Memory Gaps was built around encounters:

Encounters between Guykayser and the residents of the Kennedy neighborhood in Châlette-sur-Loing. During this period, twenty individual interviews were conducted. Encounters orchestrated by the Excentrique festival between Guykayser, visual artist, Olivier Baude, linguist, and Gérard Parésys, computer scientist. This was, first of all, an opportunity to develop a common theme, the “collective self-portrait,” with different perspectives, viewpoints, and tools. This was, then, the creation of an installation that materialized the culmination of work made up of paths that crossed and intertwined before coming together on September 22 during the Kennedy neighborhood festival. The collective work was organized by Guykayser between September 2011 and September 2012. During these twelve months, encounters followed one another in Châlette-sur-Loing, Orléans, and Paris. It was first necessary to explain and compare each person’s approach. This dialogue continued throughout the project, and it is not the least of the successes to have created a space for exchange between artists and academics. with the participation of DICRéAM

See and hear the memory gaps

Portraits: cross perspectives on identity. Emmanuelle Guerin

Thus, the creation of a portrait based on highlighting an individual’s identity is a problematic task whether one is an artist or a researcher. In all cases, it is the relationship between the individual and the common that is not sufficiently taken into account, for lack of insight into the nature of mutual influences. Thus, even when the artist’s approach is intended to be “hermetic,” meaning a representation of reality reconfigured very far from common codes, the interaction between the artist and the viewer is only possible on the condition of a more or less explicit recourse to constituent elements of the body of collective knowledge and representations. Nevertheless, the artistic approach to identity is otherwise inaccessible: being unable to depart from its objectifying aim, the researcher cannot reach certain aspects of identity. On the one hand, because they adopt a neutral posture that does not allow them to give enough of themselves to, in return, get the subject to open up in turn in a conniving interaction encouraging reciprocity. On the other hand, because the principle of pre-categorization extracts the unpredictable from the field of observation by limiting it to generalizable criteria. “It may be (…) that, better than philosophers or analysts, artists are able to help us reinvent a creative relationship with identity fragmentation, no longer as tense closure, anxiety or pain, but as laughter and enjoyment.” (Grossman, 2009: 4). In other words, the two approaches, although part of different perspectives, are complementary. This is the bet we are making, particularly in a first dialogue experience: the Memory Gaps project, initiated by Guykayser (site).

It is in fact the meeting of the latter and his team and a group of researchers, sociolinguists, from the University of Orléans. The anchor point of this collaboration is the quest to create portraits of residents of the Orléans region. For one of the parties, it is a question of creating a work taking concrete form as an “interactive visual and sound installation.” For the other party, the aim is to enrich, expand, deepen, refine, research work already begun, ESLO (site), which aims to build a corpus of oral data to create a sound portrait of the city of Orléans. Obviously, the methodologies are specific to each and relative to the assumed constraints and necessarily different objectives. Although leading to a collaboration, the basis of the work is laid by the artist and his project. Memory Gaps is concretely organized in several stages:

a) Guykayser meets the residents of a neighborhood (“Le plateau Kennedy,” Montargis Metropolitan Area) individually and offers to talk with them. The subject of the discussion is a personal photograph, chosen by the informants, in which they appear. The aim is to have them tell the memory evoked by the events depicted. This interview is recorded and a copy of the photograph is kept by Guykayser.

b) From the collected photographs, Guykayser creates a montage giving the illusion that they are one. Specifically, the new photograph stages all the informants next to each other, as students might appear in a class photo or members of a sports team or other group. The shot is then printed at actual size and, in place of each face, holes allowing anyone to put their head through.

c) At the same time, Guykayser creates a sound montage of each interview in order to obtain what according to him synthesizes the account of the memory evoked by the original photograph. These excerpts will be associated with each “hole” so that, when one puts their head through, they are heard. Furthermore, through dedicated software, the excerpts will also be seen, since for each one a visualization of the sound signal is offered, of the transcription in words, in syllables, in phonemes and an identification of the linguistic units that seem to ensure the homogeneity of all the excerpts. Thus, the aim is to highlight the individual and the common both visually and aurally: from individualities, a group emerges that makes sense.

d) The “interactive visual and sound installation” will be presented as part of the Excentrique 2012 festival (site). Guykayser will present his work and offer anonymous people to embody one of the characters represented by lending them their face. People will then hear and see the excerpt of the account related to the chosen character. The ultimate stage of the undertaking will consist of collecting the impressions of people who agreed to participate. In fact, the objective is to ask them afterwards what they intuitively understand about the identity of the character embodied.

The sociolinguist’s intervention, in the development of the project, is secondary and is limited to transcription, analysis of excerpts and the interview with anonymous people who agreed to participate on the day of the project presentation. Nevertheless, there is material here for numerous reflections and an opening of research perspectives on the question of identity. It is indeed the possibility of obtaining data to which the researcher’s position does not allow access. On the one hand, the first interviews conducted by Guykayser necessarily differ from interviews that can be conducted as part of a research project. What takes place in the artist-subject interaction can never be established in a researcher-informant interaction, even if they are people otherwise known. It goes without saying that what the informant will reveal of their identity with a view to contributing to an artistic project cannot be of the same order as what they would reveal in the context of a research project: even with real immersion work in the informants’ community, even with real connivance, the informant will reveal what they think will interest the researcher. In representations, such an interaction appears as evaluative and/or informative; in all cases, it is not felt as the one that is established with an artist. It is not a matter of considering that more interesting data is obtained in one case or the other but that we are dealing with complementary data. Furthermore, it is interesting to see how and on what elements Guykayser selects the elements to assemble the excerpt that according to him synthesizes the account. In other words, what constitutes, for him, constituent elements of the informant’s identity? Confronted with the entirety of the interviews, the researcher can in turn identify what seems to them to be defining. The comparison of the syntheses, in consultation with the artist, will perhaps shed more light on the definition of identity. Finally, the second interviews, with anonymous people on the day of the project presentation, will provide elements for reflection regarding common ideas, shared representations. Why do we attribute such identity to such an account? For this aspect of the work to be relevant, we must think of an interview scenario open enough not to induce pre-categorization, not to make people say what is expected of them.

This first dialogue experience between researcher and artist opens up many perspectives. It is part of a dynamic of breaking down disciplinary boundaries, recalling the indispensability of cross perspectives when one is interested in Man. Of course, such an approach would find its fulfillment with other points of view, that of the psychologist or the historian for example. However, the relevance of this collaboration arises from the opening of the academic framework to the arts and vice versa. The whole difficulty lies in maintaining the postures and ends of each while considering complementarity: there could be no artistic project commissioned by the researcher nor research project commissioned by the artist. It is a matter of thinking of a more complex collaboration where each would find their place while understanding, respecting, even sharing the other’s interest. Posing the question of identity as common ground for the researcher and the artist seems conducive to such an arrangement, each being aware of the complexity of the subject and their limited field of action: no one knows how to define what is unique, common and dynamic at the same time. This does not prevent finding, in attempts at cross approaches, mutual insights.