Aurélien Froment. The journey of all journeys Great Travellers (4)
Where do texts take us? What are the infinite geographies that are born on the pages of a book? The French artist Aurélien Froment asked the actress Karine Lazard to read and in so doing recreate scenes taken from different movies. Standing in front of a plain white background and with a single object in her hands (a book), the actress re-enacts the attitudes and gestures that Brigitte Bardot, Julianne Moore and Oskar Werner, among others, adopted in films by Jean-Luc Godard, Stephen Daldry or François Truffaut. Echoing a recurring theme in the history of painting, cinema has also asked actors and actresses to sit with a book in their hands to record the private and magical act of reading. Turned into a performance by Froment, L'Adaptation manifeste (The Genuine Adaptation) transforms reading’s ‘journey of all journeys’ into a manifestly exterior gesture.
