I start over every day because I have no choice. The lighted candle is never just a lighted candle.
The knives no longer cut but open doors. The sharpness of the blades goes through the flesh
and the sound they make sometimes resembles the sound of truth. I have never understood
the opposition between art and technology. I believe that there are only practices, techniques,
more or less obscure, more or less negative, in the best sense of the word. In the same way the
aesthetic qualities of a thing cannot be disjoined from its relational qualities, that is to say
magical. When my palm closes on the handle of a counterknife, when my fingers caress the
edge of a card, when my eyes glide lovingly over a printed surface, when I put the images in my
mouth and they begin to dilute in it, yes when I touch like that the forms that I make or that
others make, it becomes clear that the aesthetic qualities of those forms only ever serve to
increase their effectiveness. The soup is better in the bowl you made for me. The oil is better
because of the sprig of thyme you put in it. The unusable knife is more powerful because of the
key I roughly glued to it. Each assemblage is magic, and I think everyone knows it, even if only
on an intuitive level. When I swim in the river and come back with my hands full of little pebbles
that look like turtle shells, and in the evening I put those pebbles by the fire while you sing the
song that others before you sang, then something happens that, despite appearances, owes
nothing to chance. I like the fact that in my language, courage is etymologically linked to the
heart (“coeur” in french). The heart has never stopped being brave. The heart has never
stopped producing assemblages that, from a cultural point of view, often had been called
magic. I have the impression that this is coming back, that the heart, so to speak, is gaining
ground; that more and more creatures have the courage to practice this strange thing that is
sometimes called magic but which is only a way of lovingly animating things and, in so doing,
playing the game of the world. Almost nothing is needed, as everyone knows. A thorn on a
table, a flower in hot water, a few lines on a piece of paper, a fingerprint in the sand, etc. If
these technologies are coming back, it is undoubtedly because the world aspires to be
renewed.