Invitation Letter to Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou

Montréal, December...

Dear Emmanuelle,

I hope you're fine and that the jetlag is not too heavy after your return from Dallas. How was Texas? How was the conference? I can’t wait to hear from you about these New Cities Future Ruins! I read the curatorial statement on their website, and it sounded great!1

I have just arrived in Montréal where I will stay until mid-January. From 10th to 20^th December, I'm going to participate in the SenseLab event on Whitehead, organized by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, under the title Distributing the Insensible; Performing the Anarchive2. This will be my first real experience with this Montreal-based “research-creation” group. I know quite well and appreciate Manning/Massumi's theoretical bets and lines of flight (Whitehead, Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari...), but I do not yet know how they transfer their conceptual virtuosity into artistic practice, and about their takes on artistic research; I'm really curious. I’ll tell you more after the ten days of these "close reading" sessions, combined with a “thoughts-in-the-act” workshop. In any case the description of the event, focused on Whiteheadian approaches of timelessness and non-sensuous perception - which, in the blurb, aggregate to those of Duchamp's infrathin (inframince), Deleuze’s crystal image (image cristaline), and Gins and Arakawa’s landing sites - is appealing and seem to resonate quite loudly with my concerns around a “renewed temporal ecology of the stage”. By the way, this may be of your interest I guess, Brian is finishing his book Architectures of the unforeseen, I will tell you I hope more if I have the chance to glimpse in.

After this working period I will try to rest a little in Montréal during the Xmas break with a week of vacation, and also Aurélie will visit shortly for a post-residency duo presentation at the Darling Foundry, on the becoming of our piece Alterations3 that we created here in Montréal two years ago.

Last fall was incredibly full, including the production and evaluation of my first artistic part for the doctorate. Intensive work that was happily rewarded with supportive enthusiasm from the external examiners, in particular for the installation and for the chosen methodology.

It is thus after this energizing closure of this first part of the doctoral process that I am writing to you; on the one hand, to inform you of the choices of orientation of the research in relation to the second and last artistic part of the doctoral project which will take place in two years from now, and, on the other hand, in fact, the main reason I am writing, to propose a collaboration, in relation to this second artistic part to come.

Voilà: I wish to continue my experiments on the relations between theatre and time ecology by inviting in the question of architecture. I had already told you a little about this, I remember, during the last summer solstice in the garden in Montmartre. About this intuition – and also the apparent logic – to shift from a critical and deconstructive regime of the “given stage” to a more generative (speculative? postcritical?) dramaturgical dynamic. During and after the development of the work realized for the first artistic part - during which I undertook, in particular, the reconstruction on a 1:1 scale of the open-air theatre where my project The Theatre Season took place - this intuition solidified. Therefore, this idea to extend and enrich the research by directing it towards the (hopefully open and multiple) answers to the following question: what kind of stage/scenic architecture could be generated from these questions of heterochrony, multitemporality and idiorrythmie that occupy me theatrically? Stage/scenic architecture(s) thought in the light of this architecture that is at the heart of your work, as you evoke it at the "edge of everything else", this architecture of and at the edge, this - would you say this? - architecture without architecture... but I'll come back to this a bit later.

More concretely, I would like to set up with you, (if you decide to be involved, which I really hope you will) a research and working group to design and produce a collection of prototypes of "stages/theatres of the future", through which the question of the permutation of agencies between the backstage (the postnatural biosphere and techno-environment) and the proscenium would be at stake and at play, in which the thought and experience of a temporal complexity (these anthroposcenic chronotopias I am research-wise speculating on...) would be the performative (and architectonic?) stake. How to prototype the stage of the future?... that is – could be – therefore the question. I acknowledge that already we will have to take care of this complex notion of future, as well as that of prototype. Elie During's thinking in this latter (2002), i.e. the shift of definition from the prototype as an ideal prospective object (as model) to that of an experimental object per se (as potential), interests me very much; or even a possibly paradoxical, undecidable, duality of objects operating, at least, in two directions, in a programmatic way, with a projection towards an eventual future construction, and also, and above all, autonomously, from and through a raw and specific performativity (shall we call those: scenes? protoscenes? scenotypes?...), with no purpose of construction ahead. Regarding the future, in addition to the above-mentioned suspicion of western linear conceptions of time, we might also consider what is going on in term of collapsology, solastalgia, and terraforming scenarios...

