Bulletin Somnambule

In Lipstick traces Greil Marcus, he establishes connections between different movements, such as Dada, the Situationist International, the Punk movement... In this way, he traces lines of force in history between events which, by reflecting one another, sketch the contours of an underground history of the past century. This subjective approach to connecting different elements may go some way to explaining Aurélien Froment's approach, which at first glance appears rather heterogeneous. Indeed, while it is difficult to establish an immediate relationship between objects as diverse as a boat on a mountain, a construction game, a collection of book titles, a tattoo project, car journeys, a guided tour of a concrete utopia... the fact remains that relationships exist and structure this ensemble.

[1] Duel, television film by Steven Spielberg, 1971; music by Billy Goldenberg.

[2] This diary contains an image of Arcosanti that was published in a previous issue of Architecture d'Aujourd'hui.

Circulating within it, cinema obviously offers access to some of the pieces. In 2000, for example, the soundtrack to Steven Spielberg's first film [1] was used in a performance entitled Duel. Aurélien Froment and Patrice Gaillard invited spectators to sit in the back seat of their car for a drive in the immediate vicinity of Nantes. This listening session in the form of a journey was punctuated by sound extracts from the TV film of the same name, which pits a motorist against his imagination and/or a psychopathic lorry driver. Similarly, the performance that brought together two football teams in a large stadium for a game with an invisible ball was an update of the tennis match in Blow-up, but longer. Finally, it's hard not to recognise in this model of a boat stranded on a hill the central motif of the film Fitzcarraldo, especially when the play's title is Werner Herzog! But, like the 2030 agenda [2] that accompanied the model, this object plays on troubling temporal shifts.

[3] Paolo Soleri is an Italian architect born in 1919, who since 1970 has been building a city of the future based on ecological principles in the middle of the Arizona desert (Cordes Junction).

Produced to announce a film project about Arcosanti, the relief shot here plays on the disconnect between its function and its form. Indeed, there is nothing in its appearance to link this reduced model, other than metaphorically, to Paolo Soleri's architectural project in the Arizona desert, but its function as a miniature prototype is just as contradicted by the fact that it comes after the fact from Herzog's film. In short, the model does not announce what it represents, but does not represent what it announces. And yet there are indeed links between the project to build an opera house in the jungle, which is the subject of Fitzcarraldo, and the building of a city in the desert, as Paolo Soleri wishes [3]. We could even place these four terms in a semiotic square - desert and jungle (as non-desert) on one side, and city and building (as non-city) on the other - and see what they generate in terms of concepts. This chiasmus, in which the pre- and post-projects of the depiction are superimposed, produces effects of time not unlike those produced by film editing.

[4] Arcology is a neologism coined by the architect Paolo Soleri that combines architecture and ecology.

[5] Theodor Hierneis oder: Wie man ein Ehemaliger Hofkoch wird, 1974 by Hans Jürgen Syberberg.

The seventh art can also serve as a formal lexicon for certain pieces. In the film about Arcosanti, Aurélien Froment spent a long time thinking about the formal solution to be used to represent this project, which has already spanned some thirty years, but it was finally the combination of Roger Tomalty, a veritable living archive of the Arcosanti site [4], and a memory from the film Theodor Hierneis ou le cuisinier de Ludwig [5] that enabled him to find the form for this video entitled The Apse, the Bell and the Antelope (2005). In the manner of Syberberg, who follows Ludwig II of Bavaria's cook around the king's palaces and residences, the film about Arcosanti divides the site into several shots through which a guide character moves, drawing up a portrait of the Solerian city in short bursts. In the space of thirty minutes or so, different geographical points belonging to different strata of time are linked together to form a narrative that brings together both the history and the future of the site, thereby overcoming the paradox of a retrospective vision of the project in progress.

6] For Aurélien Froment, it could have been the ‘montage’ of these two experiences that sparked off the idea of arcology in Soleri's mind: the three-dimensional circulation on board the liner and the hyper-density of Manhattan's buildings observed from the cell at Ellis Island.

