While walking around a street corner, a word might catch our attention. A quiet intervention would disturb the existing environment discreetly. We would encounter, without knowing it, an artwork by Élodie Merland. Native of northern France, graduated from the Dunkirk School of Fine Arts, then of the Toulon School of Fine Arts, Élodie Merland's work includes performance, artist’s books, installation and graffiti of another kind. Highlighting reality without embellishing it, the artist has exhibited, among others, in Dunkirk, Rennes, Folkestone in the United Kingdom, and Roubaix, notably for Watch This Space 9.
Ana Bordenave: When we arrived, we stopped so that you could write with white chalk on a low wall the following sentence: “Seul avec son propre silence” [Alone in his own silence]. Much of your work is embedded in the urban fabric, and these sentences that you write with chalk, spray paint or collage are examples of this. Can we speak of a reappropriation of space, or are you primarily motivated by the search for a new form of communication?
Élodie Merland: To take a piece of wall or choose to invest a space is to appropriate it, for a time. When I was at the Toulon School of Fine Arts, one of my projects was to go every Sunday for a year to a phone box where I invited someone to call me. I called these Les galeries d’une heure [One hour galleries] (2009-2010). What interested me about the phone boxes was that I could occupy them temporarily, spend time inside them, and be reached by phone. It's also a point of view, like a public notice board, a place you do not choose, open to the city.
My interventions also have a specific link to the place the space and what I perceive there. During a residency in 2016 in Folkestone, I made a collage of wallpaper with the phrase “No time for a romance” in a space that seemed idyllic, but where a lot of rubbish had accumulated. So I decided to write this sentence, but the next day the wallpaper was ripped off and burned. In my opinion, it proves that it had its place there. Folkestone is a peaceful city with many artists' studios art-educated public. Burning it was a radical act. There was no time for a romance or anything else.
AB: If your work is related to an exploration of places, what is your relationship with the people who inhabit and pass through them? In the project of Les galeries d’une heure, the audience seems to be both the source, the material and the recipient.
EM: For Les galeries d’une heure when I was called, I took a compass and I described, facing North, East, South and West, passers-by, cars, houses… They became postcards of the moment. I like the concept of the postcard, because I associate it with places where you do not really want to go. There is a bit of humor, and also a poetic dimension.
Working in urban space puts you in touch with a wider and different audience than people “locked” in a museum or a gallery. The place has the power to address this diversity. I enjoy listening discreetly to what people say in the places where I write. In Folkestone on the Zig Zag Path, I wrote the word “Breathless”. The steep walk leaves passers-by breathless, and there is a viewpoint where the trees block the horizon. It's a small victory to manage to make people laugh in another language, and it is also amazing that the word has remained for two years, although there is a lot of graffiti around it!
AB: About your residence in Roubaix in 2017 with the program Watch This Space, you said you express yourself better through words and that you need to write. Is this always the case?
EM: Words are essential in my work as material and as accompaniment, because several of my projects require explanation. My inspirations are also often literary. The expression Bruits de fond [Background noises] comes from the French writer Georges Perec, and Les galeries d’une heure project evokes La vue [The view] (1903) by Raymond Roussel, although he describes things drawn from his imagination.
To echo the previous question, the words serve as a means of communication with the public in urban space. For each of my projects, I use the language of the country: in English in London and Folkestone, in Czech in Prague, in French in Paris and Roubaix, etc. Of course, I do not speak all languages, so I make sure to find the right people to help me translate. These translations are important so that my words can be understood by as many people as possible. At other times, I have played with my poor language skills, as in the book Parler des mots dits [Talking about words said] (2016), the result of my residency in Folkestone. During six weeks, I wrote a diary about my confrontation with the English language, my difficulties in communicating with others, and my misunderstandings. I wanted it to be published without correction, so that it would reflect my own English, with its clumsiness and mistakes. Languages interest me as materials that differ each time.
AB: There is also musical notation, that we can see more than we hear in the Concert pour 52 cabines téléphoniques [Concert for 52 phone boxes] (2010). Is this interest linked to a musical education?
EM: I used musical writing, because the sound interests me through background noise. By using the phone boxes, I wanted to make a concert that nobody could hear in its entirety. Their ringing tones are different according to their dates of manufacture, but they have the same duration. So I composed a score, gathered 52 people for 52 phone boxes, and a chronometer as a conductor. The concert was not aimed at the audience present, but at passers-by, although they could not know what was being played and they could only hear one phone box, one instrument. At that time, I did not have any musical training. I later enrolled in a conservatory. It made sense to me to learn to read music. It's like learning a new language. Moreover, scores are objects that attract me aesthetically, because this writing system, especially on contemporary scores, creates other visual forms.
AB: Like the rest of your works, your performances are discreet and intimate. For Is she counting waves (Folkestone, 2016) you point your finger at the horizon without saying a word. With Love is waiting (Folkestone, 2017) text and movement are passive and repetitive. Performance, however, is an artistic form that we imagine to be active and extroverted. Your staging seems to cultivate this contradiction.
EM: Love is waiting is one of the rare performances where I speak. Often, it comes down to a gesture that I sustain over time. With Vois mon souffle [See my breath] on the same theme, I was moving concrete letters to write “Je plierai les draps seule” [I will fold the sheets alone] while recording my breath gradually increasing. The boredom of the public interests me. Furthermore, Love is waiting is an intimate text, but what I like when we talk about love is that everyone can relate to it. In any case, that's my conclusion after playing it in Folkestone.
AB: Do you create a connection between your personal stories and a desire for universality?
EM: During my residence in Roubaix, I used the first person singular, because my work in this city grew out of my personal story. However with this exception I prefer to avoid using “I”. More recently, I also took part in a residence in Bourbourg in a nursing home where residents are losing their memory. The sentences I wrote afterwards on steel sheets speak of loneliness, lack of tenderness, the desire to die or sexuality: “Le temps ce n’est plus de notre âge” [Time, it is not for our age anymore], “Prends-en plusieurs ça ne se voit pas” [Take several of them, it does not show]. I wanted it to be sentences that everyone could have said. If what I write is always from a personal feeling, I address everyone.
Interview by Ana Bordenave. Les mots vifs d’Élodie Merland [The vivid words of Élodie Merland], in leChassis, n° 5, 2018, pp. 32-37, Paris.