Poetic Scalpel

»Would you say that your (artistic) practice is political? If so, how would you describe its political dimension?«

Thank you for the question.

Our first reflex was to answer: Yes, our practice is political.

It was without doubt. Our work deals with contemporary issues – climate change, management of fossil resources, food management – that suffer a lot from the lack of political courage and we felt that we could not clear ourselves of the responsibility. We raise questions and try to bring a language to process all the challenges that we will face in the years to come. We felt also that our engagement in creating Éditions Supernova was from the same process, acting for the community by bringing tools, some elements of thought that will made us better armed to face our ultra-media world.

But actually our practice is not political, our practice is poetic. That is the reason why we choose to share our blog, HAÏ, in Schlossghost.

Magali & Cédric

Poetic Scalpel

The world goes too fast. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Speed and Politics. Over the past 20 years, Paul Virilio’s titles have tirelessly enumerated the staggering acceleration of the human world at the pace of expanding technologies.

How to grasp this flow that through its acceleration, but also through its content, outstrips any possibility of human understanding? It is necessary to find arms for a critical combat. Methodical means to fight a war against this onslaught, without falling into the trap of using the same weapons. In a sense, it is necessary, as in a particle accelerator, to break down the matter constituting this reality in order to perceive its algorithmic foundations. This is what HAÏ works at. Magali Daniaux and Cédric Pigot enumerate epochal angularities in brief flashes. Glances. Augenblick = Augenblitz.

Each news item offered to us exceeds the moment of its own foundation in reality to interpenetrate much broader areas.

This paradox is only apparent: by reducing the projection surface (three lines, an image, a title), Daniaux and Pigot expand the magnetic and resonance possibilities of each of their collages. For here is where the critical weapon’s cutting edge is at play. The aim is not to accumulate but first to eliminate the surplus, to dissolve in order to better coagulate. Solve et coagula. Their collage of words/texts are juicers of meaning; by fracturing content in their centrifuge, they extract clear political kernels that deceive us like aphorisms. The spirit of Japanese poetic martial arts is not far away. HAÏ: haiku. More precisely, they construct moki. In free three-line verse, they sharpen the semantics confronted with the friction of the archive image.

Philippe Boisnard, 2016