Jean-François Peyret
Re:walden matériau thoreau - Performance - 2010
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 12
Performance
In July 1845, in a wood near Concord (Massachusetts), Henry-David Thoreau, aged 27, who hadn't yet invented Civil Disobedience, built a cabin with his own hands on the edge of Walden Pond. He lived there alone for two years and two months. When he once again became a "sojourner of civilized life", he spent seven years writing the book inspired by this experience, Walden; or, Life in the woods. Almost 400 pages of it. At an average of 40 pages an hour, a good dozen hours of thorough reading as it is called, are necessary to get to the last line: "the sun is but a morning star". Now, knowing that, according to official figures, an installation is visited in 4’48’’, we can understand the difficulties of the installationist to get people to stay in the box. A challenge? Yes, because there will always be those to protest that profound, solitary and concentrated writing should be read in the same way and that the only good reader is one sitting (or lying down). Let us bet however in this digital age, that our brains used to explore new zones, for better or worse, are sensory equipped for adventure, for a wander into our cabin, simultaneously music box, image box and chatterbox. Every machine is a machine of/to memory. Ours will combine in arbitrary fashion real or recombined memories (every machine is a combination), a real fake memory committed collectively. A minor crime.
