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Images that Haunt Us

Author(s): Muriel Combes


Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 36 (Summer 2014), pp. 30-39
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art and
Design, University of the Arts London
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Front cover of the
book Enquête sur le/
notre dehors (Valence-
le-Haut) < 2007 — … >
à la date du 24 avril
2012 (Valence:
Captures éditions
and Art3, 2012).
All images courtesy
Alejandra Riera

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Images that Haunt Us
— Muriel Combes

When I first met Alejandra Riera before a Fontbarlettes. But I waited to finish the
seminar in Seville, she gave me a book in book before watching the film, which
French, whose title could be translated as: is like an emanation or a moment within
the enquiry process. In any event, not
Enquiry on the/our outside a goal or an end result. I will thus allude
(Valence-le-Haut) ‹2007— …› occasionally to the film, but will speak
dated 24 April 2012 mostly about the book, which has a
an image of collective thought wealth of material.
on the place people inhabit
with the inhabitants of the •
neighbourhood Fontbarlettes. 1
The book/enquiry is structured as follows:
It is a book that defies categorisation, and
that in fact does not ask to be categorised, a) a series of conversations with the
only to be read. I hesitated to accept the inhabitants of Fontbarlettes (titled
invitation, explaining to Alejandra that ‘exchanges’) and, at the end of each
I am no longer a philosopher: I stopped exchange, ‘footnotes’ made up of
teaching philosophy ten years ago and commentary and/or quotations inspired
practising it two years later. She replied: by the content of these exchanges;
b) a series of image plates corresponding
Muriel Combes considers notions to the exchanges;
c) captions for the plates, grouped together
of montage, history and collectivity after the plates.
Enquiry on the/our outside (Valence-
le-Haut) ‹2007— …›, initiated by The structure of the book thus suggests
that it should be read not continuously
Alejandra Riera. but in a back-and-forth manner, as one
navigates between the exchanges and the
‘That’s perfect. I’m not an artist either.’ notes, the image plates and the captions,
I let myself be persuaded by this sophism, and then returns to the conversations.
and, carried along by faith, I accepted
the invitation and opened the book. ‘Enquiry on the/our outside’ is the
She had also given me the two-hour title of several projects carried out by
video Enquête sur le/notre dehors Alejandra over the past few years — as if
(Valence-le-Haut) ‹ 2007—… › (Enquiry on it were the only thing to be done, tirelessly.
the/our outside (Valence-le-Haut) ‹ 2007— It is an enigmatic title, or a programmatic
…›), a version dated 15 July 2012 and one, which makes one want to follow
made together with the inhabitants of her programme as it unfolds. The dates

1 Enquête sur le/notre dehors (Valence-le-Haut) < 2007 — … > à la date du 24 avril 2012 is a response to the
commission received by Alejandra Riera from a group of inhabitants of the Fontbarlettes neighbourhood
who, following the initiative of Valérie Cudel, applied to funds from the Fondation de France’s
programme ‘New Commissioners’. Initiated in 2009, the commission was intended to last for one year,
but exceeded its original framework, as this core group of participants invited other inhabitants to take
part, eventually resulting in a 352-page-long book including 12 conversations, numerous footnotes and
39 image plates and captions, with the participation of Jo and Naïma Pino, Hafida Kada, Marion Barras,
Amel, Mohamad-Ali Osman and their children, Pierre Pellet, Catherine (Marie-Jeannette) Lacoste,
Ahmad Qamouch, Luc Fontaine, Rachid and Rachida Zahri, Michèle and Éliane Blache, Daniel and
Suzanne Anquetil, Mohamed Ben Ftima, Meriem Fradj and Xavier Hubert, Mireille Baudron, Alain
Nivon, Luc Baylion and Marc Papillon. See Alejandra Riera, Enquête sur le/notre dehors (Valence-le-Haut)
< 2007 — … > à la date du 24 avril 2012 une image de pensée collective du lieu que l’on habite menée avec
des habitants/es du quartier de Fontbarlettes (ed. Valérie Cudel), Valence: Captures éditions and Art3,
2012. The publication is accompanied by a film initiated in 2009 and dated 15 July 2012.

