We are all migrants.
The Contemporary Workshop| N° d'inventaire | 22030 |
| Format | 14 x 22 |
| Détails | 96 p., 6 color illustrations, hardcover. |
| Publication | Paris, 2019 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9791092444988 |
Behind this politically charged title opens a space that exceeds, literally to infinity, the narrow understanding we may have of the word migration. For Jean-Luc Parant's text, a long-form prose poem, and as if from a single arrival, broadens the phenomenon to a cosmic dimension. The ordinary presentation of the "fact of migration" and its panicky accents, which punctuate a binary division between "them" and "us," dissolve here into long periods supported by a unified "us," the subject of a poetic narrative of the origins and the future of the human race. Starting from a reduced number of elements—the sun, the earth, the day, the night, the body, the eyes, thought, time, space...—substances that it associates, reinterprets, and converts from paragraph to paragraph, the text sketches a mythical vision of man, almost in the style of those cosmogonies that were the first scientific descriptions of the universe. In a ceaseless but peaceful back-and-forth between the finite and the infinite, the near and the far, the poem releases a sort of spirit of potential, or of constant reversibility, which acts in a liberating way on its reader. In truth, the political question is not absent from this imaginary development; it even surfaces – without floating – at many points. But the intelligence of the poem consists in taking this question to the next level, not only by rediscovering through poetry what biology and history attest – that life and our societies are the fruit of a “great journey” –, but by discovering migration in the very nature of man. We are all migrants thus frees itself from the grip of the present by inventing its own necessity, and gives scope to address issues which, however burning and urgent they may be, cannot admit of rushed answers.
Behind this politically charged title opens a space that exceeds, literally to infinity, the narrow understanding we may have of the word migration. For Jean-Luc Parant's text, a long-form prose poem, and as if from a single arrival, broadens the phenomenon to a cosmic dimension. The ordinary presentation of the "fact of migration" and its panicky accents, which punctuate a binary division between "them" and "us," dissolve here into long periods supported by a unified "us," the subject of a poetic narrative of the origins and the future of the human race. Starting from a reduced number of elements—the sun, the earth, the day, the night, the body, the eyes, thought, time, space...—substances that it associates, reinterprets, and converts from paragraph to paragraph, the text sketches a mythical vision of man, almost in the style of those cosmogonies that were the first scientific descriptions of the universe. In a ceaseless but peaceful back-and-forth between the finite and the infinite, the near and the far, the poem releases a sort of spirit of potential, or of constant reversibility, which acts in a liberating way on its reader. In truth, the political question is not absent from this imaginary development; it even surfaces – without floating – at many points. But the intelligence of the poem consists in taking this question to the next level, not only by rediscovering through poetry what biology and history attest – that life and our societies are the fruit of a “great journey” –, but by discovering migration in the very nature of man. We are all migrants thus frees itself from the grip of the present by inventing its own necessity, and gives scope to address issues which, however burning and urgent they may be, cannot admit of rushed answers.