Christian Bernard . Poetry reading in Nice . Friday 11 March at 7 pm . Photo © I.
Christian Bernard . Poetry reading in Nice . Friday 11 March at 7 pm . Photo © I. Kalkkinnen The Galerie Eva Vautier invites Christian Bernard for a reading of poems within the exhibition by Natacha Lesueur, Plus jamais de cheveux collants (même par temps humide) , on 11 March 2022 at 7 pm. Christian Bernard (born 1950 in Strasbourg) is an exhibition curator. After teaching literature and philosophy in Alsace, he joined the Ministry of Culture as artistic adviser at the DRAC in Lyon (1982–1985). He subsequently directed the Villa Arson in Nice (1986–1994) before conceiving and directing the Mamco, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Genève (1991–2015). He was artistic director of the Printemps de septembre in Toulouse in 2008, 2009, 2016, 2018 and 2021. In 2021 he also curated the retrospective exhibition of Natacha Lesueur, Comme un chien qui danse , at the Villa Medicis in Rome. In parallel, he has for years pursued an activity as a poet ( Petite Forme , éditions Sitaudis, 2012). 3. Ni loi Night trains vanished, the inkwell overturns the page where they crossed on the ashes of water, books on the water of logbooks and obituaries black with smoke blown beneath the embers of lanterns Chinese or paper fish Trains of lost crashing the ink drinks the evening poured from the pen ivy and octopuses let loose everywhere no monkey, no sign, no knitting nothing but corpus of memory, boa constrictor Christian Bernard, 17 July 2017, Excerpt from Catelles pour Freundlich , Letter forty-five, Walden n press, Trémas, 2017 Read more EXCERPT from the interview with Sylvain Thévoz, January 2015 Sylvain Thévoz : How did you come to poetry, and how do you move through it? Christian Bernard : « It is first of all a question of the ear, therefore of voice, the warmth of language, the savour of the lexicon, of rhythm, of refrain, which came early for me when, around the age of 5 or 6, I would join my father in his bed on Sunday mornings and he would recite poems to me. Heredia, Sully Prudhomme or Brizeux, the ones I remember. Then school: the pride and the anxiety of recitations. Still the Parnassian cymbals, of course, but above all the genius of La Fontaine, the breathtaking vertigo of ellipses. Finally, against school, the gang of the moderns: Rimbaud eclipsing the symbolists, then very quickly Lautréamont and the surrealists, the beat generation, Pound and Cummings. A banal path, but an accelerated one. » Today, it is naturally more complex. Whatever the importance of US poetry, the American polarisation of French poets reminds me of that of French artists in the late 1960s and the 1970s. A late aftershock of the Marshall Plan? Let us not overlook European poetic practices, nor the polyphony rising from globalisation, a healthy plurality of languages and worlds. Let us not neglect the deep historical field of poetry in the Latin languages. And let us unravel the modern narrative without liquidating anything of what we will continue to owe it, but reopen the…
