THE HALLE SAINT-PIERRE MEETINGS 2015-2016

par Françoise Py

October 9, 2015

organized by Françoise Py

at the Halle Saint-Pierre on Saturday, November 7, 2015, then from November 2015 to June 2016 on the second Saturday of each month from 3:30 to 6:30 PM.
Reception by Martine Lusardy

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Pablo Picasso: Writings and Statements, set to music by Bernard Ascal.
Aruna: French, Spanish and South American songs.

The afternoon of Saturday, November 7 will include two one-hour parts. In the first part, Bernard Ascal will present Picasso's Writings, most of them unpublished, which he has made into a book accompanied by a CD. Through spoken and sung voice, Picasso's texts reveal themselves in their incredibly innovative rhythm. The conference will include readings and listening moments. In the second part, singer Aruna will take us on a journey through songs.

Bernard Ascal is a poet and painter linked to surrealism since the sixties. Author, composer, performer, he has set to music Picasso's Writings but also many surrealist poets like Philippe Soupault or Aimé Césaire. He will present us with the monograph that has just been dedicated to him, Sorties de pistes, published by Le Petit Véhicule, with texts by José Pierre.
Aruna is an extraordinary singer with a deep and warm voice, quite exceptional. Leaving her native Béarn at the age of 16, she traveled and sang with the gypsies who adopted her. She travels the world, particularly India and Latin America, and sings for the most disadvantaged audiences. She has just returned from Mexico where she completed a six-month humanitarian mission, singing in prisons, hospitals, and impoverished neighborhoods. Her repertoire includes her own songs as well as the most beautiful French, Spanish, and South American songs. In the vein of a Mercedes Sosa, she brings forgotten chants to life. She accompanies herself on guitar, an instrument she plays instinctively, with gypsy accents. (You can hear her songs on YouTube at Free Live Sessions and at Aruna Lapassatet).

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Afternoon dedicated to Antonin Artaud.

Screening of the film by Gérard Mordillat and Jérôme Prieur En compagnie d'Antonin Artaud, le momo from 1993, based on Jacques Prevel's book, with Samy Frey, Marc Barbé, Julie Jézéquel and Valérie Jeannet, 79'.
Film presentation by Jérôme Prieur.
Round table moderated by Dominique Calmé with the director and two collaborators from the Cahiers Artaud, Virginie Di Ricci and Nicolas Rozier.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Screening of the film by Catherine Binet, Les Jeux de la Comtesse Dolingen de Gratz, 1981, 113', with Michaele Lonsdale, Emmanuelle Riva and Marina Vlady, freely inspired by Unica Zürn's Sombre Printemps.
Presentation by Jean-François Rabain.
Debate.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

Homage to Rodolfo Krasno. Presentation of the artist by Christine Frérot.

Screening of the film by Guillermo Krasnopolsky on Krasno.
Round table with the director, Christine Frérot, Pierre Bouchat, Jean-Clarence Lambert and Julio Le Parc.

Jean-Clarence Lambert and Julio Le Parc.

The Genesis of Krasno

Krasno's work is a story of birth: gestation, hatching, growth. We never finish being born and each new birth reveals us to ourselves and to others. The egg is the maternal womb, our first dwelling, it is also mother earth, the womb of the earth, our last dwelling. It is also all the shelters we have given ourselves, all our nests, our cocoons. For Krasno, it is also the studio. He writes: "the egg has become my studio." Hatching, but also sometimes "de-hatching": we come out of the egg, but we can also enter it again, in a return to the origin.

Krasno's work is deeply existential, it is a life-work, a work that meditates on life and helps the viewer to orient themselves in life. These adult bodies emerging from the egg — torsos, hands, legs, heads — offer a temporal shortcut from birth to adulthood. Time is suspended. The third term — death — is inscribed in the work, in this suspension, as in vanitas, Memento mori, to invite us to savor the present, to give it meaning. It is a work that works as much on time as on space, on temporal unfolding and time as virtuality.

We have within us the virtuality of flight that is creation. We take flight through imagination, through dreams. Krasno, by making us emerge from the egg, exalts this potential for flight through poetry and art, but he also reminds us that we are subject to gravity: we are these strange birds riveted to the ground who will never be able to fly again. Like the Dodo, exalted by Lewis Carroll and Malcolm de Chazal, who became a kind of prehistoric bird due to its disappearance. No doubt Krasno has immortalized us in his fragile paper so that one day we will remember that there were strange wingless birds who would have wanted to fly. He shows us our human condition as voluntary exiles, with no possible return to the native land — as if this land had disappeared or was not yet born. This exile is of course Krasno himself, who left Argentina and became from nowhere, except from his den-dwelling-studio, his ultimate egg, but it is also all of us chained, held back, without possibility of leaving, immobilized, even imprisoned. Hence the constrained eggs: iron, ropes, nails, plaster, armor, breastplates, plexiglass boxes, grilles. We are at the heart of this dialectic: held back and ready to leave, immobilized, but already almost in flight. Existential dimension that is doubled by a political dimension. Even far from his country, Krasno feels the abuses of the military dictatorship in his own flesh. His suffering takes form in his sculpture.

When Krasno is invited to create a large work for the Villejuif school complex, he dedicates this work to youth: the twenty characters molded from life and placed on the façades are as many Icaruses about to fly, climb, jump. Youth embodies this hope of a more just and freer society to be invented. Krasno in his works tries to awaken in us this youth and this desire to fight, to create, to take flight.

