Living is easy

Living is easy Jeanne is sleeping. An alarm clock rings. She wakes up, gets up, goes to stop the ringing, and returns to bed.
A second alarm goes off. She stops it somewhere else in the house.
She’s about to lie back down when a third alarm sounds.
She barely has time to stop it before a fourth alarm rings, then a fifth.
She runs through the park turning off alarms that keep multiplying.¹ There are countless attempts to get out of bed, to awaken, to desire, to surge, to be born into a life.
Beginnings of sentences pile up, paragraphs we stumble over, false starts—celebrated by Janet Malcolm as a form of writing in her brilliant article “Forty-one False Starts”, published in The New Yorker in July 1994: a direct portrait of the American painter David Salle and an indirect one of the writer.
Beginnings and urges for life, stacked and compressed, build a wobbly structure, a biography of the self—altogether banal, but real.
We gather, we lose, we share, we remember, we accelerate, we mess up, we remember fiercely, we meet, we come back, we drift away, we come closer, and so on. Shall we call each other? See each other soon? The patrol path of a prison, skimming the rooftops.
The rooftops of the prison, right up to their peak.
At the hour when the guards, silent and weary from staring into the dark, sometimes fall victim to hallucinations. First Guard. — Did you hear something? 
Second Guard. — No, nothing at all.
 First Guard. — You never hear anything.
Second Guard. — Did you hear something? 
First Guard. — No, but I had the impression I heard something.
 Second Guard. — You heard it or you didn’t? 
First Guard. — I didn’t hear it with my ears, but I had the idea of hearing something.
 Second Guard. — The idea? Without ears?² This is the incipit of Roberto Zucco, the beginning of Scene I, titled “The Escape.”
Today, weary and defiant, sleepless, we don’t hallucinate while watching the night. I have ideas that aren’t referenced in books or theory—they’re sensory and rooted in memory.
What do the works of Andréa Sparta and Louis Chaumier do to me?
What kind of relationship do I form with them during my passage through the exhibition space?
How do they transform me? I ask myself this a bit naively, but honestly—I found myself repeatedly dumbstruck by the familiarity their works evoke in me.
They have this magical ability to bring me back to specific moments in my life.
 A flash of that childlike, insatiable curiosity; of that endless stretch of time—“say, you’re pulling on the string”; of repetition—and boom, rewind the tape and rewatch the movie.
The carpet rasping against knees and elbows, the extension cord that lets you talk on the landline somewhere other than the living room, the infinite hours spent crawling on the floor pushing a never-ending line of metal toy cars, one by one; the cat brushing past my head, arching its back, coming for a cuddle. It’s endless. Everything stretches.
Daylight fades, the darkness thickens, and our attention is swallowed by play.
It would never even occur to us to turn on a light—no way. It’s the adults who bring us back to reality: tklik-tklak—“careful, you’ll ruin your eyes.” ¹ La Journée d’une Rêveuse, Copi, play created in Paris in January 1968, in Copi Théâtre, Christian Bourgois Éditeur, Paris, 2018, p. 25 
² Roberto Zucco, Bernard-Marie Koltès, play completed in autumn 1988, premiered in Berlin in April 1990, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 2011, pp. 9–11