This invitation aligns with our very first inspiring discussions during which I asked you if and how theories such as O.O.O., new materialism, speculative realism or affect theory, have been impacting the (magnetic) field and the course of contemporary architecture thinking. After the wonderfully detailed visit that you so generously took me on a few months ago of Francois Roche’s exhibition at the FRAC Centre, after listening to you, on several occasions declining, decoding and so vividly celebrating the radical architecture of the 60s and 70s, after reading your work about how architects (the tangenting dear ones!) have been playing with ambients, spheres, obliques, voids, crystals, and blobs... after discovering, with joy, your critical expertise towards this undisciplined architecture that has been challenging its bases through  "performance" and/or art exhibition (through mise en scène?), and finally knowing that you are currently at the threshold of a doctoral project on computational, robotic, discreet architecture, I thought that, maybe, you could be interested (please say yes!) in the idea of spending some time in "artistic research" with all these focal lenses, all these filters and fluxes, to crashtest how all this can meet this question of the emergence of a "stage of the future", a stage of a theatre without theatre - a perforated, diffracted, rescaled, altered, glitching stage; a stage that might emerge and vanish at the same time, that pops up from the thinking of redirecting agencies and attentions within and towards non-human temporalities, whether oceanic or algorithmic...

Hence I propose that this project would be hosted at the crucible of my research in Helsinki on the contemporary mutations of scenic thinking and practice. I would like to invite you to work "at home" from the historical perspective of western theatre, and at the intersection of its (historical and metaphorical) relationship with architecture. Yann Rocher's magnificent work, Théâtres en Utopie - a catalog of incredible projects, over the centuries, of innovative and "futuristic" constructions of what is called a theatre, that is, I copy-paste from the Cambridge Dictionary online, a " building, room, or outside structure with rows of seats, each row usually higher than the one in front, from which people can watch a performance or other activity", can be used as a launching pad. It is such an exciting book, we've already talked about it, and the huge investigative work produced for its realization - already done, such a gift seeing as I should have done this research myself before this project on the stage of the future! - is invaluable. However, at the same time, I do think that our project would (will?!) be based on the endeavor to go beyond this history of the construction of alternative/eccentric/enhanced theatre-as-building, a theatre that is still one, still matching the dictionary definition. The theatre, and the stage, on which I would like to invite you to enter and speculate on with me, with hopefully other visiting collaborators, is indeed no longer this built space, containing structure, straight architecture, in this sense. This theatre is neither a palace of crystal or rocks, nor the in vitro/in teatro reproduction of a cave, a mountain or a spacecraft, neither a theatre-machine, nor a marvel of industrial innovation offering technical possibilities to increase the sensations that a (built) stage can stimulate. It is something else, probably less tangible, more elusive. This theatre is probably not, at the other end, total exteriority, a new type of Matrix-like Theatrum Mundi... an expanding hydra-like dataverse that seems to absorb us in... But then, what?

In this undertaking of withdrawing from the mandatory « building », of these theatres that are no longer, we will, for sure, have to answer the inevitable question "So how is this still (a) theatre?" This question comes up all the time when one is in contact with my work. It’s a question that as we know comes from our Western way of thinking and the passion for binary oppositions and the awkward need for establishing dichotomic systems of dominance. After reading your publications, I think it will be interesting to discuss the parallel that can be drawn between this "theatre that is not" and "this architecture that is not, either". For a few years now, you know, this is what has slowly led me to this artistic research; I have followed on the one hand the timeless promises of Derridean deconstruction, and on the other, the suspicions of the identity of queer theory. I have sought, in and through practice, to thwart the systemic logic of an established, dominant stage thinking - the theatre that is, therefore - by trying to develop dramaturgical strategies to disturb its temporal boundaries, claiming that the here-and-now-in-between-human-only theatre is not efficient anymore to account for a new climatic regime, «to sensitize» it, to borrow the term from Latour. At first, I called - I don't have a passion for exegesis, and I find it suspicious in the field of artistic research, but I do like to name or rename things, to propose terms, to bet on neologisms and formules-ouvroirs... - this theatre impermanent. The term appeared five years ago in opposition - friendly, I find its work relevant - to Gwenael Morin's Permanent Theatre (Théâtre Permanent). Impermanent in its practice, but also in its foundation, its very definition. Its infrastructure. Its hardware.