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‘‹ 2007—…›’ and ‘dated 24 April 2012’ images. Because what we hear most about
indicate that what is at stake here is a suburbs are clichés, that is, depictions and
process, a long (five-year) and incomplete visions constructed without those who
process, perhaps never-ending; in any live there, and often against them.
case undefined, like a friendship. A While strolling between Valence-
sentence early in the film speaks of this Centre and Valence-le-Haut, Pierre Pellet,
incompleteness: ‘She wanted to never a visual artist who lives in Valence and has
finish, so as to never have to give … to give led workshops in Fontbarlettes, comments
in’. Thus ‘dated 24 April 2012’ marks only on how it contrasts with the downtown,
a halt in the process, like a freeze-frame. where ‘everything is an image’ and one
And then: a thought-image, a senses ‘the desire of urban planners to put
quotation of — an homage to? — Walter the city on display and offer up a vision
Benjamin, who often used the term of it’. The message sent to the periphery is
Denkbild, or ‘thought-image’, to refer to clear: ‘Get out of the midst of our images!’ 3
his short prose pieces. 2 I will return to this A wager, then, on the people and
idea in a moment; for now, let’s say simply inhabitants of the neighbourhood in
that an image is not a piece of information. question, with whom the enquiry was
‘A history of the present cannot be a carried out and the image constructed.
piece of information’, we hear in the film. Can a gathering of individuals become
One must thus avoid the redundancy a community? Or rather: can the enquiry
of information; in the film, for example, process bring out that which is transitive
one never sees someone and hears what and shared, a thought-image of ‘one’?
they are saying at the same time, in a ‘One’ here meaning not consensual but
redundancy of visual and auditory images. shareable.
‘on the place people inhabit’ — the The wager in the title is not a means
title asserts that people inhabit. In the of rerouting the original commission; on
weak sense of the French word habiter, the contrary, it is inherent in the commis-
yes, people all inhabit somewhere. But sion itself, because the commissioners
the place in question, an outlying neigh- were in fact the ‘inhabitants and/or
bourhood in the city of Valence in France people who frequent the neighbourhood’, 4
called Fontbarlettes, suggests that what and because the point of departure
this work seeks to define is whether this was precisely the ‘stigmatisation of the
place is inhabitable and alive [habité] neighbourhood’ — the danger of capturing
in the strong sense of the word. the neighbourhood in the biopolitical
What, then, would inhabit in the system of ‘banishment’.5
strong sense be? What could it be, what The terms of the commission are
could it mean, other than, or beyond, also worth quoting: ‘to reveal the ways in
simply using a number of machines to which the inhabitants have appropriated
maintain our lives, to gather our strength, this constantly changing space’. 6 This
to meet our vital needs? means: to bear witness to the appropria-
An enquiry into the meaning of the tion, or rather, the different ways the
word inhabit: that would be the first way neighbourhood has been appropriated;
of looking at this work. an appropriation that, on its own,
And inhabit, in this sense, supposes can jam up the biopolitical machine
a different subject than ‘one' [on]: ‘we’ of suburbanisation. The commission
[nous] rather than ‘anyone’ [on], the also bore the request to ‘plunge into the
community. perceptions of a broader outside, one
‘une image de pensée collective’ (‘an capable of providing a different reading
image of collective thought’) says the title. of our present context’. 7 The perceptions
A word that is the subject of a wager, we of a ‘larger outside’ involve another outside
might say, insofar as the book is an attempt than the outside of banishment from
to bring back images of a place without society. ‘Our outside’ is not the outside

2 See Walter Benjamin, Images de pensée (trans. Jean-François Poirier and Jean Lacoste), Paris: Christian
Bourgois, 2011; and Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged
Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
3 A. Riera, Enquête sur le/notre dehors, op. cit., pp.120—21.
4 Ibid., p.2.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.

