How to Lose My Own Voice

Do you think in one voice, or many?

What comes to you in the quiet, still parts of life?

We spoke to artist Stéphane Querrec about voice, design, and the problem of inspiration.

Querrec writes voices. His films, texts, and artwork are elements of a conceptual inquiry into the nature of speech and the construction of identity. Born in Biarritz, FR and now based in Berlin, DE, Querrec has exhibited at institutions internationally, including Espace Culturel George Émile Lapalme, Montréal, CA, basis Frankfurt, DE, and Tanzquartier, Vienna, AT.

Below, we chatted with Querrec about his practice.

New Laconic: You don’t give your narrators names, and names can often compress or limit an object, linguistically. Do you have a reason for keeping your narrators anonymous?

Stéphane Querrec: To have a name is to have power; it means assuming a symbolic mandate and a social role within a class of people, a nation, a tradition. It implies a genealogy, as well as a potential legacy.

Voice, on the other hand, is what intrudes and divides between the inside and the outside; it is what comes and vanishes. If the voices have no name in the book, it is because I wanted to write as much anonymously as possible, and speak to all, without addressing anyone.

I do not want a reader to connect with “me.” I want them to connect with themselves, and the nameless voice is that mediator.

NL: You speak of the voices in And ordinary sorrow as “interior monologues.” Where do the lines come from?

SQ: In this book you don’t have plot, you don’t have a character, you just have a mere voice, to which no names are assigned. The voices speak of that which is lost, love.

The voice without an origin, a location, is the whole point of the book. My problem is: How to lose my own voice? How not to be an author?

There is perhaps no origin other than language itself. I do not embody the voices. Neither do I have the intention to use them as a mask to express my Self or my Anti-Self, like confessional poets do in America (such as Frank Bidart, for example). I contain them: I am this someone who gives the voices shape, rhythm and tone.

NL: Do you have a favorite word or phrase?

I don’t “hear voices”, like some writers pretend — especially Nordic contemporary writers. I only write whatever comes into my mind, without concern for its meaning or coherence. I need to move away from the expressive self if I want language to do the talking.

NL: The book has six parts or chapters, but starts at 0. Is there a significance to starting at 0?

SQ: Starting at zero meant starting from the point of the void, from what has been lost, as if the voice was coming through before being born. It meant to me the remaking of nothingness, a way to curb sadness.

NL: I love how you explain that the book has a lack-of-structure that really evades form and makes the reader question the mental convention of “connecting the dots.” Gestalts are most intriguing when they are questioned, and therefore visible in a meta sort of way. Does this type of practice appear in your other work, and how?

SQ: I recently made a commissioned art piece for the Canadian art institution La Place des Arts in Montréal. Entitled La Complainte, it is a 35-screen mosaic fresco onto which an anonymous voice is displayed in fragmented texts. The screen-mosaic was a pre-given: created initially by multimedia designer Érick Villeneuve, it now broadcasts digital works from artists and other cultural programming, with an audience of about 35,000 people passing every day.

I was interested in the mosaic structure itself: four large zones of multiple screens of different sizes assembled all together vertically and horizontally. When I apprehended it for the first time, I did not see an all-over surface but rather a divided form that clumsily tries to hold its parts together, and pretends to be One. Like a broken mirror repaired.

Whatever the moving image inscribed on it, one cannot entirely fathom the thin black screen edges splitting up the total screen surface in various parts. So I decided to make that structure very visible.

First I wrote a nameless voice lamenting of things undone in life, of a fear of breaking down. I worked towards a syntax of depression, so to speak, in which every sequence is broken into fragments and on the verge of muteness. Then, I dispatched the sentences onto the all-over surface so that words would break between screens, and lines could un-line up between them.

NL: You mention Virginia Woolf frequently in your promotional texts. We love Orlando because it weaves together fiction and reality so absurdly well. Do you have a favorite book or essay or story by her?

SQ: To The Lighthouse is a remarkable book, like a slow explosion. I also like the Unpublished Autobiographical Pieces, and in particular the memoir entitled “A Sketch of the Past.” In it, if I remember correctly, Woolf explains the distinction between what she calls states of “non-being” and “moments of being” in daily life.

Literary commentators have much focused on the positive flashes of consciousness conquered over absence. But I am more drawn to the transposition of feeling “embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool.” This numb whiteness is life.

Related posts:

The concept of college tuition prices has certainly become a hot topic in the last two decades. With tuition prices on the rise it has become harder to get an education without getting into loads of…

Most people own a smartphone, and a good portion of those own an iPhone; However, most don’t know how to actually use it. You’re not the only person who isn’t sure about most of their phone. Read the…

If you are an artist or a photographer and would like to participate in this little endeavour, just shoot me an email wezel2@gmail.com, or respond to this piece in the Comments section. There do not…