A little later, I renamed it as heterochronic theatre, as opposed to a theatre that would be homochronic, subjugated to the absolutism of the Hic et Nunc, the sacrosanct here and now. Recently the terms of deep stage and hyperdramatic have appeared in my work, in relation on the one hand, to the deep time at the heart of the current debate around the Anthropocene, and on the other with Timothy Morton's hyperobjects and dark ecology. But I stop there, we will have, I hope, time to discuss this, and to probe the resonances with this architecture that you are working on.

To return to the collaborative project that I propose, here is already a first drafted description of what I have in mind. This is kind of an abstract for a research project grant application (I will try to raise some funds for the project).

SPECULATIVE ARCHITECTURES OF ANTHROPOSCENIC CHRONOTOPIAS/RESEARCH GROUP

After focusing on the notion of scenic temporal turn(s) through the revision of his theatre practice towards an ecologically-minded stage that is fit for the temporal dimensions of the Anthropocene, Roumagnac's Implementations on "(Neg)Anthroposcenic Chronotopias ; Multitemporality, Heterochrony, and Idiorrythmie at Play" logically finds expansion in the research potentiality of the intersection of his focus on theatre and time ecology with speculative/radical/relational architecture. The second part of his research process will build upon investigations led by a collaborative research group. The intention through this collaborative process over the course of two years is to make 'prototypes of future stages/theatres' emerge from the specific research concern on the urgent need for a mutation of the production and distribution of time of a theatrical event, in response to the contemporary planetary techno-eco-dramaturgical challenges. The research group would situate itself within the double cross-fertilizing context of artistic research and contemporary art, within an interdisciplinary dynamic of investigation. Its aim would be to foster new plateaus for thought and experimentation on the question of stage, architecture, ecology, and futurity. The initial research group would intend thus to cultivate potentials across encounters with fields such as performing and visual arts, architecture theory, new media studies, performance studies, contemporary philosophy, future studies and ethics in the context of the current global ecological turmoil.

Once our prototypes of the stage of the future are made, we will probably assemble them "somewhere" and « somehow » and for "a time", and invite an audience to answer the question - or at least to stay some time with it - with us of « how it is theatre or a stage ? ». Once again it is not about avoiding the question, but about re-examining it. And by the materialized redistribution of the elements of the definition, perhaps we will succeed in bringing out why it is, perhaps, theatre.  In your article La Grande Occasion you quote this beautiful phrase by Philippe Rahm (I translate rawly): « the architecture exhibited in the form of speculative objects (...) does not represent, but presents spaces and times, physical, climatic, geographical, physiological which are then freely interpretable, socially, culturally, politically, psychologically. ».

So what do you say? Would you be interested already, in the idea of setting up this research group with me?

Ideally, it would be great to work in collaboration with the School of Architecture and the Scenography Department of Aalto University in Helsinki. As I mentioned, I think I should be able to raise some money to enable the project as part of my doctorate. Ideally, it would be great to be able to take on board, for temporary sessions, artists and architects, who would visit the project, for a shorter period of time. Perhaps we could try to organize “stages of work” in several places and cities (Helsinki, Paris... Tokyo? Barcelona? Palo Alto?...). If this happens, it will also be important to discuss together, and with all the participants, the common and collective character (which is proper to the traditional "theatrical work" - in this I am conservative!) of such a project and its relation to the dynamic of a more individual research, as part of a doctoral evaluation. I think that it is possible to carry out together a hybrid project, ethically "sustainable", clearly exposing the complexity of this double nature of a collective project and chapter of individual research, in the institutional framework of the doctorate.