A long-term project, the film involved the production of several related works, including a library of 44 books linked by their titles. ‘De L'île à hélice à Ellis Island’ (From Propeller Island to Ellis Island) is a series of books linked to Paolo Soleri's personal history by the combined reference of the title: Jules Verne's L'île à hélice (The Propeller Island) for the ocean liner aboard which the Italian architect emigrated to the USA in the post-war period; and Georges Perec's Ellis Island, which takes as its subject the island where Soleri, like all immigrants at the time, was obliged to stay while awaiting an American visa [6]. A principle of montage and navigation that combines chance and determination, difference and repetition, rereading and linking, the marabout assembles Island of Silence, Le silence des glaces, La glace à quatre faces, Face aux feux du soleil... right through to De l'autre côté de l'Ile.

6] For Aurélien Froment, it may well have been the “montage” of these two experiences that sparked off the idea of arcology in Soleri's mind: the three-dimensional circulation on board the liner and the hyper-density of Manhattan's buildings observed from the cell at Ellis Island [7] See Georges Perec, “Notes brèves sur l'art et la manière de ranger ses livres” in Penser/Classer, Paris Hachette, 1985. Aurélien Froment has also added a glossary showing the paths taken and dead ends encountered in the creation of this piece (De L'île à hélice à Ellis Island, Index, Antwerpen, deSingel, 2007).

[8] Entitled Between the Dome Area at the Sir John Soane's Museum and the East Galleries in the Wallace and an Edwardian Room at the Geffrye Museum.

[9] A Page Torn out of a Book, Print on Paper, 15x21 cm, 2006.

Of course, the library functions as a classifying element [7], but each title in itself develops an expressive potential capable of capturing the imagination. A case in point is Island of Silence (2006), which depicts an iceberg inside a niche in the wall, only a small part of which emerges, while the bulk of the mass sinks into the bluish depths. This piece, which has its origins in the first title of the library, demonstrates in its own way the potential figurative resources of this collection of heterogeneous works. These last three pieces were also brought together in an exhibition entitled A Hole in the life at the STORE gallery in London (2006). In this space an illusionist wall painting [8] imitating the light penetrating through the display case unified the hanging surface - a single wall - and separated it from the rest of the gallery space, like two unconnected spaces, one touched by a fictitious light and the other not. In a gradation from white to dark green to black, the mural linked the pieces exhibited on the same surface, like a kind of conductive medium. By coincidence, a page torn from a book and stuck to the display case announced the title of each work [9].

Along with cinema, books are the other focus of Aurélien Froment's research. But here, the narrative is less important than the object that contains it, and it is often as an image that the book is summoned. In Croisière sans escale (2000), for example, three people in a room were silently reading the same book for an entire day. This way of summoning objects with a narrative content, and therefore containing a potential narrative, recurs frequently enough for us to speak of the narrative potential of the reference. The building set inspired by Friedrich Frœbel's educational models is a good example. By roughly reproducing the wooden elements of the educational system invented by this German educator, who died in 1852, and making them available to the public in an exhibition space, Debuilding (2001) functions on several levels. Apparently, it is a succession of constructions and destructions, which Aurélien Froment archives in the manner of Robert Smithson, but when we know that Paul Klee, Joseph Albers, Le Corbusier and Franck Lloyd Wright were all children of the Frœbel teaching method, Debuilding invites us to re-read the history of modernism.

[10] Greil Marcus, Lipstick traces, ed. Allia, 3rd edition, 2000.

[11] In the theory of general relativity, wormholes are passages that connect two distinct points in the universe.

[12] Les Vampires (1915-1916) is a series of 10 films recounting the adventures of journalist Philippe Guérande, assisted by Mazamette, as he battles a gang of bandits called the Vampires.

Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind them things that can be weighed and measured (...) or is it not also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing except the mystery of spectral connections between people far removed in space and time, but speaking, as it were, the same language [10]? asks Greil Marcus in the introduction to Lipstick Traces. In response to this question, the piece Inventaire de succession (2006), centred around the character of Irma Vep alias Juliette Berthaud alias Musidora alias Jeanne Roque, is fairly characteristic of these metonymic shifts that form wormholes [11]. These spatio-temporal connections are known as EisteinRosen bridges. in historical time. In this assemblage of images on several planes, the passage from one character to another is made by means of homonymy distributed around the axis formed by the different pseudonyms assumed by the main performer in Louis Feuillade's film Les Vampires [12], in which Irma Vep officiates. Once again, the name of this femme fatale of popular cinema, who left a lasting impression on the spirit of her time, creates an anachronistic network of female characters within the same composition. These subterranean links between disparate events, like long echoes that merge from afar, underline the poetic use of reference in Aurélien Froment's work. Few elements are enough to thwart the effects of authority, so that each source generates its own correspondences and the resulting effects of meaning.

[13] Exhibition from 19 November 2005 to 14 January 2006 at the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers.

[14] See Loose Associations by Ryan Gander, 2003, in Trouble. 4, Spring 2004.

In another mode of correspondence, this time epistolary, De toute personne réelle, vivante ou morte is an installation made up of 50 small cardboard boxes, each containing 300 copies of a pair of images exchanged with the artist Ryan Gander. This collection of 100 different postcards, made from images that the artists had collected with a view to reassembling them for the exhibition [13], was laid out on a 50 m2 floor made by re-using Frœbel's educational modules. What seems to unite these different categories of images (reproductions of works, objects, street scenes, etc.) is a principle of free association at work in the practices of both artists [14].

[15] See William Eggleston, The Democratic Forest, Doubleday-Secker & Warburg, New York-London, 1989.


[16] Conceived by the Hungarian Frigyes Karinthy, the idea of six degrees of separation dates back to 1929. Using the vocabulary of the six degrees of freedom found in mechanics, this theoretical idea evokes the possibility that every person on the planet can be linked to anyone else through a chain of individual relationships comprising no more than five other links (Source: Wikipedia).

This democratic attention [15] perhaps explains the appearance of the figure of Aby Warburg in some of Aurélien Froment's work. For this art historian, whose research methods revolutionised the way the discipline was thought about in the last century, any type of representation was significant when it came to establishing proof of the survival and circulation of forms across time and space. For example, a small drawing inspired by a Warburg photograph of the Hopi Indians shows Roger Tomalty in the guise of a historian standing next to an Indian whose back is adorned with a tattoo, a drawing by Arcosanti (The Return of the Cliff-Dwellers). This tattoo was also the subject of a text for the catalogue published in the journal of the Centre national de la photographie on the occasion of the exhibition Pale Fire (2003). In this text, Aurélien Froment presented a tattoo project based on Arcosanti's plan. But Pale Fire is also a novel by Nabokov, whose title Philippe Thomas translated into French and used in the plural for his exhibition at the CAPC in Bordeaux in 1990, and whose catalogue was used for Une pièce à conviction (2006). The book, whose orange cover has been exposed to the sun and the moon and which now reveals the projected shadow of a balcony ironwork, is protected from further revelations inside a black box. In this way, the Marabout game continues throughout Aurélien Froment's work, and it is always possible to take one piece as a starting point and link it by different degrees of separation [16] to another piece.

Aurélien Froment is currently in residence at Point Ephémère, working on a film projection manual. The book, made up entirely of black and white images, shows every stage from the arrival of the reels in the projection booth to the screening of the film. Aurélien plays himself in the film, as he is also the projectionist. Another film, entitled Molly, is in preparation and will extend the links between his work and the film Fitzcarraldo. Finally, work on Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland will extend his thoughts on montage. Each additional piece, rather than pointing the work in a particular direction, aims to extend it, to open up a new horizon; by increasing its surface area in this way, the ensemble opens up the possibility of new ramifications between the individual pieces that make it up. Emblematic of this approach, La fin des films (2000), a set of cards handed out at the entrance to the screening on which the end of the film was told, emphasises that once the destination is known, there is always the pleasure of moving on.