre, seul sur les rives étincelantes de l'Arno, sur les chemins des jardins de Boboli que je dévalais à perdre haleine, au musée des Offices, devant le Duomo où, étrangement, des prêtres installés sous de petites tentes confessaient de rares fidèles au volant de leurs voitures, all masqués et à bonne distance, in a transaction de péchés dont les uns délivraient les other. Plus exactement, the same thing that the fidèles deliver les prêtres de leurs fautes. Mon cœur battait abnormalement. Je traversais les places en courant, la piazza della Signoria qu'on vait tant de fois parcourue ensemble avant de s'asseoir fourbus sur une banquette en cuir du café Rivoire. J'étais un fou qui sentait la vie le quitter en déambulant le long des artères vides menant au Ponte Vecchio, ou dans les palais des Médicis with leurs tombeaux, à l'affût des sensations d'autrefois, quand la ville bruissait de rires, de flashes et de jeux d'eau. Je poussais les portes des églises désertes, appealais Maud et Lisa, en vain. This proves that Stendhal has access to the syndrome of Florence, a violent phenomenon in the thunder of the tour, a mix of panic and ecstasy, the rencontre of grace and the tense, the douleur qu'inflige l'art quand sa beauté irregardable vous assomme. Dans mes rêves, ceux dont me restaient quelques bribes au réveil comme entre me doigts un sable d'or, je me retrouvais seul avec Marina. This is what you see on the street, in the reflections of the vitrines, in a white train of the mariée or ensanglantée rouge. This is just the same as the ombre furtive that you can see in the filament of the light.
Little by little, these visions of crépusculaires agirent comme un révélateur photographique sur des sels d'argent. Les images latentes que j'avais gardées en my des apparitions de Marina à Florence se firent plus nice. Mon pressentiment devint tangible, presque palpable, à portée de main écorchée. Je revoyais les expressions de peur collective face à l'artiste se mutilant au couteau. Puis l'évidence me saisit un matin de sommeil agité. The price of distance from Marina with Ulay, as well as its incomprehensible visitors to MoMA, does not announce the arrival of the mornings that are the premier of all barriers.
À l'Hôpital on availability reporté les opérations à des jours meilleurs. After an urgent intervention on a garçonnet atteint d'un rhume aigu de la hanche - ne pas le ponctionner l'aurait menacé d'une boiterie indélébile -, je me mis en congé force indefinitely. My equipment saves every moment that it pours out to me. On this entry in the epidemic qu'on appelait déjà pandemic, certains have a "P" majuscule defiant to the "A" of Marina Abramovic. À mesure que nos visages disparaissaient derrière des masques pas vraiment carnavalesques, et comme les consignes sanitaires s'apparentaient à des performances qui nous auraient paru insensées un mois avant - se tenir à un mètre des autres, se moucher dans son coude, se laver les mains à tout bout de champ, ne plus rien toucher dans l'espace public, effacer en toutes circonstances ou presque la moitié de nos visages –, les œuvres de Marina sont remontées en moi. Pass comme des souvenirs. Come des alertes. Surtout quand des images télévisées ont montré les rues italiennes nettoyées à grands jets de désinfectant. Marina The Cleaner. Qui netoyait le passé, qui netoyait les hinges des guerres d'hier, qui netoyait son corps en le lacérant, espérant le purifier. An appeal au propre, au pur – encore que je mefiais de this idée –, à l'hygiène de vie confondue avec l'hygiène des corps. Né des échanges mondialisés de biens et de personnes, le virus nous forçait à ériger des frontières partout. Frontières terrestres et aériennes, sans être bien sûrs de leur efficacité à nous protector. Mais surtout frontières individuales. Des sas entre nous. Qui aurait pu encore passer entre Marina et Ulay nus à l'entrée de leurs anciennes exhibitions des seventies ? En quelques semaines, nos corps étaient redevenus nos ultimes limites, nos barrières de chair et de peau. Pour prendre also in des other, nous devions nous en tenir éloignés. The civilization without contact nous transformait en îlots humains, chacun enfermé en soi, méfiant envers autrui. Et revivais les mille experiences extrêmes de Marina dans ce qu'elles révélaient des limites entre la vie et la mort, de nos fragilités, de nos résistances, d'une résilience possible.
Eric Fotorino, Marina A (Gallimard, 2021).
On some evenings, or even before falling asleep, I would relive our recent trip to Florence and feel that we would never experience such moments of carefree joy and harmony again. They belonged to yesterday, without any hope of returning. The feeling of loss weighed heavily on me. We had experienced something far from normal as if it were perfectly ordinary. One of the last moments of our former lives, without anyone having pointed it out to us. No one, except perhaps Marina A., with her enigmatic, seemingly useless or absurd performances, would have shown us a path with mysterious outlines. The fragility of our bodies in the face of unfathomable dangers, our mortality as delicate leaves hanging by the thread of life, while we were promised bionic eternity.
