Le photogramme de l'action
Conferences directed by Jérôme Mauche.
For this new installment of Poetry Platform, we will consider the dramatic and poetic work of Fabrice Melquiot as well as the works of artist (and narrative and fiction writer) Éric Rondepierre to look into their creative and writing processes. While Éric Rondepierre has made the film frame the starting point for his visual work, also situating it at the center of his books, this « blind spot » of representation also constitutes an entry point into the protean universe of Fabrice Melquiot. In ten years and about thirty plays, Melquiot has constituted a genuine world rich in situations and invention, which has turned him into one of the best-known contemporary playwrights. The still image, a springboard for personal memory and a metaphor of history, frozen for a moment, allows parallels to be drawn between these two original authors. Their works, beyond what also differentiates them, are the kind that develops a specific relation to the world, poetic and political in their own way. The important place childhood holds for Melquiot and Rondepierre attests to this, be it their own childhood or that of others, sampled or imagined, persistent like an image.
BIOGRAPHIES
Fabrice MELQUIOT
Born in 1972, Fabrice Melquiot is the best-known author for the stage in his generation. After acting for Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and others, his first texts were published by l’École des Loisirs and broadcast on France Culture. Since 2001 he has published over thirty texts at the Éditions de l’Arche, as well as two collections of poems, Veux-tu? and Graceful. In 2008 he was awarded the Prix Théâtre de l’Académie française for his oeuvre. Written in a strong, poetic language, his theater represents a bold inventory of the contemporary. Among his plays, let us mention L’inattendu and Percolateur Blues, 2001; Le diable en partage and Kids, 2002; Ma vie de chandelle, 2004; Je Rien Te Deum and Marcia Hesse, 2005; Tasmanie, 2007; Eileen Shakespeare, 2009; 399 secondes, 2010; Youri and Quand j’étais Charles, 2011. These texts were directed on stage by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, Michel Dydim, Franck Berthier, Marion Lévy, Stanislas Nordey, Didier Long, or the author himself. Translated in many languages, his work has been performed in the United States, Germany, Greece, Russia, Mexico, Spain, Japan… Many of his texts are written for the younger public, like Perlino Comment (2001), Bouli Miro (2002), the first play for a young audience to be featured at the Comédie Française or, more recently, Guitou. Fabrice Melquiot just published a narrative, Braderie des ombres (Créaphis/Fondation Facim), which takes place in Modane, the city he comes from. The book also served as the basis for a photographic work, « Figures, » which combines texts and portraits and has been shown in exhibitions.
Eric RONDEPIERRE
Born in 1950, Éric Rondepierre was an actor before he developed a photographic work in relation to cinema. Since the early 1990s, he has been sampling single frames from films seen on television but also selected in cinematheques, enlarging the image so as to explore its « blind spots », and stressing out through a subtitle the literary dimension at work in the medium. Exhibited in France as well as abroad (at the Moma in 1992, for instance), his work – always conceived in series (Excédents, Annonces, Précis de décomposition, Stances) – has since then become more diverse, increasingly including his own images or drawings. Éric Rondepierre also started publishing fictional texts in the catalogs for his exhibitions (Le jour où Laura est morte, Galerie Michèle Chomette/Actes Sud, 1995; Moires, 1998, Apartés, 2001, Contrebande, 2003, Éditions Filigranes). More recently, his books, which have become integral to his work, have explored other – notably biographical – territories. He is the author of novels (La Nuit Cinéma, Seuil, 2005; Toujours rien sur Robert, Léo Scheer, 2007) and a narrative (Placement, Seuil, 2007). His last book, L’hypothèse (Publie.net, 2009) analyzes his artistic approach. Among the books devoted to him, a monograph published by Éditions Léo Scheer in 2003 includes contributions by Pierre Guyotat, Daniel Arasse, Denys Riout, Jean-Max Colard, Thierry Lenain, Alain Jouffroy, and Hubert Damisch. In 2012 a personal exhibition of Rondepierre’s work is to take place at the Arsenal in Metz.