Entretiens sur l'art with Anne Le Troter
Entrusted since 2021 to critic and curator Jill Gasparina, the ‘Entretiens sur l'art’ (Interviews about Art) series, which for over 20 years has built up a formidable collection of artists' words, will from now on be looking closely at the materiality and conditions of emergence of the works of the guest artists.
In Anne Le Troter's work, and even if it is a little artificial to present things in this way, there is substance and form. As far as the latter are concerned, we find installations and sound pieces (which often feature groups talking), video installations, editions, performances and theatre. And sometimes drawings. These preferred media show that the heritage from which she has developed her work is eclectic: sound poetry, conceptual art, choreography and the performing arts all intersect. She also mixes registers with a certain malice, from the most tender to the stiffest.
One of her most recent pieces, Racine, Pistil, was presented on the La Pop barge on the Bassin de la Villette in the summer of 2024. It proposed a listening experience based on bone conduction that consisted of physically connecting to a sculpture with a twig in the mouth to hear from inside the body the lascivious murmurs of Pornoplante, a vegetal character in full sexual maturation, fluid, invented by the artist during a residency at the Bergerie Nationale de Rambouillet in 2019.
From the singular situations of reception or listening that she sets up, of which this is only the most recent and spectacular example, we can deduce that Anne le Troter is very interested in the control devices that regulate the holding of bodies and the circulation of speech, but also, conversely, in forms of care, or more broadly in all the kinds of refuges where the productivist and extractivist logics of the market economy are thwarted. The artist, who once worked as a telephone interviewer, knows that the voice can be a tool of capitalism. Or just the opposite: a place for subversion, imagination, sharing and pleasure.
Anne Le Troter was born in 1985 and lives and works in L'Île-Saint-Denis.
