Seule la main..., Solo la mano...

VIDEO, in English (Vancouver)

VIDEO, in French (Beirut)

VIDEO, in Italian (Macchiagodena)

VIDEO, shooting of the performance in Macchiagodena, Italy.

PHOTOS by Petra Benovsky performance in Macchiagodena.

The Only the hand… performance started in Vancouver in February 2007 when I visited the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design to meet with animation students. At this occasion an evening of image and music improvisation was organized by the Computational Poetics group where I did a four hand animation performance with Aleksandra Dulic and a duet with musician Stefan Smulovitz. For this duet, I choose to work from a sentence that had been brought to my attention by my French friend Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, an eminent specialist of Pasolini and of animation cinema : Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

Hervé knew very well that this sentence would interest me for many reasons : the fact that it expresses itself in the form of a paradox and also the fact that that it centers on the gesture of erasing which had become a central element of my live animation performances. He has heard about “the sentence” during a conference given by professor Carlo Ossola. Skipping the details, I should say that this sentence was apocryphally attributed to the German mystic Master Eckart. At any rate, this idea of associating truth and erasing has a very ancient history. Traces of it are found a bit everywhere, in the Gospels, in Dante amongst other,

Beyond the austere mystical undertones of this sentence, what interest me fist and foremost in it is its precise relationship with my workflow when I do live improvised animation, alternately drawing and erasing. The animated movement cannot appear without the action of erasing. It also interest me because it relates the question of truth to very physical actions that put the body into mortion, that is writing and erasing, and not just to the act of “saying the truth” although speech is always present as a ground. It seemed to me that the impossibility to attribute this sentence to any single author did authorized me to give it a meaning that suited my needs without necessarily discarding all of the possible historical interpretation of it.

I did the first performance in English. I continued several times in French (Seule la main qui efface peut écrire la vérité) in Toronto, Beirut, Montreal and Chicoutimi. In Beirut, I regretted not having done the necessary preparation to be able to do it in Arabic. Actually my stay was too short for the amount of work that would have been needed in order to do it correctly. Nevetheless, this planted in my mind the idea of taking advantage of all of the occasions that would permit me to do the performance in as many languages as possible. It has become a project. And the objective of associating the austere theme of erasing carried by the sentence to the burgeoning abundance of virtually all the languages add another layer of paradox and gives a less unilateral value to the whole enterprise : to advent truth must not only face the exercise of taking away all superfluities, but also engage itself in the infinite repetition of all the idioms of mankind.

I first thought that the end product would be a DVD set with the captures of all the different linguistic versions of the performance. I now think that the simultaneous viewing of different versions, which would permit to create a vaster dynamic and plastic ensemble, would be more interesting than a mere collection of versions on a DVD. What makes it visually interesting is the fact that all the performances generally have the same structure (because of the structure of the sentence itself and because of the music which is always the same) but that they also are all very different in terms of timing and of visual and dynamic construction. So when it will be technically possible, I now want to do the performance with a three screens setup (two previous versions being shown on each of the side screens, and the new one on the center). The ultimate point would be a video installation with a wall of video screens on which wold be shown at once all the versions in different languages performed in different countries. The multiplication of languages is not enough, it is a necessary condition that all the performances in different languages be done in front of audiences who speak and understand those language in the very places where they live. In May 2008, I performed it in Italian in the village of Macchiagodena, in the mountains, 200km east of Rome and at ZOCulture in Catania (Solo la mano che cancela puo scrivere la verita). Next January, I will be in Belgium and on Jan. 29, I will be performing the Dutch (Flemmish) version of Only the hand...: Enkel de hand die uitwist kan de waarheid schrijven. On February 7,I will be performing it in Portuguese at the Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa (FBAUL) in Lisbon: Só a mão que apaga pode dizer a verdade. By then, I would be up to 5 different languages.

For more information about Only the hand… and about the conditions of presentation of a performance, please contact Pierre Hébert (ph@pierrehebert.com) .