4/10/2023 0 Comments Une fenetre in englishThe witnesses also told me, in roundabout ways, some very striking things about the relationship they had with the dead. Finally, I recognised practices in them, concerning the relationship to silence for example, that were close to those that had long been mine. The people I interviewed were surprisingly similar to me, in the sense that they kept answering evasively, not really saying anything. I think that through my encounters with people who culturally have a very different use of speech than I do, I understood the place it plays in the construction of our lives and the central role that silence plays in it. So what is the real subject of Un singe à ma fenêtre? The principle of the book is then to find the other subject, that hides and reveals itself behind the apparent subject. Drifting is also a way of discovering other, more important things, hidden behind the initial subject. Can we get to this thing and really say it? Each time I think I'm going to get there, and each time the centre slips away, leading to books that can sometimes be confusing. It's not so much a drift as a kind of spiral that turns around a blind spot that you can never reach. The side steps and digressions are almost more important than the initial subject. As I get older, I realise that most of my books are drifting, that they never move in a straight line. In this way, I form a kind of focus group, I listen to what they tell me: this material fires my imagination and produces the text. My writing protocol is always the same: starting with an intuitively defined subject, I try to meet people who know the subject or who want to talk about it. Faced with this obstacle, I ended up accepting the drift of their words, and the fact that they spoke to me about everything but the sarin gas attacks. I avoid my subject in Un singe à ma fenêtre, it's true, which is also linked to the fact that my witnesses also tended to avoid it, or had nothing to say about it. How did this choice fit in with your working protocol? Un singe à ma fenêtre deliberately revolves around its subject without ever addressing it directly. So the atmosphere of Villa Kujoyama and how I felt about it played a very important role in writing the book. I could see that I was in a magnificent place, in very favourable conditions, and yet I was deeply anxious, angry in short I was in the doldrums. This became a sort of comic leitmotif in the book, the gap between what we expected and what happened, the place of the unforeseeable in this highly structured residency. I very quickly realised that I wasn't going to be able to carry out the project as I thought, because nothing happened as planned. When I arrived in Japan, I was not expecting such a surprising and different country, I was not at all prepared for it. How did your residency unfold and how did it inform your writing? On the contrary, in Un singe à ma fenêtre you insist on a form of unease that you felt on your arrival in Japan. Residencies are often presented in an idyllic way by those who take part in them. That is to say, not to interview victims but contemporaries who had not been directly affected by the attacks but who, perhaps, had memories of what they had stirred in them. Reading Underground, Haruki Murakami's book of interviews with victims, then convinced me that I did not want to produce a strictly documentary work, but a work of fiction. From this point of view, the Tokyo attacks offered the dual advantage of geographical and temporal distance (they happened in 1995). But I was aware that I needed some distance and that I was not in a position to work on such recent events. I wanted to reflect on how these collective events affect our lives, even when we have not been directly involved. I began the project in 2017, two years after the Bataclan attacks. How did you get the idea to work on the 1995 Tokyo attacks? How did you approach your research? At the same time, I am a lecturer-researcher at the University of Paris 8, where I deal with everything to do with contemporary literary creation, directing the work of students who want to become writers. For example, in my work with the electro-acoustic composer Eryck Abecassis. In particular, I consider the role of the voice to be very important in literature, and I like the idea of continuing to use it as a mouthpiece, while associating it with other arts to propose hybrid forms. I am very interested in the ways in which literature can go beyond the written word, through sound pieces, displays in public spaces, etc. I also write texts for the stage, and I perform on stage myself. My first book was published by Verticales in 1999, and we have worked together ever since. Could you tell us a little about your career?
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