What are you whispering? Sorrow. Sorrow. Joy.Joy

6 months ago -October, 2014- artist Emmanuel Lagarrigue made a project for the Frestas Trienale -Sorocaba-Sao Paulo, Brazil- in which he focused on the notion of community based on Maurice Blanchot ‘La communauté inavouable’ -‘The Unavowable Community’, 1983. Along with the people involved in the project, Lagarrigue worked on the first part of the book, which focuses on the figures of Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Bataille, translating and recording versions of these texts.

For the LOOP Festival in Barcelona, Lagarrigue wanted to continue this research, considering this work as an open way to produce encounters, ideas, situations and new forms at the different stages of its existence. In this regard, he has worked with art students of the Massana School in a workshop focused on the second part of Blanchot’s book, ‘The Community of Lovers’, devoted to the text ‘The Malady of Death’ -‘La maladie de la mort’-, by Marguerite Duras. Again, the workshop as a meeting point permitted exchanges among the participants and allowed sound recordings. Issues of translation and transmission are central in this work, which is the result of ephemeral communities that are formed by the desire to foster these reflections.

The final output of the work is entirely related with the conditions where it is performed . While in Sao Paulo a strong visual device was chosen, in Barcelona the installation takes the ‘shape’ of a strictly distributed sound piece -10 channels-, lacking any visual dimension.