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Enquête sur le/notre of this supposedly desirable inside known This disavowal of the role of the artist
dehors (Valence-le- as ‘society’; nor the outside-cum-exclusion is a rejection of the position of oversight,
Haut) < 2007 — … >
à la date du 24 avril from the interiority of the norm, into of exteriority, which makes the artist a
2012 (Valence: which it is always only a matter of being legitimate producer of valid utterances;
Captures éditions integrated; but this desirable-in-itself someone who has a good point of view
and Art3, 2012),
image plate outside, whose emerging images are on the situation.
‘Mohamed Ben precisely the subject of the investigation. It is also a refusal of the position
Ftima’, pp.246—47 The Enquête never adopts a concept of mastery: game leader, project manager.
such as exclusion because the dialectic of Riera sees her role as that of a scribe:
biopolitical integration-exclusion is what ‘Outside established categories, trans-
must be disarmed. Still, one must go and cribing here was, above all, taking one’s
look closer at what ‘society’ puts outside, time. Permitting oneself out-of-date
at what it relegates to these peripheral considerations’. 8
spaces because it is deemed too trouble- Slowness as method.
some for the downtown. For example: a
prison, a slaughterhouse, a nuclear power •
plant. But also: a water tower, a weather
station and, above all, large housing It is undoubtedly this refusal, or rather
complexes. this nonchalant deposition of the figure
There is thus at the source of this of the artist, that led me onto the path of
work, on the part of its commissioners the images that haunt us.
themselves, the desire and wager that When one works with images, one
an enquiry can be carried out in a shared has good reason to be haunted by them,
manner. in the sense first of all of the haunting
A few words on the role of the recipient nature of the cliché. As Gilles Deleuze
of the commission, who refuses to be and Félix Guattari once wrote, for anyone
called an ‘artist’. ‘She wanted to blend in, who wishes to create percepts, the white
to lose her role’, we hear in the film. sheet of paper is only seemingly empty:

8 Ibid., p.12.

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it is full of clichés that await us.9 And the Hegel, cannot be ignored — but it is Enquête sur le/notre
periphery of a city is precisely an object especially a waltz rhythm. And I prefer dehors (Valence-le-
Haut) < 2007 — … >
caught between the absence of images this image of a three-step dance. à la date du 24 avril
and the proliferation of clichés. 2012 (Valence:
In another sense, however, we are 1. A Thought-Image Captures éditions
and Art3, 2012),
always haunted by the images that occupy I said that the idea of a thought-image is a image plate
us, often unknowingly, and which we can direct homage to Benjamin; we could also ‘Catherine Lacoste’,
try to bring into the light of day. say that it is the inscription of a sisterhood pp.188—89
with his thought. In ‘Convolute N', titled
• ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory
of Progress’, of his incomplete research
I will leave this question up in the air project published under the title The
momentarily, this motif of haunting Arcades Project, Benjamin puts forward a
images, to take a second run around the conception of the image that is completely
track, in three stages, in order to dig a in keeping with the method of the
little deeper into the central proposition materialist historian.
of the title: ‘To educate the image-making
medium within us, raising it to a
1) a thought-image; stereoscopic and dimensional seeing
2) a collective thought-image; into the depths of historical shadows’.10
3) a collective thought-image Benjamin quotes this remark by Rudolf
of the place we inhabit. Borchardt to define the ‘pedagogical
aspect’ of his own project. It appears to me
This ternary rhythm is the rhythm of that we can see this at work in Alejandra’s
philosophy — something which, since various projects as well.

9 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Percept, Affect and Concept’, What Is Philosophy? (1991,
trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson), New York: Columbia University Press, pp.163—99.
10 Rudolf Borchardt, quoted in W. Benjamin, ‘N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’,
The Arcades Project (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999, N1, 8, p.458.

