Tête à tête with Raymonde April

Letter from Above to Your Infinities Dear Raymonde, I’m in residency at the observatory of the International Space Station. Finally, creators can go to space to do research and creation. Five days: eighty orbits around Earth. One orbit takes about ninety minutes. Fifteen to sixteen orbits in twenty-four hours. A sunset and a sunrise for each revolution. We’re not all that high above Earth, about 410 kilometres. Imagine the trip from Montréal to Rivière-du-Loup, but vertical. I didn’t bring much with me. Your photobooks, a camera, and something to write with. From here, I’ll get a wonderful view of the places where you took all those pictures. Especially because visual acuity increases in weightlessness. So you can see the tiniest wrinkle on a face, a pore of skin, the stems in a sheaf of wheat, a spider, a nude swimmer diving, or the fatigue of a worker sitting on a hill with his scythe, L’homme de poussière. Raymonde AprilL'homme de poussière, 1978-1991.Photo: courtesy of the artist When I arrived at the station, Sabine Werlach was about to end her residency. She’s a dancer and choreographer from Charleville. She avoids talking about Arthur Rimbaud. Car j’ignore où tu fuis came to mind again. The kind of sadness that runs the length of wet cobblestones through a glass lozenge. Sabine has created her first weightless choreography. She had a chance to tweak a “weightlessness dimmer” that she had invented. It is to be used in the theatre where she will present this new work. “These days,” she told me, “we can control temperature, light, sound, and speed electrically, through dimmers. Soon, we’ll be able to control gravity. It will be revolutionary. We’ll be able to increase, decrease, or eliminate weight, body mass. We’ll build weightless roads on Earth to move goods and people from one place to another, as we do here in the ISS. Every theatre stage will be equipped with one. Dancers, actors, opera singers, and circus performers will be able to create new movements, invent different ways to get around. Imagine Bach’s Mass in B Minor performed in a state of weightlessness. Nothing will ever be the same.” She would like to live on the other side of the sky—here, that is. I told her I’m in residency to look at the images you took on Earth. Looking at photographs on Earth and looking at them in the Cupola are two different experiences. In space, the subjects photographed are freed from Earth’s attraction. “I know,” she answered. They can turn on themselves, change a perspective. We can also leave them as still as they are on Earth. We flew over billions of faces invisible from here. You, you wrapped them in creative attention to reveal them to us, familiar and friendly. Maybe that’s part of your art, dear Raymonde. Raymonde AprilPluviers, from the series Équivalences 3, 2010.Photo: courtesy of the artist Time, nostalgia, memories, presences, smiles, light and its shadows, friendship, childhood, parents, landscapes, animals, celebrations, the private and the public, human relationships – everything you capture with your little magic box becomes other and yet isn’t transformed. I think I’ve found tragedy in your works only once. The face of that young girl sitting beside a calculator: Tout embrasser, no 273. When I look above Earth, the darkness of the universe is never as deep as her look. Do you know what it’s about? If you do, write to me. The observatory looks like a cathedral rose window. We call it the Cupola. It was made in Italy. It’s truly a glass cupola. Six big trapezoid portholes around a seventh, circular one. It’s quite magical. It reminds me of the series Épicentres. The dragonfly in l’Atelier de Louise Viger. The eyes of that fabulous insect. Nearby, small white erasers on which the artist created miniature mezzotints. Slivers of infinity. Les temps satellites are floating weightless around me. It’s beautiful to see them, all ten of them, blinking red against the endless black of space or the blues of our planet. Sometimes they’re random, sometimes in formation. People dance among trees. Your face. A man reads. A waterfall. On the station, we quickly forget those simple gestures, those reminders of living. You’d enjoy following your floating images with your eyes. They do tai chi, like your friend Charles in the video Équivalences 4. This empathetic slowness is familiar here. The rustling of leaves, less so. We travel about eight kilometres per second: Montréal to Rivière-du-Loup in fifty seconds. Using the sextant, I locate the Cygnus constellation. Your images of birds. La corneille et les canards, those in Inconsciences, the pelican in Aires de migrations, Pluviers in the series Équivalences 3, La maison où j’ai grandi, the bird at the studio window in L’atelier, Mazgaon, taking off in Marine Lines. Raymonde AprilLa maison où j'ai grandi, 2013.Photo: courtesy of the artist I put away Les temps satellites. The lastone hovers, at arm’s length, at the tip of the Indian Ocean: the brant geese next to a stretch of water. Do you remember our visit to the Barcelona zoo? The cage of vultures. The heron on a springboard. The white peacock that looked like a wedding dress. The albino gorilla. There are animals in your world. We feel like they’re friends, they’re part of the family. They live alongside humans, take part in landscapes, in Earth’s sky. Above Africa, they are Cabanes dans le ciel. The shadows shimmer, move, bend. Profiles of a human head, mysterious silhouettes, detach themselves from windows, a torrent. On the ground, a cluster of stars meld with alveoli. It’s night-time, down there. Despite our speed, we feel like we’re moving slowly above the cloud-streaked oceans. I wonder if you’d like to take pictures here. The only human beings to be seen are in the station. But there are so many objects, shapes, and colours floating around. You’d make a unique photographic series. Everything moves. There are straps to stabilize us. But weightlessness is constant. Hair and other things. The light is raw, clean, with no atmospheric filter. The black of the universe is purer than anything on Earth. We’d like to pick it up with our hands, taste it, listen to it, wrap ourselves in its deepness, perhaps mould it. An infinite camera obscura with only one division, within itself. That’s how I felt when I looked at Ranch. That instant when the moon rises above a deer. It’s as if a point of light has landed on him. Or that ashen cloud, alone above