Emma Ben Aziza: Knotting

Every speaking being is spoken before it speaks; it emerges in an existing network woven, amongst other things, by the parents’ desire. From that moment on, language is not a tool; it compresses us rather than serving us. We are all played in the musical sense by these sounds and meanings; we therefore have to invent a form of writing that enables us to hold together the thing (the real), the words (the symbolic) and the image, thereby weaving reality. Needless to say, a subject is also tied to a culture, a society. As Freud, with his uncompromising

pessimism, put it in a letter to Fliess in 1897: “One always remains a child of his age, even in what one deems one’s very own.” In short, the singular fiction takes place in the present moment.

Emma Ben Aziza was born in 1997 and took her first steps towards the theatre (BA and Conservatoire in Lyon), followed by the Beaux-Arts (Valence and Nantes). For her, this was the articulation of the three dimensions that make up every speaking being: that of language, that of the image and that of the thing in its compactness, named by Lacan: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. Emma Ben Aziza finds support for knotting in her family history, that of a diaspora. Moving back and forth between France and Tunisia forced her grandparents to raze an orange grove made up of rare species of oranges that had not been used for the industrial crops developed under colonisation. One day, she discovered the orchard she had known without any trees, with a paving