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I found in Benjamin’s ‘Convolute cinematic. In this sense, the work
N' three other passages that seem to published under the title Enquête sur le/
echo directly the method of enquiry into notre dehors performs a form of montage,
Fontbarlettes and, perhaps, Alejandra’s fabricating images with words; that is,
working methods more generally. it creates relationships between aspects
of our present and flashes of the past
A remark by Ernst Bloch apropos of buried in historiography, which Benjamin
The Arcades Project: ‘History displays describes as ‘the strongest narcotic of
its Scotland Yard badge.’ It was in the the century’ (because it ‘showed things
context of a conversation in which I was “as they really were”’). 14 The image, in this
describing how this work — comparable, sense, is not merely visual or figurative.
in method, to the process of the splitting It is also a form of language. And vice
of the atom — liberates the enormous versa: there is a way of thinking through
energies of history that are bound up images.
in the ‘once upon a time’ of classical The concept of the thought-image thus
historiography. 11 speaks of the union of image and thought,
figure and discourse. It also speaks of the
This work has to develop to the highest method of montage, which brings together
degree the art of citing without quotation several images, or several elements,
marks. Its theory is intimately related figurative or otherwise, to create meaning.
to that of montage. 12
2. A Collective Thought-Image
It’s not that what is past casts its light Collective here should be understood
on what is present, or what is present in two senses: with respect to people
its light on what is past: rather, image and with respect to images.
is that wherein what has been comes With respect to people: the Enquête
together in a flash with the now to form found an important source of inspiration
in the film Chronique d’un été (Chronicle
Enquête sur le/notre dehors of a Summer, 1961) by Jean Rouch and
Edgar Morin, which ‘is an attempt to
performs a form of montage, examine how to produce reality with
fabricating images with words; others’.15 On two occasions a remark
that is, it creates relationships by Jorge Luis Borges is quoted: ‘The image
between aspects of our present one man can form is an image that touches
and flashes of the past buried no one.’ 16 It offers a kind of programme
in historiography. for an image of collective thinking in the
sense of an image conceived by several
people.
a constellation. In other words: image But ‘image of collective thinking’
is dialectics at a standstill. For while also speaks of the plurality of images:
the relation of the present to the past ‘Together we must render the image of
is a purely temporal, continuous one, this place more complex, go to the brink,
the relation of what-has-been to the reveal the histories that run through it,
now is dialectical: it is not progression speak not of a single image but of several,
but image, suddenly emergent. — Only or in any event free up others.’17 To speak
dialectical images are genuine images; ‘not of a single image, but several’ conjures
and the place where one encounters a collective image, in the sense of an image
them is language. 13 made by several people, but also in the
sense of a constellation of images, of an
The thought-image is thus an image image made out of several images — as
that is the result of a montage operation in a film, or an image plate, or a montage
— montage that is only secondarily of image plates.

11 W. Benjamin, ‘N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’, op. cit., N3, 4, p.463.
12 Ibid., N1, 10, p.458.
13 Ibid., N2a, 3, p.462. Emphasis the author’s.
14 Ibid., N3, 4, p.463.
15 A. Riera, Enquête sur le/notre dehors, op. cit., p.105.
16 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Averroes’ Search’ (trans. James E. Irby), Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other
Writings (ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby), New York: New Directions, 1964, pp.153—54.
17 A. Riera, Enquête sur le/notre dehors, op. cit., p.79.

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There is a poverty of the image that and to the idea that ‘only if we are capable
is mortifying. ‘The image that people of dwelling, only then can we build’. 21
often have of people who live in a suburb Alejandra writes:
… is very poor’, we read in the exchange
with Rachid and Rachida Zahri. 18 Their A first question would be: who is this
comments return again and again to the ‘we’? And a second, which he discussed:
question of the other’s gaze; they speak of what is ‘dwelling’? Heidegger delves not
‘the evil gaze of the others’ as an ‘evil eye’. into the need to live somewhere, but of
They have put up two verses from a sura course into a broader reality, one whereby
of the Koran in their living room, which we all live somewhere, being what we
they recite for protection. are, on earth, on a land. And there is
This question of the effect of the way this sentence: ‘Saving the earth does not
one is seen, of the image other people master the earth and does not subjugate
have of us, is thus very important. But it it’. From this it follows that building
is also important to consider its impact in is a part of dwelling and dwelling comes
the person who looks poorly, or who looks before building. And he emphasises that
with an ‘evil eye’. the true housing crisis consists not in
For there is a way of understanding the lack of dwellings but ‘lies in this, that
the image that is not separate from mortals ever search anew for the nature
the person seeing and the person seen: of dwelling, that they must ever learn to
‘An image may very well be the point dwell’. All I wonder is who these mortals
where the person seeing and the are who have to learn how to be alive and
person seen are joined’, writes Giorgio in what this learning process consists. 22
Agamben, drawing on a reading of
Arabic philosophers. 19 If the person seeing Heidegger appeals at once to a learning
cannot be separated from the person process (‘they must ever learn to dwell’)
seen, if the image names the point where and to a kind of primordial sense of
the two become indistinguishable, there dwelling, which we must recover, when
is a vital need to make the image more
complex — ‘together to make the image of Can a gathering of individuals
this place complex’, as Alejandra proposes
to the inhabitants of Fontbarlettes. 20
become a community?
Or rather: can the enquiry
3. A Collective Thought-Image process bring out that which
of the Place People Inhabit is transitive and shared,
There is an explicit reference to Martin a thought-image of ‘one’?
Heidegger in the Enquête, concerning the
meaning of inhabit, or dwell. It is found he writes that dwelling is ‘saving the
in a footnote that relays an exchange with earth’, and saving consists in letting
Luc Fontaine, a former building contractor something return to its natural state.
who worked on the construction of From the exchange with Luc Fontaine
Fontbarlettes, and in particular the Ninon we learn that it is important to break
Vallin tower (demolished in 1984—85). free of the invocation of what is ‘inherent’
In this passage, Alejandra refers in and primordial in order to become
particular to the talk ‘Building Dwelling sensitive to inventions in ways of
Thinking’ given by Heidegger in 1951, dwelling; the fact that people mourned

