Prsésence manifeste

PRESENCE MANISFESTE. Manifest. u Latin manifestus, from manus, hand. That which can be grasped easily. With the hand. Can the void be grasped with the hand? a invisible presence, the ghost, mana. Is it the void? How many artists say so? Manifesting this emptiness, which is anything but uninhabited, is the object of their presence. racing lines, filling surfaces, swelling volumes. With what hand that grasps ours? When Philippe Berthommier and Marine Aïello meet, they instantly sense that they are inhabited by a familiar presence. They see it by observing what has come out of their hands - seized. Berthommier's archipelagic thinking, borrowed from Édouard Glissant's Tout-Monde, Aïello's mythological island and all around, the primordial waters. "We played a game. We asked the Presence to grasp four hands - faithfully - at once. Let it manifest itself and say! And say what? Vibrate the silence. Vibrate the absent. Vibrate space-time. Spirits. Stories. Merging everything. Melting and founding. Because here, presence is a place. A place in the distance, whose bell is still vibrating the temporal curve. Here, presence is an elsewhere, as we would say, an Other. Presence can be taken elsewhere and left there. It can continue its own existence, in parallel. As in two dimensions. Moving forward without touching, out of respect, porous but not meeting. Or just a little, in a barely perceptible way. Discreet, modest. Where the borrowed hieroglyphic sign beckons. A landscape. Part of the presence that returns to us from elsewhere has remained in elsewhere. Elsewhere or the Other. It is not absence. It is not, here, a survival of absence or a memory. It continues its trajectory. Like a double. We leave doubles elsewhere, in the Other. Philippe and Marine have become each other's doubles. "He and his feminine island. He grasped the hand. The hand of the earth. The hand of a craftsman, a farmer. Glued it to the wall. To make marks. The same tracks on the same wall. The cave. The animal. The one that extracts itself from us when we gasp for breath. Taken by the hand. The childhood of gesture. The childhood of Art. Engravings, drawings. Tracing. Trajectory. From wall to substrate. Earth. Fire. Volumes. One presence. Four hands. Do we need a manifesto? Marine Aïello *Edmond Jabès