Soyez truite

Novels, clinics, operas, cathedrals, public housing, poems, symphonies, parking lots, museums…
And you and me, between Elvis, Chardin, Bach, Montaigne, Fellini, Warhol, Bocuse…
We wander, naturally.
So: let’s walk in this neighbourhood of ancient slopes, shaped by Bruant, by Nerval, by Arabia.      Pharmacies solicit your thinness, displays of over shiney apples, hallal butchers, colour everywhere, walk between
the pavement scooters, the African mamas of fleshy shoulders marked with a rosy strap, pushing prams full
of children, amongst the perfumes of the Goutte-d’Or and the echos of the Butte.  Walk. And you will reach
the rue Labat. And then: it’s not a museum, it’s not a gallery, it is a shop, an old shop. In its window, the echo
of what you just passed on your promenade, the quintessence of your voyeur’s harvest, everything is there, crammed in, packed tight, hidden away. Of course we should throw all that in water, like those chinese paper balls, to see a hundred flowers bloom, a thousand stories unfurl, rise out of each sculpture to recount their travels through time, space, traversed by dangerous frontiers, by times opaque, of  tranquil sun and ordinary poverty.
And what does one see there amongst this disarray, this accumulation, this heaping up?    Wire and wax, shards of broken metal freshly plastered, polished, shining with underground brightness, reflections of heat and the humidity of sweat on skin.
Spoons, sieves, skimmers, screwdrivers and saucepans, irridescent feathers, springs, twists of brass, taciturn ebony and voluble mahogany.
Patience. Slowly from an old wood block, the heaps of old iron, the accumulae of rust, strange copulations propagate, ferruginous couplings and ligneous labours, crossbred birthings.     Swarmings, a thousand little bones, totems of violence, improbable personages at the frontiers of humanity, rickety and knotted, sometimes slender, sharp, bristling with famished teeth.       Pursuing a dream of humanity between the signs and the scrap, a metamorphosis of essences.     These are existences crude or incipient, delicate monsters emerging from dead matter, matt matter.
Take each personage, each sculpture. Take it in your hands, touch it. Take it like a baby, like something fragile, cardinal, rock it like a little kitten without a mother, a new born lamb. It mews gently, bleats in your arms. Gradually will emerge a more orderly language. Then you will hear the stories, the words of which our two gentle mediums have simply reflected the echos. Listen long, it is a simultaneous translation of all tongues.
That’s it. You can leave the studio and return to the street, rejoin the new peoples of the old neighbourhood
of Paris and mingle with the ease of a trout in a river, with the eye of the just.     Ange et Damnation will have transformed you into a trout of the Goutte d’Or.

Jean Debouverie
Tanslated by Victoria Cole