Stitching the Seine

Photographic documentation of the performance

Olivier Marboeuf

Performance text “Stitching the Seine river”

It is not a library, not an archive room. It is not the right place. Hidden in the coolness of a shadow, it nevertheless stores.
It stores what could perish. This is not the place, but she knows how to make her craft out of everything.
A rock here, a river branch there. That is enough and quite sufficient to make a home that rocks. Perhaps she muddles up the rivers, gets the hemispheres a bit mixed up, mistakes the solid north for a south that trickles and rushes. And she freezes all the things that come into her head in a big white fridge. Maybe she is setting up a feast, a party. Or perhaps it’s just to keep a memory, to preserve what changes, transforms. Her own face, the running of water through her fingers. She stitches. It is useless to try to hold back the water and to retain the time that slips under the mask.

Beauty melts in the capricious sun and I think she laughs about it. But she likes to do things that apparently serve no purpose. It is her way of healing the world secretly. Dip your needles in the “fatapera” and sew up these scattered stories, sew up the continents and journeys, the languages and skins lost in the crossing of the oceans. Sew up the whispers and the songs of this liquid landmark.