CONTINUITY IS AN ILLUSION
Continuity is an illusion: this was the conclusion the physicist Jean Perrin reached after his first indirect observations of atoms in the early twentieth century.
The idea holds true, too, for our lives, which unfold on a less minute scale.
For there is no such thing as a logical sequence to the words others speak, the images that imprint themselves on our minds, the thoughts that come to us, or the memories we retain of having lived through it all.
Nothing follows from anything.
Hence, perhaps, the intuition that the world is, above all, fragmentary, torn, interrupted.
Dis-Cursus is a self-generating installation by Anaïs Escot, a writer, and Denis Vedelago, a video artist. On view in the multimedia space of the Kateb Yacine Library in Échirolles, on the outskirts of Grenoble, until 19 February, it is mesmerising.
Before us, a horizontal image-window is divided into four rectangles. Each contains a screen set against a field of uniform colour: from left to right, seafoam green, pale grey, faded lavender and brown. On each screen, a few seconds of film repeat four or five times; elsewhere, a sentence slowly writes itself, fades, then slowly writes itself again, two or three times in succession. Meanwhile, a sound installation brings us other sentences, sounds, music, small familiar noises.
Each fragment appears in an order determined by chance. Together, they take the form of three lists that unfold, mingle, interrupt one another and endlessly trade places:
THINGS SEEN
A woman raises a cup of coffee to her lips.
A spinning top turns.
A man runs along a deserted beach.
A couple strolls along a jetty.
In a 1970s apartment, a woman gets up to stroke an armchair.
A man opens a telephone directory and searches for a name.
THINGS HEARD
“There are those who answer the question of happiness with work,
and then there are the others.”
A door slamming.
Footsteps.
A cigarette burning down.
THINGS READ
“The sky cracks, tears open; the clouds are swallowed by the mud.”
“You cannot remember what does not exist.”
“It only ends much later, after nightfall.”
Here is the world. It is not the story we make of it.
It does not bear the meaning we would give it in order to understand it.
It has no reason. No logic. Nothing.
And yet something profound is being said about our lives.
And we remain spellbound, like the character in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, who played and replayed the recording of his memories, unable to grasp what had happened on that day that had meant so much to him—a day whose significance leaves no trace on the tape he is listening to now.