Virtuality of flight, but also virtuality of white, of the blank page, smooth or grainy. Paper has replaced bronze, it is its exact opposite. Far from defying time, it is fragile, degrades, alters in light. Hence the plexiglass boxes, sorts of glass cages, which emphasize this fragility. Paper becomes shell, becomes skin. A page become body, a body become page, a body like a blank page where everything remains to be written, where the body writes itself, inscribes itself. Silence, memory and forgetting. Patrick Modiano speaking of the writer — but he could have said it of Krasno too — "it is perhaps his vocation, before the great white page of forgetting, to make some half-erased words resurface, like these lost icebergs that drift on the surface of the ocean." This will be all of Krasno's work for his book-objects with poets, such as Jean-Clarence Lambert or Octavio Paz: his Pierres éparses are precisely like nomadic icebergs.»
By Françoise Py

Saturday, January 23, 2016 from 3:30 to 6:30 PM

(Rescheduled following the November 13, 2015 attacks)

Screening / debate En compagnie d'Antonin Artaud
film by Gérard Mordillat and Jérôme Prieur based on Jacques Prevel's book, with Samy Frey, Marc Barbé, Julie Jézéquel and Valérie Jeannet, 79'.

In the presence of Jérôme Prieur, and Nicolas Rozier for the Cahiers Artaud
Meeting moderated by Dominique Calmé Halle Saint Pierre – auditorium (free admission)

May 1946: after nine years of internment, Antonin Artaud finally leaves the Rodez asylum to return to Paris among his own. This day is Jacques Prevel's illumination. A young poet, he will follow Artaud in his wanderings between the Ivry sanatorium and Saint Germain des Près, while pursuing the same quest for poetry, drugs and the absolute. Prevel becomes the disciple and provider, the companion of this man of genius whose chronicle he relates until his death two years later. In this post-war Paris where he knows misery and suffering, Prével attaches himself forever to Antonin Artaud, who was his only friend. In this astonishing inspired "biography," Gérard Mordillat signs, with Jérôme Prieur his accomplice, a film as rough as writing can be, as free as poetry...

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Laurence Imbert D., painter and sculptor, dialogues with her poet and critic friends: Gérard Xuriguera, Fernando Arrabal, Jean-Clarence Lambert, Jean-Yves Bosseur, Daniel Loewers, Jean-Loup Philippe and Marame Al Masri.
Screening of the film Laurence Imbert D.: l'entre deux mondes.
Musical interludes: Jérémie Lecoq (cello and voice).
Presentation of Gérard Xuriguera's book: Sur l'aile d'un songe: Laurence Imbert D. (Éditions F.V.W., November 2015).

Laurence Imbert's painting opens the Gardens of the Sky to us. These are distant landscapes with no resemblance to the known, unexplored regions with unpredictable colors and forms. In her imaginary cartographies, the infinitely small joins the infinitely great. Her cosmogonies refer to the cellular universe, to embryology. She thus rediscovers Victor Hugo's fundamental intuition who noted: "everything is the atom and everything is the star." In this painting of energy in suspension, deflagrations neighbor with pacified zones, muted tones with brilliant colors, earths with cinnabars.

The space-time that she constantly explores is also our historical time revisited and reworked. Like Matta who said: "I am not a painter, I am a shower," she shows through painting. In a learned painting, she revisits the great abstract artists of the 20th century to distance them: geometric abstraction (expression of rhythm through colors and lines), lyrical abstraction (reciprocal agreements between sounds and tones). Her affinity with contemporary music is particularly affirmed in her latest series in homage to Pollock. This detour through Pollock is also a way of saluting Hayter, her neighbor on rue Cassini, her immense friend who died in her arms, who in the forties opened the way of all over to Pollock, as Pierre-François Albert recalls in his recent Hayter, un génie du trait. In a danced performance, she turns around the canvas, or enters inside it, to cover it with interlacings, all-over energetic networks where the eye gets lost.

But paradoxically she reintroduces a center, a white circle, in a square format, as in Echec et mat, which literally puts the all-over principle and its non-oriented reading in check. The eye turns around this vacant center, like a navel, an "umbilicus of the limbo," to use Artaud's terms. The center, cosmic nucleus, fundamental emptiness, is also an equivalent of silence. The circle is cut out with real objects. In Pollock, the real surreptitiously invited itself in the form of sand, broken glass, string or nails caught in the paint laces. In Laurence Imbert, these are enormous demonstrative nails that affirm a return to the third dimension. She also reintroduces into her painting the brushstroke, the direct contact of the tool with the canvas that dripping abolished. The summoned references are both exalted and put to the test, in a circularity, an eternal return that vivifies them. There is in her subversion of the reference, diversion, spectacular reversal. Rarely has painting been so alive.

Françoise Py

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Homage to Tzara by Wanda Mihuleac and Éditions Transignum. L'Homme approximatif: Performance show with Wanda Mihuleac, David Napoli, Denis Parmain, Guy Chaty, Siewert Van Dyck, Ioana Tomsa, Cornelia Petroiu.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Screening of the film by Gilles Nadeau: Maurice Nadeau: Révolution et Littérature,
presentation by the director.
Debate with the director, Maurice Mourier and Alain Joubert,

Saturday, May 14, 2016

Screening of the film by Fabrice Maze on Claude Cahun (Éditions Seven Doc, Phares collection, 2015).
Debate with the director and Anne Egger.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Poetry and songs: Alain Aurenche and Aruna

Practical Information:

Halle Saint-Pierre: 2 rue Ronsard — 74018 Paris, Métro Anvers. www.hallesaintpierre.org

Françoise Py: 06.99.08.02.63, francoise.py@univ-paris8.fr
The Association for the Study of Surrealism is chaired by Henri Béhar