La Langue Verte
Solo exhibition, 2021
Centre Culturel Jean-Cocteau
Paris (France)
Curated by Luca Avanzini
Solo exhibition, 2021
Centre Culturel Jean-Cocteau
Paris (France)
Curated by Luca Avanzini
Six giant books rest in the exhibition rooms of the Jean-Cocteau Cultural Center in Les Lilas, Paris. They are open on the ground, on a carpet punctuated by a pattern of tribal masks around which figurines seem to dance. These are extraordinary and very special books: they contain no words and tell new stories every day. The creatures they house go to bed with two eyes and wake up with three more. A visitor who returns several times to consult them would believe to be crazy, or would swear to have seen certain figures disappear under flat areas of color. These are the Langue Verte books from the CANEMORTO trio, magical books that the Jean-Cocteau Cultural Center and the André-Malraux Library were lucky enough to be able to show in an astonishing exhibition made for and by children.
Txakurra, the name given to CANEMORTO’s deity, carries within itself liberation from all power structures. It is the Dionysian anti-divinity refusing the Apollonian order of social norms which transform children into adults. CANEMORTO's research is materialist, anti-intellectual, collective, experimental, fanciful. It takes root in the underground culture of graffiti, but frees itself from its rigidities through an attitude of lightness common to those who only take play seriously. It is ambivalent, ironic, hybrid. Their language breathe the oxygen of those who make the pictorial gesture a vital requirement and a spontaneous evidence: the Art Brut of madmen and the free art of children. The language of Txakurra is called the Langue Verte: instinctive, direct and raw, this language comes to life in the energy of drawing and speaks to everyone without saying a word.
How can we account for this energy within the institutional walls of an art center, without extinguishing the sacred fire of the dead dog? First rule: reverse the rules. The works “fall” from the walls, they take the form of books arranged in the rooms like islands on which children crawl, roll and walk in search of treasures hidden in the geological stratification of their pages. Second rule, divert the first law of an exhibition room: do not touch the works. In the world of the Langue Verte, it is not just a matter of touching them but of transforming them. Colored pencils are left available to anyone under the age of 12, an age at which one would transition into adult society. The pages of each volume, inhabited by mysterious and quirky figures barely sketched, are just waiting for the children's drawings to transform and come to life. By breaking the verticality specific to traditional museography and canceling any safety distance, the works become the ground for an encounter which is not only symbolic. It is a physical, sensory encounter with the unknown which reveals us to ourselves.
More than 1500 children participated in this collective performance from October to December 2021. Following the instructions given by CANEMORTO, set out in a video in the style of Fluxus protocols, they took off their shoes, chose a color and let their imagination run wild on the thick paper of these magical books. Sometimes in teams, some solo or in groups of friends, they exchanged pencils and supported each other in wild freestyles without ever wondering if they had the right to express oneself or how to do so. Some followed the outlines of the characters drawn with six hands by CANEMORTO, others ignored them, still others covered them vehemently, like graffiti artists on a “punishment” mission covering the subway trains with their obsessive gesture. The result is a jam session where we no longer recognize the features of the artists or those of the children, breaking with the division that underpins adult society. The Langue Verte is a free patois, constantly renewed. Its alphabet is traced by the gestures which punctuate a ritual where the collective transcends the individual, nourishing itself from its unique imprint: its style. It is a danced language whose patterns vary according to the vibrations of lines, tones, and pencil strokes, sometimes soft, sometimes powerful. As in a new Babylon, the members of the Langue Verte tribe understand each other without speaking, united in the freedom that makes childhood the terrain of all possibilities.
Luca Avanzini
Photographs by Élodie Ponsaud / Laura Aruallan
Txakurra, the name given to CANEMORTO’s deity, carries within itself liberation from all power structures. It is the Dionysian anti-divinity refusing the Apollonian order of social norms which transform children into adults. CANEMORTO's research is materialist, anti-intellectual, collective, experimental, fanciful. It takes root in the underground culture of graffiti, but frees itself from its rigidities through an attitude of lightness common to those who only take play seriously. It is ambivalent, ironic, hybrid. Their language breathe the oxygen of those who make the pictorial gesture a vital requirement and a spontaneous evidence: the Art Brut of madmen and the free art of children. The language of Txakurra is called the Langue Verte: instinctive, direct and raw, this language comes to life in the energy of drawing and speaks to everyone without saying a word.
How can we account for this energy within the institutional walls of an art center, without extinguishing the sacred fire of the dead dog? First rule: reverse the rules. The works “fall” from the walls, they take the form of books arranged in the rooms like islands on which children crawl, roll and walk in search of treasures hidden in the geological stratification of their pages. Second rule, divert the first law of an exhibition room: do not touch the works. In the world of the Langue Verte, it is not just a matter of touching them but of transforming them. Colored pencils are left available to anyone under the age of 12, an age at which one would transition into adult society. The pages of each volume, inhabited by mysterious and quirky figures barely sketched, are just waiting for the children's drawings to transform and come to life. By breaking the verticality specific to traditional museography and canceling any safety distance, the works become the ground for an encounter which is not only symbolic. It is a physical, sensory encounter with the unknown which reveals us to ourselves.
More than 1500 children participated in this collective performance from October to December 2021. Following the instructions given by CANEMORTO, set out in a video in the style of Fluxus protocols, they took off their shoes, chose a color and let their imagination run wild on the thick paper of these magical books. Sometimes in teams, some solo or in groups of friends, they exchanged pencils and supported each other in wild freestyles without ever wondering if they had the right to express oneself or how to do so. Some followed the outlines of the characters drawn with six hands by CANEMORTO, others ignored them, still others covered them vehemently, like graffiti artists on a “punishment” mission covering the subway trains with their obsessive gesture. The result is a jam session where we no longer recognize the features of the artists or those of the children, breaking with the division that underpins adult society. The Langue Verte is a free patois, constantly renewed. Its alphabet is traced by the gestures which punctuate a ritual where the collective transcends the individual, nourishing itself from its unique imprint: its style. It is a danced language whose patterns vary according to the vibrations of lines, tones, and pencil strokes, sometimes soft, sometimes powerful. As in a new Babylon, the members of the Langue Verte tribe understand each other without speaking, united in the freedom that makes childhood the terrain of all possibilities.
Luca Avanzini
Photographs by Élodie Ponsaud / Laura Aruallan
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