the horizon. That flaxen plain, green and fresh. Earth is our checklist. It reminds us that the colours of the world are just below our position. That’s what the six strangers seem to indicate, each taking a direction of the wind for itself. Raymonde AprilRanch (chevreuil), 2015.Photo: courtesy of the artist We enter terrestrial night. It will last about forty-five minutes. Once we finish this little curve, the sun will appear, bit by bit, in nameless orange glows. Its rising is an illusion. Just like daytime on Earth. On the other side of the blue sky is black night. The beginning of all mysteries. That of humility and of awareness, in a different way, of its finiteness. The moon isn’t so different. Four hundred kilometres above the planet is barely a stone’s throw. We aren’t far enough away to see all of Earth. But this point of view changes us forever. You must feel this when you photograph living things and objects, light and its contours, both crystallization and refraction. Have I ever told you that when I was a child, when someone took a picture of me, I thought they were photographing what I was looking at? So, I’d stare at a bird, a tree, a cloud, the lake. When they showed me the photograph, I didn’t understand why it was just me in it. I thought also that my gaze “travelled” to the object I was looking at, like a flashlight beam, and not the inverse. Often, I amused myself by looking to the side of the sun, a star, or a tree. I thought that my gaze went past the sun, the star, the tree. I also thought that a friend could walk on my gaze and reach the sun, the star, the tree. Then, I learned that the eye receives, perceives, and captures, and not the other way round. I remember being a little disappointed. It was if the sun, the star, or the tree had “won” the game of the gaze. I remembered this idea when I watched your film Tout embrasser. So many sounds, microscopic places, objects, lines, textures, colours, materials, close-ups, distant shots, deposited and then removed to make place for the next ones. A Francophile Russian cosmonaut joins me in the Cupola. He wants to show me a new visor. He asks why I’m smiling. I show him Debout sur le rivage. That image in which a translucent slide cover discreetly veils your face. As a joke, I tell him that artists wear this kind of protection in space. This intrigues him. So I show him the image, taken from La fortune, in which Michèle Waquant wears a transparent pencil case on her head. I hoped to continue, but he had floated back to his workstation. Raymonde AprilDebout sur le rivage, 1984.Photo: courtesy of the artist Raymonde AprilLa fortune, 1994.Photo: courtesy of the artist I wanted to show him Une mouche au paradis. The day before, I had confided to him that you had photographed, in an abandoned attic, a school desk that reminded me of the small work table used by the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. Above India, I see a singer and the Beijing stadium in Mumbai. Men sleep under Marine Drive. Nearby, a woman who has come from elsewhere makes her Autoportrait au rideau. The wind caresses her face. She is sitting. She seems happy. Perhaps she is you. Farther on, a man in a white shirt takes a nap under Les Femmes de Mazgaon. Women in colourful dresses, sitting in a group, smile at the person who invites them to become an image, testimonials to living beings on Earth. One of them seems to be in love. Her gaze is imbued with the humanity seen so often among the inhabitants of this mysterious country. Much farther on, there’s your dear friend Ram. He’s so calm. He wears pants and a pleated shirt, both impeccable. He is at a window. Perhaps he is folding a garment? He meditates, prepares, plans. He breathes. The greenness on the other side of the glass watches over him. Raymonde AprilRam, 2013.Photo: courtesy of the artist A Temple. Garlands. Offerings. Orange. Ganesh, perhaps. The street. The passersby. Children. Workers. Bricks. In front, an immense cement wall. A bas-relief portraying the bow of a boat. The heat. The noise. The light. Do you remember that photograph from the series Miniatures? We see you standing, in the shadows, behind a lit lamp. You seem to have your hands over your ears. As if the light were making too much noise. You’ll tell me. I got permission to let some of your images float in the station. They’ll stay here after I return to Earth. There will be ten of them. At night, when you see the space station rise over the horizon, you’ll tell yourself that part of your world is flying over ours. On Earth, the lights of towns and villages scroll by like the credits for a film under our path. In each of them are faces, perhaps those that you photographed one day.Brasier floats before me. Flame, blue, and a woman. Raymonde AprilBrasier, 2015.Photo: courtesy of the artist That series is one of my favourites. Perhaps because India settled within me forever after I went there in 1994. You’ve told me that you felt the same thing. I try not to look at it too often, as fire is something that the astronauts here fear the most. They’re as superstitious as athletes or actors. I could live with these photographs. They speak to me and penetrate to the deepest part of me. Have I told you that I attended an antyeshti, the funeral cremation ceremony, in Varanasi? I watched attentively, with new patience, the almost-complete disappearance of the body of an old man with a serene face. It took about three hours. It was a rare, circumscribed, exceptional experience. Just as the photograph makes things appear, here the fire frees appearances. The two come together. In Brasier, the fire speaks, plays, dances, listens, receives. The woman offers it blue, her complementary colour. This union will be as ephemeral as life on Earth. Try to imagine the scene from Brasier in weightlessness. Perhaps we’re all strangers on this planet. But that’s us, humanity as we are now. Each one of your photographs testifies to this. From here, I see no one on Earth, even during the day. When you look up, you don’t see us. At best, your eye picks out a tiny speck of bright dust flying through the night above your horizon. The woman in the checked shirt beside the river in La maison où j’ai grandi is looking exactly there. Within, there are seven of us and I’m writing you this letter. Be well. rober Raymonde April, Rober Racine

Tête à tête with Raymonde April

Rober Racine

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