RAYMOND GERVAIS
Finir
From April 11th to May 25th 2012
Opening on April 11th from 6pm to 10pm
Performance by Frédéric Fisbach on April 11th at 7:30pm
Performance by Sylvain Chauveau on May 9th at 7:30pm
Performance by Remy Héritier on May 23rd at 7:30pm
Encounter with Raymond Gervais, Franck Leibovici and Jacinto Lageira, April 18th at 7:30pm
Written like a score, the installation places Debussy and Beckett in dialogue, re-staging them towards the end of their creative process, at the point when they were respectively asking themselves how they should finish, wondering about the possible failure of their production, and therefore wondering "how" and "what to do" — because finishing still entails doing something. The fact that Beckett was an amateur pianist who liked to play certain pieces by Debussy, the fact they both lived in Paris and are also both buried there, and their concern over finishing a work, and, more importantly, the fact that Raymond Gervais had previously pursued separate projects on the two artists who are finally united in this piece, are just some of the elements making up this sober staging which Gervais names a "poetics of finishing". Taking certain lines from one of the last texts Beckett wrote, Stirrings Still (1988) ("Oh all to end"), and the title of his last poem "What is the word" (1989), and Debussy's last three sonatas, imagined yet never composed (Sonatas No. 4, 5 and 6), to produce both concrete and figurative resonances between the two approaches, Raymond Gervais left any possible ending or completion pending by accomplishing an artistic gesture which is itself located somewhere between being and non-being.
Read full text by Jacinto Lageira.
About Raymond Gervais.
Listen to the conference with Raymond Gervais, Jacinto Lageira et Franck Leibovici.