Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once

I am walking through the periphery of a pedestrian zone in a large European city. It’s a gray day and it looks like it’s about to start raining.

I wait in vain for the relief of a cloudburst. It’s a Sunday, the city is rather empty, the pedestrian zone deserted. Only a few couples of different ages are strolling hand in hand along the sidewalk. I walk through the streets between chain stores and restaurants towards the train station. I pass a store that fries fish, then one that prepares sandwiches. I can identify the chain eateries by the smells that permeate the pedestrian zone through the slits in the closed glass doors. The windows are steamed up from the heat produced by the deep fryers, sandwich makers or air conditioners.

Several young couples sit in front of an international restaurant chain that sells pizza, pasta and Caesar salad. They look down towards the dish they have ordered. Some are smoking cigarettes. They only talk sporadically.

A blackbird lies next to one of the tables. It is lying so gently that you only notice at second glance that it must have been dead for some time. If you take a closer look, you can see that the bird no longer has eyes - they seem to have been removed by another animal that lives in the pedestrian zone.

The people at the tables take no notice of the corpus next to them. Not because they haven’t seen it, but because they are unimpressed by its presence. Maybe it’s because it died in a very elegant position. It maintains its composure beyond its demise. The dead blackbird is by far the most alive, the most mythical and dignified element in the scenery I pass through. I try to remember the introverted faces of the people, but I only ever think of the little body of the blackbird, whose soul has clearly already left it - and which nevertheless seems to be the only soulful element in this completely disenchanted world that I, another pedestrian, am passing through.

For a long time, dead birds did not have an exclusively negative connotation, albeit a frightening, prophetic one - they were seen as a symbol that a shift would take place in the future. A sign of transformation. For apocalypse, meaning the end of the world, as well as for the positive transition from the mundane to the supramundane. A rain of dead birds is a sign of great change. Perhaps this is the reason why they were cast in bronze in a folkloristic manner and installed on wooden plaques, hanging in dive bars or provincial, bucolic living rooms. The deceased animals remained in strangely realistic poses - poses that give their dead bodies a certain vitality. Remained lively forever. Lying on their backs, their eyes wide open - quite unlike the blackbird in the pedestrian zone, which had died in a very macabre, almost representative manner.

The term “vanitas” goes back to the (incomprehensible) idea of one’s own finiteness, indistinguishably caught up in the same concept as “vanity”. In terms of art history, vanitas still lifes are paintings that operate with the symbol of the skull - but precisely in their preoccupation with death, they also stand for radical vitality. Another term used is „Memento Mori“ which means be aware of your own mortality.

They are therefore not necessarily a sign of death, but rather a sign of the individual’s inability to reconcile themselves with the idea of their own dying. It is almost a sign of megalomania - and thus rather of the idea of infinity, if not of immortality.

François Durel uses these folkloristic art objects less as ready-mades than he uses them as unreadymades. As items of which it is unclear whether they are still acting in their function as handicrafts or as actual art objects, autonomous sculptures. They are in a kind of limbo. In an intermediate space between not-anymore and not-yet, between a complete, self-contained work and an unfinished gesture.

How others remember you (the vanitas question) and how you remember things yourself remains unreliable. Actually, we are all unreliable narrators, in search of a narrative with which we can endure living, with which we can bear ourselves. After all, we are all guilty in one way or another. And so certain actors appear again and again in the landscape of our memory - and sometimes you only understand years later why they remain present even though they should belong to the past. Which buildings - and which objects - are such carriers of memory?

How do we remember the architecture we were surrounded by in your childhood? How does it become part of you, as an outline of the mental, inner architecture - that is, part of the space that structures our present perception and our ability to differentiate, classify and prioritize?

I remember, and I’m sure it’s also a memory that has only taken shape through repeated recounting, how my psychoanalyst told me about an analysand whom he “cured”, if that is a valid category in psychoanalysis at all. It was a French opera singer with a classic symptom: she could no longer sing. After a while, she enunciated a word that, in her mouth, slowly broke down into its syllables: Opéra. As she pronounced it, she realized what it incorporated: O, pére! Oh, father! Daddy-issues: of course the most universal topos in psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, a few months after the linguistic event, the silent singer began to sing again, like a resurrected bird.

So what situation does one find oneself in when working as an artist? In the position of putting oneself and one’s own work so radically at disposal? François Durel goes deep into the architecture of his malleable memory - he shapes it, changes it and presents it, always at eye level with the act of remembering. He also enters the realm of pain that goes hand in hand with the emancipatory gesture - and acts as a surgeon of his own somatic memory. He enters into a dialogue - with the spirits that he evokes, with the visitors and not least with the people he encounters by giving objects that have remained unnoticed for years, the casts of dead birds, a renaissance. Every exhibition is an invocation of ghosts - and this one in particular. François Durel’s work echoes a certain degree of discipline and a stoic melancholy. He enters the limbo of memory, in which it is unclear which actor plays which role and which ghosts are consciously or unconsciously conjured up in the process. Just as Derrida seeks the “Différance” (written with an a) in language, that is, the gap that is always present (between the signified and the signifier, between the symbolic, the real and the imaginary), Lyotard proposes the “Différend” (ending with a d), a state in which two parties cannot understand each other because they literally live in different realities, even if they are in the same space - precisely because, for example, they have a different relationship to their (mother) tongue. The artist devotes himself to those undecided, painful and pleasurable interstices -an act of controlled surrender, just like dancing. Sometimes you almost flinch when looking at his pieces - because they carry a transcending quality, just like when you look at a bloody ballet or a dead blackbird in a pedestrian zone. They are carriers of memory - they remind us of something that we can never fully comprehend because we don’t trust our own narration. They are traces. Traces, that, as all traces do, indicate that something has already passed. Art can also be an act of exorcism. Dead birds no longer sing.

Olga Hohmann