18 Ibid.
19 Giorgio Agamben, quoted in ibid., p.54.
20 A. Riera, Enquête sur le/notre dehors, op. cit.
21 M. Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Poetry, Language, Thought (1951, trans. Albert
Hofstadter), New York: Harper & Row, 1971, p.57.
22 A. Riera, Enquête sur le/notre dehors, op. cit., pp.66—67. Emphasis the author’s. The footnote continues
as follows and clarifies: ‘Rather [Martin Heidegger] writes: “Mortals dwell in that they save the earth.
[…] Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save properly means to set something free
into its own essence.” And in a footnote in [Heidegger’s] “The Question Concerning Technology” [1954]
we can read: “Retten, to save from a danger, originally to snatch or remove, is also used in the broader
sense of helping or assisting.” And, further, in the body of the text: “To save is to fetch something home
into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its genuine appearing.” I don’t
understand what is the “genuine” being, which would only be genuine for a specific “we”. In contrast,
I think I understand something about singular forms of being, or about the odour and consistency of
the earth they save, which are not always those that we would recognise as “genuine” or “belonging to
our heritage”, those of “the origins”. And I still ask myself how to return the earth to the earth, since it
doesn’t speak our language and doesn’t claim anything as genuine, that is, as its full property.’

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Enquête sur le/notre the demolition of the Ninon Vallin tower traversed by the outsides of colonial
dehors (Valence-le- shows that such inventions do indeed occur. wars and decolonisation. 25
Haut) < 2007 — … >
à la date du 24 avril To dwell or inhabit means to Our outside is also the untold history,
2012 (Valence: enter into a relation with the outside, the invisible history of asymmetrical wars.
Captures éditions meaning with something that propels In conversation with Amel
and Art3, 2012),
pp.156—57 us and cannot be reduced to the social, Osman, Alejandra refers to the images
to society, as members of which we are she took in the neighbourhood as
managed. ‘Where do people dwell?’ ‘partial views’: ‘above all, I had the
Alejandra writes to Amel Osman. intention of taking close-up shots and
‘In an ensemble that communicates to distance myself from the image
with “elsewheres”,’ she continues, of the towers, of the architecture.’ 26
‘so that the image of “here” goes well To delve into the details, then, instead
beyond the boundaries we create. There of reproducing the general views of
is always movement.’ 23 urban planners.
The transcriptions of the exchanges Partial views. The camera hesitates
with the inhabitants are like trans- between the sky and the earth. It rests on
individual portraits — portraits that are a stone block.
traversed by something: The enquiry takes place where the
singular and the common are no longer
traversed by the passions, concerns, discernible, where individual life paths
desires, disappointments, etc. of the are weaved into the history of capitalism
neighbourhood’s inhabitants; through the experience of wars, exodus
traversed by the outside, with respect and (interior and exterior) migration
to the architecture of confinement; 24 waves. 27

