Julie Saclier

Author, performer and visual artist Julie Saclier works alone or in tandem, but most often in the company of multiple voices. She views text as matter, which she sculpts as a lacemaker would.
After long periods of intense reading, during which she alternates between various books, Julie Saclier weaves together various textual and literary references, makes oblique connections and combines them into polyphonic poetry. Rather than use digital algorithms, she looks for the right form within temporal gaps and mixed registers — essays, novels, podcasts… Each source is meticulously indexed and used only once, exclusively, so as to avoid adding anything to the world, as a form of essentialism, just as her taste for protocols is aimed at starkness.
This process of extracting, sampling and reclaiming words, like the everyday objects she uses in her installations, produces a sort of desacralisation, a distancing of memories. Whether this applies to her family heritage in the mines, or to labour as a whole, to the status of women, to feminist activism or to her own personal history, Julie Saclier writes and says something about a collective memory in which genres produce other genres, and in which otherness generates novelty. With a rhythm and scansion that neither judges nor oppresses, her work transforms and defies codes. The carefully considered potential for infinite combinations incites a different kind of giddiness.

Martine Michard

Translated by Lucy Pons, 2024