Prendre la parole
2022 – 2024
Installation
Site specific dimensions and amount of objects
Installation view: 80 objects, dimensions: 3,5 x 8 x 3 meters
Megaphones from stoneware, high fired, partly engobed and glazed
The work is accompanied by multiple public debating sessions with pottery, écriture automatique and readings
Prendre la parole
[French: To take the floor.]
Prendre la parole is a poetic-conceptual work consisting of several modules. It is a spatial installation, a workshop, and a book. With this work,
I invite viewers to reflect and debate with me about emotions and phenomena that concern and affect us as individuals and as parts of a society: shame and anger, ambivalence and disagreement, and the resulting longing for change and solidarity. The installation consists of 80 ceramic megaphones that I shaped over several months in a repetitive, sensual process. The repetitive movements of my hands allowed me to digress, giving rise to thoughts on a less rational, more emotional level. In the work, the megaphone functions, among other things, as a paradoxical symbol for the search for words and means of expression and, in the silence of the installation, for all the words that are formed in thought but can never be uttered due to a lack of listeners, an injured freedom of speech, or out of shame.
In the book “Prendre la parole – on shame and the urgency of speaking at all or anyway,” I describe the reflections inherent in the installation in greater depth. It is a collection of questions and a poetic documentation of the time in which I developed the work.
Prendre la parole is about becoming and staying sane as a person and a society. It is about claiming space for yourself. But it is also about entendre la parole des autres, literally to take in the words of others. Speaking is always about listening, too. What we have to learn most urgently is that the aim of debate must not always be agreement. I want us to become stronger and more patient, so we can listen to each other and endure feelings of disagreement. I want to agree on the fact that everything is complicated because people carry all their baggage and thus are complex, ambivalent, inconsistent, contradictory, and not either/or. I want to agree on protecting those who need it most in the first place and step back with our egos and the need to win an argument. I want us to recognize when we’d rather shut up. I want us to realize when we need to act instead of talk.