Someone had said—I didn't know their name—that life was just a dream and death our wake-up call. Sometimes I dreamt that I was returning to Florence without Maud and Lisa. It was the same journey I was reliving, except that I found myself alone in the streets of the old town, alone on the glittering banks of the Arno, on the paths through the Boboli Gardens, which I ran down breathlessly, at the Uffizi Gallery, in front of the Duomo, where, strangely enough, priests in small tents were hearing confessions from isolated believers behind the wheel of their cars, all masked and at a safe distance, in a transaction of sins from which some absolved others. More precisely, it seemed as if the believers were absolving the priests of their sins. My heart was racing in an unusual way. I ran across the squares, across the Piazza della Signoria, which we had crossed so often together, before collapsing, exhausted, onto a leather bench in the Caffè Rivoire. I was a madman, feeling life leaving me as I wandered the empty streets toward the Ponte Vecchio or through the Medici palaces with their tombs, searching for the feelings of bygone days when the city was filled with laughter, flashing lights, and fountains. I pushed open the doors of deserted churches, calling in vain for Maud and Lisa. I experienced what Stendhal supposedly called Florence Syndrome, a violent, dizzying dazzle, a mixture of panic and ecstasy, the clash of grace and darkness, a pain caused by art when its incomprehensible beauty overwhelms you. In my dreams, of which only fragments remained upon waking, like golden sand between my fingers, I was alone with Marina. Sometimes it was she I glimpsed on a street corner, reflected in empty shop windows, with a white bridal train or a blood-soaked red one. Sometimes it was only her fleeting shadow that I saw glide through a band of light.
Gradually, these hazy visions acted like a photographic developer on silver salts. The latent images I had retained of Marina's appearances in Florence became increasingly clear. My premonition became palpable, almost tangible, within reach, as if grasped by a battered hand. Before me, I saw once again the expressions of collective fear toward the artist injuring herself with a knife. Then, on a morning of restless sleep, the obvious struck me. Marina's distancing herself from Ulay, as well as from the countless visitors to MoMA, heralded nothing less than the first of our acts of isolation.
In the hospital, we had postponed the operations until a better time. After an urgent operation on a little boy with acute hip inflammation – failure to drain the fluid would have left him with a permanent limp – I had myself indefinitely I took a leave of absence. My team knew they could call me back at any time. We had entered the epidemic, already being called a pandemic, some with a capital "P" that defied Marina Abramovic's "A." As our faces disappeared behind less-than-carnival-style masks and health regulations evolved into performances that would have seemed ludicrous to us a month earlier—keeping a meter apart from others, sneezing into our elbows, constantly washing our hands, not touching anything in public spaces, obscuring half our faces under all or almost all circumstances—Marina's works surfaced within me. Not like memories. But like warning signs. Especially when television images showed Italian streets being cleaned with large jets of disinfectant. Marina The CleanerShe who cleansed the past, who cleaned the mass graves of yesterday's wars, who cleansed her body by slashing it open, hoping to purify it. A call for cleanliness, for purity—though I distrusted this notion—for life hygiene, which is confused with bodily hygiene. The virus, born from the globalized exchange of goods and people, forced us to erect borders everywhere. Land and air borders, though we weren't sure they would truly protect us. But above all, borders between individuals. Airlocks between us. Who would have still been naked between Marina and Ulay at the entrance to their former seventies-able to walk through exhibitions? Within a few weeks, our bodies had once again become our ultimate boundaries, our barriers of flesh and skin. To care for others, we had to keep our distance. The civilization of social distancing transformed us into human islands, each locked within themselves, distrustful of others. And I relived Marina's thousand extreme experiences, in what they revealed about the boundaries between life and death, about our fragility, our resistance, and a possible resilience. 1
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- Shortly before Christmas 2018, the doctor Paul Gachet takes his wife and daughter on a discovery tour of Florence. While he is eager to show them the Botticellis, the charms of the old town, and the Arno River, their stay is disrupted by the appearance of the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic, who marches through the city streets and into the halls of the Palazzo Strozzi. Who is this suddenly omnipresent woman who disrupts all of Paul Gachet's and his family's points of reference by abusing her own body to speak to a deaf and failing humanity?
Paul Gachet, a surgeon and orthopedist, is reluctant to accept the artist's mutilation. However, he is captivated by her world, which gradually moves away from seemingly senseless violence and expresses a search for harmony with others, particularly with her partner Ulay, whom she embraces until he suffocates, before knotting his hair with her own or exposing his heart to the arrow of her bow.
Two years after this performance in Florence, Paul Gachet stumbled upon an old photograph of Marina A and Ulay titled The impossible rapprochement ("The Impossible Approach"). Filmed in Bangkok in 1983, it depicts two people who would like to touch each other but are mysteriously prevented from doing so and must keep their distance. When the global pandemic broke out, Paul Gachet understood that the manifestations of this art were a form of warning, the meaning of which he now finally grasped in full. A call to protect others and to rebuild our societies on the two small words "after you." (Translation from the publisher's announcement.)>>>
