L’intrigue se cherche dans le dénouement de son nœud is the collaborative ‘writing’ of an exhibition that has emerged from a conversation between the artists and the curator, and which recounts, step by step, its own conditions of conception and evolution. Borrowing from the vocabulary of the theatre, the title of the project defines a critical and working framework that reflects the process of the exhibition’s meta-creation.
In the French theatrical lexicon, nœud [the climax] is that moment when all the elements of the plot come together, the suspense of an unknown denouement to come, a creative entanglement that prompts the realisation of the final action. In L’intrigue se cherche dans le dénouement de son nœud, the nœud symbolises the exchanges between the artists, the multiple directions of work and orientations of the project, and the idea that the exhibition writes its own intrigue [plot] while resolving the creative and collaborative tensions within the realisation of new artworks. Reflections by the artists also gave rise to an exploration of theatricality: the sound of language and of objects, performativity, mise-en-scène, interpretation....
L’intrigue se cherche dans le dénouement de son noeud takes the shape of a publication and an exhibition. The publication shows the artists’ ‘workshop of ideas’, which developed over a cross-residency between Marseille and Glasgow, and in a remote ‘transmission’ of ideas, documentation and sketches. It returns to their conversations and reveals the disparate threads subsequently used to weave the exhibition.
Among these threads, the very idea of the exchange - of the remote communication undertaken between two artists from different countries and who speak different languages - provided substance in the creation of the project. The artists’ conversations have revolved around the structure of language (spoken, of the body or transmitted by different technologies), the interference and misunderstanding that happens between languages and the creative potential that arises from language misheard. The artists explored the structure of language as well as the cultural veils that can layer upon it, thus, the exhibition takes as its subtitle one of the main ideas that grew from the exchanges: l’échafaudage du langage / the scaffolding of language.