23 Ibid., p.105.
24 See ibid.
25 See ibid., pp.34—35.
26 Ibid.
27 See ibid., p.65.

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Back to the Images that Haunt Us Numinous comes from the Latin ‘Partial vue, 28
and Their Forms word numen , which Jung translated as February 2009.
In the shade of her
Haunting is one way of inhabiting. ‘divinity’ and which described, for him, trees. Allée Elisée-
It is the way ghosts inhabit places, ‘what, on Earth, appears divine’: 28 Reculs, geographer
memories inhabit our minds and images [and anarchist],
1830—1905.’
inhabit our lives. The mere use of words is futile when you Photograph reproduced
In the book/enquiry, the image do not know what they stand for. This is from the image
plates are printed on translucent paper, particularly true in psychology, where plate ‘Hafida Kada’,
in Enquête sur le/
so that images are always haunted we speak of archetypes such as the anima notre dehors (Valence-
by the presence of other images; they and animus, the wise man, the Great le-Haut) < 2007 — … >
are connected to the others, just as the Mother and so on. You can know all about à la date du 24 avril
2012 (Valence:
inhabitants of a neighbourhood are the saints, sages, prophets and other Captures éditions
connected to each other. godly men, and all the great mothers and Art3, 2012),
Where, then, is the image? Not in of the world. But if they are mere images p.181
individuals’ heads, nor, properly speaking, whose numinosity you have never
on the paper or the screen, where forms, experienced, it will be as if you were
outlined traces and pictures can be found. talking in a dream, for you will not know
An image is at the crossroads of several what you are talking about. The mere
realities: subject and object, matter and words you use will be empty and
form, matter and meaning, etc. valueless. They gain life and meaning
Carl Jung grasped something of only when you try to take into account
importance concerning the nature of their numinosity — i.e. their relationship
the image when he spoke, on the topic to the living individual. Only then
of the archetype, of the numinous. The do you begin to understand that their
numinous is the reason why an archetype names mean very little, whereas the
is precisely not a universal image, way they are related to you is all
contrary to a widely held belief. important. 29

28 See ibid., p.33.


29 Carl Gustav Jung, ‘Approaching the Unconscious’, Man and His Symbols, New York: Doubleday, 1964, p.98.

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The numinous, in my view, names the way the form of a great elegy. Anonymity,
in which the image haunts us, occupies the artist’s withdrawal, is understood
us; that is, the way in which it signals the as a strategy for making voices heard —
possibility of an inhabitable world. not only those who speak, the inhabitants,
In the Enquête, we can identify but also the voices of those of whom the
several ways of activating this numinous speakers speak. There thus arises a kind
quality of images. One consists in the of great network of discourses, like a
attention to detail and the disavowal pseudo-encyclopaedia, 32 but which is
of the general view in favour of the read like a novel, or heard like a ballad
detail shot; another involves the relation told along a stroll, with the storyteller
between a photograph and its caption; constantly changing, offering us their
but here I would like to dwell on the path through the neighbourhood and
question of degradation, which returns through history.
at several points in the Enquête. ‘Minimal The film ends with a visual journey
degradations but [which] accumulate across a map of the neighbourhood,
and reveal the poor construction quality. crossing streets named after musicians.
What do these gestures persist in We don’t wonder where we are, we simply
signalling so incisively outside the listen to an old recording of the soprano
buildings?… Is there … something to be Ninon Vallin singing a song by Gabriel
read into these gestures, or do they remain Fauré, and, as we listen, we sketch out a
snatches of a language that only those parallel journey. The opposite of a map,
who practise it can read?’ 30 Expression or a map for not finding our way (through
of discontent, or a way of making the poor our certainties), the book/enquiry
quality of these materials a new material reminds us that to find one’s way is not
for expression. the same thing as finding oneself, and
And then, at the end of the footnote that this could sometimes even mean
that follows up on this exchange, a fine losing oneself.
quotation of Édouard Glissant, which
concludes:

On the façades of the main temple


the Christians carefully scratched
out the image of the pagan gods,
as they had done everywhere else.
But these wounds in the stone observed
the contours of Horus and the other
gods to such an extent that they
appeared to highlight them, to raise
them up out of this garment of nicks,
like so much plumage of pomp. These
marks are the sign of a consenting
that does not acknowledge itself.
Religious degradation is another
form of supplication. 31

The use of quotations in the Enquête


suggests a connection to the archive as
a kind of discourse at once anonymous
and partial (because a choice of archives
and quotations exists) that ends up taking

30 A. Riera, Enquête sur le/notre dehors, op. cit., p.42.


31 Ibid., p.44.
32 The Enquête, with reference to Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris’s ‘critical dictionary’, speaks
of the goal of ‘creating a counter-model of an encyclopaedia’. A. Riera, Enquête sur le/notre dehors,
op. cit.

Translated from the French by Timothy Barnard.

This essay is an abridged and edited version of a presentation given by Muriel Combes at the seminar
‘Histor(ies) of the Present’, co-organised by UNIA arteypensamiento and Afterall at UNIA, Seville on
30 October 2013.

Artists: Enquiry on the/our outside | 39

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