Finally, one of my pieces (Backdrop) was selected by the curatorial team of the 2nd Research Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and will be presented in the exhibition You Gotta Say Yes To Another Access from May 11^th to July 2^nd (opening on 10^th May). The curators would like each artist invited in the exhibition to offer a session to present their research in the company of one or two guests, during the weekend following the opening, on May 12^th13^th, 14^th. I thought that this might be the ideal opportunity to talk about the becoming of my research and its ongoing desired encounter with architecture, and in some way to officially launch this research group project. I have submitted a proposal and apparently, I have heard unofficial echoes, I should be funded to invite two people. I think it would be pretty great if you were one of those two people. The second would be my research supervisor Esa Kirkkopelto, who would intervene around the notion of apokatastasis. You will forgive me I hope to have anticipated your agreement by proposing your name, but there is no commitment, only there was in November an emergency to fill in a form and I did not have time to write then the letter I am writing to you now.

I hereby attach a few documents for more detailed information, on my research (the initial "research plan" and the "linking paper" that I sent to my external examiners). It's a bit long but it gives you an overview of the current research, as well as the proposal for Venice, and Esa's intervention abstract.

Tell me what you think of all this; firstly the offer of collaboration and the project of co-creation of the research group, as well as participation in the events of the Research Pavilion in Venice. Please do not stress about any of this, there is no immediate urgency because I will not begin to put the project in motion before January/February.

In the meantime, I wish you, dear Emmanuelle, a very beautiful and very peaceful end of the year.

Kisses

Vincent

Postscript: I forgot to thank you for sending to my Instagram the link to Giulio Camillo's Teatro della Memoria. Wow. I have to confess that I did not know this fascinating Franco-Italian Renaissance episode. I will definitely take a closer look. I have the feeling that I could perhaps take inspiration from it for the final examined exposition of my doctorate, which I already project as a fractal, combinatory and multitemporal object, mixing image and verb, overcoming the frustrating dichotomies form(at)/content, practice/writing-about-the-practice, art agency/reflectivity, etc.. By the way, do you think that Borges cryptically referred to Camillo when writing his Aleph? Talking about the former I have kept in mind what you whispered to me by François Roche's "architecture des humeurs", two meters away from that fascinating robot that delicately weaves concrete, about your conviction that Borges might surely be reducible to one single algorithm...

I would be happy to exchange with you, who are now standing at the exciting threshold of a Ph.D. process about research dissemination. I am indeed already contemplating the modalities of the “writing” of this so-called “final” thesis-work – finality which is already an issue for me who tries to get rid of the telic logic and obligation. I am actually already projecting this « final work » as multimodal "struction"4 made of fortuitous collisions, a kind of monster deviating from the scientific reifying canons of the exegesis, and operating through distortions, diffractions, recursions, as alternative dynamics and modes of « récit ». It should, therefore, be a matter of "opening senses" through randomly aggregated « findings » (I am not sure that it is about finding anything though), undermining too significant compositions, offering open navigation through the simultaneity and complementarity of heterogeneous fragments, in order to epistemologically pass the poetics of the art through, hoping for a sensitizing maze, taking the risk of a non-sense mess... Would it be blasphemous in relation to my Derridean oath to quote Guattari here when he speaks about « the mutant, rhythmic trajectory of a temporalization that is capable of holding together the heterogeneous components of a new existential building »5? I don't think so. There is certainly a non-heretic possibility of glamourous overlap and complement between the latter's "heterogenesis" and former's "hauntology" (if I would be a philosopher I would surely be pondering this, but I am not so I keep it here on the surface of an intuition...).

