Camille Michel

Camille Michel
Period: 2012-2013
Profession: Architect (Letter received from Romain Rousseau, architect in Nantes and lecturer at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris – Val de Seine). Nantes, February 6, 2012 My dear Camille, I was very intrigued by your latest discussion on the “mega-plot” hypothesis. In a way, you come back to it in your interventions, first on France Culture, in November 2011 in
Une architecture sonore, une architecture possible , then in this invitation to take part in the round table
Villes sur écoute : des sons en carte, at the Grenoble School of Architecture (Cresson) in January 2012. You take a critical look at today’s world, where the reading grid leads to the identification of constituted blocks of truth. The contemporary way of being in the world would then no longer be situated in the search for a posture, but in that of assembling these blocks of truth. The “mega-complot” would be embodied in this apparent freedom of arrangement, with no official hierarchy: no matter what the order or arrangement, as long as the integrity of the object persists. In fact, you make this observation about secondary and university education organized around expertise by disciplinary field, effectively locking out any haphazard, not to say suspect, digression. From well-guarded cows to the “mega-complot”, the method remains perhaps the same: to simplify the world. You surely remember Pierre Bourdieu’s words from
Méditations pascaliennes , and quoted by our friend Laurent Devisme: “Each field is characterized by the pursuit of a specific end, likely to encourage equally absolute investments in all those (and only those) who possess the required dispositions. To participate in illusion, whether scientific, literary, philosophical or other, is to take seriously (sometimes to the point of making it a matter of life and death) the stakes which, born of the logic of the game itself, underpin its seriousness, even if they may escape or appear “disinterested” and “gratuitous” to those we sometimes call “laymen”, or to those engaged in other fields (the independence of the different fields being not without a form of incommunicability between them).” Architect, sound technician, but also musician; one could be reassured by your filiation to the illustrious researchers of petrified music. But no, the translation of a thought and a form from one playground to another is not, I think, your cup of tea. You warn against what you call a “summation of designation”, which would deprive us of the “around”, the landscape, and cancel out any possibility of transversality. You come back to this question of language that you’re working on, of a current impoverishment of language to the point of becoming monosemic. I know that this question of reducing a question to its outline annoys you: at the edge of the forest, are we still in the forest? And how far will it go? When you talk about “primary emotion, before it’s twisted into an idea”, I can imagine that the notion of power isn’t far off. But it’s not theorizing about it that sets you in motion, nor is it recounting your own sensations, because you don’t want to make them your own little story. What I think I read in your preoccupations, however, is the work of an architect. Not an architectural graphic designer, considering the immediacy of the image as the nth block of truth, but rather as an explorer of reality. You work on your maps to try and discover it. Architects tend to make plans, or even sections, but you make maps. I notice that your maps have no legend, no scale, and no north. I also notice that multiple territories are represented: literary, philosophical, technical, architectural, artistic and musical references, paths linking these references, zones of influence encompassing some of them, elements of method, first of production, then of critical feedback. By combining your cartographic work with sound recording, you avoid any attempt to represent the world, but rather to construct it. You point out that ears have no eyelids, unlike eyes, which can give up the game, turn away, dodge. If the gaze can be evasive, the deaf ear is already a position. Using sound forces you to be in touch with reality, in a relationship with others, and in the moment. So your sound cards are machines for grasping the world. At the same time, they let us glimpse what you describe as “emotional contents”, sound captures as blocks of sensations, and at the same time these same blocks put to work (by Marcel Duchamp’s Chocolate Crusher?), deconstructed / reconstructed (dialectically?) by the references and concepts you call up on this occasion. These cards/machines thus become dynamic objects (nothing to do with any kind of parametric program) that act by successive approaches, by furtive contacts in the manner of subtle ricochets on one (or more) bodies of water. This method confronts the great brutality of reality with the subtle lightness of the moment. It also seems to me to be a reference to shoegazing and the tragic endings of
My Bloody Valentine concerts, transforming themselves into a vibrant monotone lasting some twenty minutes, constituting a shared body of sound, space and individuals. This last track was called, I believe:
You made me realise. Best wishes RR