It’s been a long time since you made a film without animation. Daniel Birnbaum once heard someone say about your works that they were “hard to like but impossible to forget”.

Relationships between words and images are nothing new, as far as their

manifestations or their stakes are concerned. They have been copiously commented on and analyzed. The new meeting points of art and literature’s

crossroads have already been underscored. They have been labelled “literary temptation of contemporary art”,

“exhibition literature”, or “literature outside the book”. Historically speaking, what was emphasized in this linguistic tropism of art, was the use of words and, in René Magritte’s oeuvre, for example,

their distance to objects or images. Artists’ recent ambition to appropriate writing seems to open new leads, which Henri Michaux had followed on his own. But what has been emerging today, and what seems to overthrow these uses in a way, is the tendency to favour the gesture of writing rather than the written word.

Through examples of contemporary pieces, this dossier questions the manual, technical or technological gestures in connection to writing and the issue of know-how, digital tools or archaic

practices. After a general text on “scription”, peculiar to artists’ new writing practices, Magali Nachtergael analyzes how machines have induced artistic gestures linked to a know-how, with technology modifying the image of the creative gesture. Then Gaëlle Théval, by focusing on sound poets and digital artists, examines writing practices in performances that lead us to reconsider

the notion of writing itself. Finally, Marjorie Micucci studies the potential plasticity of Jean-Christophe Norman’s

scriptural and literary objects, an artist who develops “contemporary

physics of writing”.