Captures éditions

In this third title in the Digressions series Alex Cecchetti and curator Julie Pellegrin look into the genesis of the exhibition Tamam Shud, in which the artist invites us to accompany him on an immersive investigation of a baffling disappearance.

Combining the talents of visual artist, poet and choreographer, Alex Cecchetti devises performances and idiosyncratic objects that can turn up in exhibitions or other contexts. Drawing his inspiration from literature, philosophy, science and music, he brings enormous playfulness and wit to a poetic, gestural language that mysteriously unites his spectators and launches them into rituals and journeyings that call perception and life’s great existential issues into question.

The Tamam Shud exhibition is the outcome of two years’ research and writing driven by practices as diverse as poetry, painting, music, dance and performance. This interview looks back to the genesis of a project whose title – “This is the End” in Old Persian – paradoxically becomes a trigger for something new. It offers an insight into the way the exhibition resembles an identity quest in the form of a landscape to be crossed. This is an exhibition to be experienced and inhabited, and from which the artist emerges as a protean writer.

Digressions 

Initiated in 2017 by Julie Pellegrin and the Centre for Contemporary Art team in collaboration with Captures éditions, Digressions is a series of interviews (bilingual French / English) that accompanies the programme. Through conversations with guest artists, the notebooks give behind the scenes access and bear witness to reflections, research, methodologies and sometimes the doubts and the trial and error that feed the working process. By giving a voice to artists, the entire collection brings out very singular voices that resonate with each other and explore shared questions around the performance and creation of exhibitions, the physical and political engagement and the decompartmentalization of disciplines.

For each issue, the colour of the cover paper is changed, with or without embossing, to distinguish the publication in relation to each artistic project. The inside pages are printed in one pantone tone and the switch to English language materializes in a double page image drawn from research work. Postcards from the exhibitions are printed and inserted randomly into the notebooks like bookmarks. Claire Moreux’s elegant and dynamic layout follows the meanders of reflection by inviting the reader to navigate, literally, through the text.