in music collaboration with Laurent Bardainne

premiere on February 8, 2024 in Musée de la musique — Philharmonie de Paris
French text: Claire Bardainne — translation: Karthika Naïr

02:34

I am in love
with the river that flows beside the house,
with its golden sparkle through autumn,
with its currents that I retrace in summer
clad in my tiny plastic sandals,
with its sheath of wintry clay after the rains,
with its restless surge at snowmelt,
which lends it this glacier colour in which the gaze meanders

i am in love
with turtledoves that coo beneath the window
and fly off in the morning, when, with the pyjama-clad child in our arms,
we open the shutters to greet the tree and the quivering leaves,
and the damp earth the blackbirds are scouring.
 

11:00

I remember Enghien-les-Bains,
remember that childlike joy that we had, both of us, in playing

Buenos Aires: i remember the botanical garden
where we smuggled a few days of summer into our winter

i remember Poitiers where you dyed my hair grey for a video we were recording

the first time you welcomed me into your home: you had transformed
your study into a shack, and we spent the weekend in there

our first holiday together: i remember hours spent
gazing at the sea, collecting white pebbles, and figs

i remember the film The Red Turtle,
i had imagined us growing old, together, like those characters

Bussang in the Vosges mountains, i remember that day,
dozing, side by side on the hill, amid rabbit droppings

i remember that day in April on the banks of the Drôme when we said:
and what if we lived here?

i remember in Grenoble the unspeakable hassles we got 
out of, laughing all the way

in Lyon, i remember the impatience with beginnings – 
which wouldn’t let us sleep – when we found everything lovely

i remember, the taste of salt in your sweat drops after the show in Brest

i remember the first time you grazed my arm
 

18:00

22:32

Work on your house has begun
soon we will become neighbours,
the children will go from one house to the other,
we’ll invite each other to meals, we’ll stand and talk at the doorstep,
before returning home,
we will want to cherish what remains

…and me, i want to build shacks
with what is broken, pebbles, earth,
with my desires, my anger,
i want to build shacks that let the wind in,
shacks without roofs, to watch the evening star,
storms, and the crack of dawn.
 

30:00

I am not in love with you any more
i am just in love

i am in love with my garden, with the streets in my village
and also the trains
that i take, alone with my little suitcase,
in love with people,
i have never been as much in love with life

i held my greatest fear, that of being alone forever
i felt the very ancient grief of the first separation.
but in the biting cold of that solitude,
that nothing seemed to thaw,
i feel
drops
drops of love that sparkle at a random gaze
that seep through landscapes, that spurt on my face
with a tune, a light,
i feel
a nectar that drenches my children,
that pervades ties
with my friends, my parents, my lost ones,
with those dear to me, with the rain that soaks the earth, the blackbird
singing its lungs out, with the ferns, the heather,
and with these strands that melt my loneliness,
i will knit a cloak
that i will gift to the world.
 

Close the eyes,
and just drink, drink the sea

embrace the depth, the mystery

open the eyes
move towards the clear morning.