île-de-france Iéna Situation #4

(10) A community that would have renounced at last to search for the star above its head. île-de-france is the critic of the weight of a necessary administration. The weight of hours spent waiting, bodies reunited by spaces and circumstances, but without warmth. To place something in a white cube, always reenacts the violence of museumification. This seems suitable considering the ‘sacred’ character of artworks. However one must ask oneself in this case what makes them lose the crucial aspect of their sacredness – that is to say their viability as merchandise – to rediscover joy.

(11) The island’s society is a secret society in the Bataillian way: it is an enclosed totality, self-contained, opposed to the official society. In its structure, it is ironic: negation of the outside. But while romanticist irony detaches the poem from the concrete reality, autonomising it to focus only on the spirit, on the thought in itself, the secret society is another type of negation. It is negation of the intellect, formless in the meaning of without shape – insubordination of the material facts to the thoughts and to the spirit. Affirmation of low functions, life and pleasure against submission to the intellect and eternity.

(12) One doesn’t go back to childhood, no more than they return to the island. The space in which we are, doesn’t only appear
to be the reconstitution of an island. It is the redistribution of the island itself: the atomization of its structures (earth, roads, buildings, hydrography…) in which it wraps and contracts itself entirely; both metonymically (it is each of its own fragments) and metaphorically (it is the movement, the dis-location that triggers its separation from the continent and frees it from its topological anchorage). Wandering island, moving, uncertain. Contrapuntal island undocked from its port, arch swayed into the sea like a drunken raft that only stops its path at slack tide. As a matter of fact, The Île-de-France is the reason for this displacement whose final restoration affirms it will render the things of this earth their original state and inaugurate a new kind of harmony from within the chaos.

(13) Every place is potentially an island. Meaning that island is essentially absence. Absence of connection and
heterogeneity – otherness and separation, otherness through separation. Separation not as contiguity, not as that which separates two states, but as distance. Difference not of quantity but of quality. In this sense, the island is always a secret society and vice versa. In this way, our island is nomadic and we can invoke it everywhere. Nomadic by its mobility, its capacity to be formed everywhere, but also nomadic in opposition to sedentariness and the illusion of permanence and transcendence of the institutions. Our island has nothing eternal, nothing fixed, everything is temporal, formless, slippery.

(14) On your last legs, when the air becomes scarce for the benefit of 5G cell waves, when all the profane is determined by the sign of depth, the possibility of an ultimate hesitation nevertheless presents itself before certain implications of irony. In this
other island, that contains others, still, us, islanders, we create archipelagos, but we do not conserve them. What we create is encumbered by others, for the interest of others, states and institutions, that reserve the right to make maps we are the only one’s to discover. We do not own the island – it owns us.

(15) île-de-france is a stopover on our island, an Île-de-France that is shapeless and ironic. Formless as declassification, that is to say it’s a negation of the form or rather a negation of the concepts of essence and truth. It is not a double, or a distorted image of the ‘actual’ Île-de-France but the idea that there is no actual Île-de-France. It is a step in our mythology, in our narrative. A fiction – meaning it’s false, but not false in relation to the truth, simply false in itself and for itself. Autonomous and separate.
An ironic work because negation and autonomy. But a postulate for a fiction – a false – that would be the driver and link of the community.