Alexandra Guillot [France]
“Silencio” | live video performance / video
venue: 7 Dziewanowskiego Str., a wall of a building
To be somewhere and perfectly well know that soon the sensation of being there shall disappear, to want to keep holding it against you, to want it to pierce you, leave you a scar so it does never really fade and to want it so much that the fragile tip of the sensation crumbles before reaching you and to leave still frustrated searching for another stronger one, another capable of durably of proving its reality. Enfin, one must go on, rivers flow, even though water does not change, held within its cycle. I am reading a text that does not exist… I destroy the potentiality of the words, in a way… [Alexandra Guillot]
It was only at the end of the 19th century that the place now known as Pułkownika Jana Dziewanowskiego became a street. Prior to that it was one of the waterways that criss-crossed the Długie Ogrody polder; and served a dual purpose of draining the flat land and providing inland access to river craft. Because of this former role as a waterway, the site was chosen for Guillot’s “Silencio” project as a place to remember the lost dialect and songs of the Flisacy, the Vistula raftsmen, street traders, craftsmen and entertainers who travelled to and from, and occupied this place, for many centuries. The project acts as a reminder of the now silent palimpsest of culture that has shaped this land.
The fact that we know about the lost dialects and songs of the 18th century Vistula Rafters and Gdansk Pedlars owes much to an 18th century publication which set out to record them, and this a good century before the development of professional collecting of folk music and the study of folklore. In 1762-1765, an engraving workshop in Gdansk belonging to M. Deisch (1724-1789) published a cycle of 40 etchings known today as ‘Die Danziger Ausrufer’ (The Gdansk Criers). The etchings show street traders, craftsmen and entertainers, and the texts of the verbal and musical cries of these pedlars in a notation that is close to the living original encountered in the streets. The author of the musical record (who may have been Kunegunda Czacka, an aristocrat and a talented promoter of art) tried to record with precision the significant differentiation in the rhythm, the temporal progress of the cries, and even attempted to record the movements of the criers, also using non-standard signs. While recording the cries in musical notation may have caused them to be smoothed out to some extent; it is because they were recorded and published at all that we now have an approximate picture of the cries of Gdansk itinerant traders. [Source: Abstract of Brzezinska B., “The Cries of Itinerant Traders of Gdansk (1762-1765)” published in Muzyka (Music), the journal of the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences; 2005, 50: 2(197), pp45-77.]
Alexandra Guillot (b. 1980, Bayonne) is a French artist and member of the collective La Station who lives and works in Nice, France. She completed her art studies at I’école des beaux-arts la Villa Arson, Nice in 2005; and since then has had solo exhibitions in France and participated in numerous group exhibitions in France. Along with her appearance in “Symbiose culturelle” in Biennale Off, Dakar, Senegal (2012) her Narracje presentation marks the beginning of her recognition outside France.
