I am writing this text three years after this residency, which gives me the opportunity to better grasp what remains most intense. This hindsight is valuable because I realize that what stays with me is no longer necessarily what seemed important at the time or right after I left the island.
I remember going to Ouessant with no preconceived ideas, bringing with me my camera, notebooks, blank paper, watercolors, and a large collection of recorded lectures downloaded from the internet. I drew, filmed, took notes, and searched for ideas. But with hindsight, what remains most vivid from that month of work are the long and unforgettable hours spent listening to the lectures I had brought with me. That is truly what has left the strongest impression. I believe it was my most significant activity, along with walking. The two were closely linked: walking while listening to voices, listening to voices while crossing landscapes. The themes and fields of these lectures were varied—astronomy, politics, painting, botany, philosophy, cinema, physics, linguistics… I eventually became immersed in these voices, even when I did not always understand their meaning. I remember their grain, certain tones, their intonations, some forms of silence, to the point that I sometimes associate them with fragments of Ouessant’s landscapes. Even now, I occasionally listen to these lectures again in Paris or Tunis and connect certain logical developments of thought to the topological unfolding of specific fragments of the island. This effect is strange. A particular sentence ends up corresponding to a certain rock, a word to a specific area, a contradiction to a certain cove…
When I think about it, that month of silence and solitude was, paradoxically, one of the most populated months I have ever experienced.
At the same time as this ongoing activity, I was continuing a video series (previously carried out in Tunisia) that consisted of placing a blank sheet of paper in front of the camera lens, sometimes lifted by the wind to reveal the landscape it concealed. Thus obstructed and arranged by the winds and light, the camera was transformed into a kind of atmospheric sensor, recording the variations of the environment in which it was placed.
I conducted these experiments without knowing. But what moves me now, what seems important to me in retrospect, is that this month of silent listening had a major impact when I returned from the residency. I believe that this distance allowed me to find a possible “solution” to what would become the film Foyer (2016), born from these experiments with paper. Before leaving for Ouessant, I had accumulated hours of footage shot in Tunis without knowing what to do with it. And I believe that, upon my return, I better grasped the significance of the voices that would ultimately shape this film. I then immersed myself back into the footage and completed the editing of Foyer a few months later. The solitude populated by voices in Ouessant seems to have created the space that was missing for Foyer to come together and find itself