The challenge of this commentary, which is speculated so far as a processual interpretive play should, therefore, be no more the expected explanation or contextualization of the research but the designing of the assemblage itself, still called « writing », or here « commentary » - which is a tricky word for the way it tacitly implies a « critical » distance with an object one is supposed to speak of, or comment on. The question-conundrum being: how to finalize without finalizing a reflective non-reflective project as an autonomous aesthetic object which is not an artwork, but that exceeds the art per se as an illuminating supplement that is not an exegesis neither. Did you just mutter: “good luck”!? Yes, maybe it is a dead end. The work is haunted by Artaud at its core, by the disaster of an impossible theatre...

The challenge of the thesis - you will tell me this when we will be working together in Korea on the fourth session of our weSANK project for which you will eventually and for my greatest happiness accept to be a co-convenor - is to “find one's own voice” (“trouver sa voix” you will say, which triggers in French the nice homophony voix/voie (voice/way) that blends together the vocal and the processual). I will agree on that and add that this quest gets complex if one considers that there might be no “proper” voice but a plural and polyphonic rumble.

The challenge will be for me to summon and at the same time foil the canons of the academic request (at the end of the day this suspicious unitary “I” will (should) be the doctor!) and to undermine the expectations projected on theatre directing (commonly seen as organizing, composing, choosing, sceno-graphing...)  that I already dislocate in the practice. In short, the question of the artist-author that has been so much already addressed and complexified meets here the problem of the monovocality of the research(er's) argumentative affirmation... Hence, I foresee this “commentary” impossible on many levels: 1. temporally because, telic, it would contradict the thinking which is developed in the practice itself (diffraction, multitemporality...), 2. vocally because the reflecting subject might turn into a floating subjectivity intentionally wobbling in front of a leaking object 3. meta-artistically because of the necessary redoubling through the writing of the suspension of "directing" i.e. ordering components as a significant stage... This commentary might then appear as the paradoxical locus of a double-bind (mastery/non-mastery - unitary doctoral voice/polyphony - conclusive work/multitemporal openness), which at best will free-up a generative counter-performative space that might trigger an environmental mode of sensing, but at worst create an impasse that makes no sense at all, rejected as epistemically weak. And I even don't want to start to think here anything about the nightmare, and the insufferable contradiction, of a logocentric monofocal public defense as a final protocolar ceremony conditioned by hyperpresence and focusing on mono-logo-expertise...!

That is why I am already thinking of this Camillo-like design of a paradoxical object-stage-milieu, whose apparent reflective weakness would be contradicted by the surprise of a slow-forming sensing wave, vaguely implicit (our French word "vague" for "wave" and "vague" at the same time is also nice), stranded, for this commentary will be doomed to failure, on the banks of an academic ghostly request for a clearly stated reflectivity. An attempt to generate a specific idiom as an encounter between my artistic practice, the cherished Derridean ghosts(writers) and irreducible « res(is)tances », queer bad tendencies of dislocations and denials of solidifications, Borgesian bifurcations6, and even though I have tried to go sideways the popular Deleuze & Guattari path, which is not fair considering the latter's ecosophic legacy, Guattarian chaosmosic schizo-montages... So thank you for adding Camillo in the (de)construction site, it surely brings for me great potential for the designing and experimenting this (anti-)architecture of senses!

Artistic research, even if it is partly based on the needed reconquest of their once stolen speech by artists, cannot replace that of art historians, by replicating the same language. However, respeaking without mimicking the dominant rhetorical language, trying to create an idiom, so to say, is quite exciting. I will be happy to talk about all this more at this special moment when you find yourself today at the start of a thesis on the theory of architecture. Maybe you will tell me that it is a "theoretical thesis", not artistic research. However, knowing your penchant for the psychedelic pop-ups on Superstudio's grids, Mallarmé's hidden measures and numbers, and computational flickering, I am guessing that you might not hold on to the logoarchy of a blocky "theoretical thesis" without engaging what coding, discretization, algorithmic reshuffling can "do" to the metabolism of a theoretical thesis on contemporary architecture. I can't wait to talk more about all! Take care.