– See, I told you.
– What do you mean? You want a five-star hotel?
– No, lol. I mean, I’d like a hydro-massage bed, but no, I’d like to repair and answer at the same time.
…
– Oh yeah. Okay…. I just want to be in a mobile home in the middle of the forest, and to be left in peace. To feel the drops, the wet ones and the resinous ones, the ones in the morning and the ones in the evening. That would be enough.
– I don’t see why not.
– Is this a diversion for you?
– No, it’s not. At first it floated, light but shaky. Then it started to sink into the ground. Now it’s more stable and I’m afraid it won’t move again.
– Are you talking about art or life?
– I think it’s become the same thing. I’ve forgotten other ways of living. I used to see it as a mission, something to cushion people and things; something that heals and shows.
– And what was your method for achieving your mission?
– It was a kind of magic soup, with all the gems that were dear to me in it, but hey, there’s the reality principle.
– And what’s the reality principle?
– It’s when the choices we’ve made take us to places we never imagined.
But sometimes we don’t choose much.
When you’re a child.
When you’re under guardianship.
When you’re disabled.
When you’re in captivity.
– Memories of my captivity. My great-grandfather dug this in the woods when he was he was a prisoner in Germany. I wonder what we have left when we don’t decide.
– The Germans put the water in the sink”, say the grandmothers. They’re young. It’s the the war. Fathers are far away, but now there’s water at home.
It was wartime. It is Saint-Alban. Antipsychiatry was invented. The hospital
transformed into a round table. Freedom was found in enclosed spaces, when you no longer had a choice.
– Grandmothers also say “as long as you have your wits about you”. But what does it mean to be
all your wits? What’s missing when you’ve lost yours? Is it possible to have

extra things inside? I’d like us to be able to put these heads on speakerphone.
To listen to the fabrications, take on the traumas and tell the world.
– Deconsecrate.

– I used to get terribly bored when I was a kid. And I was always sick to my stomach because of the mountain roads.
Boredom dissolves and makes you want to go far, far away.
– Imagining an astronomical number of far and better places.
Crossing expanses of vegetation, soft surfaces, walls covered in drawings.
– A wall is a football pitch that looks like a mattress, a pair of jeans, an antenna looks like an aerial, looks like a sausage, looks like a tear.
– If it’s a wall
it’s a partition
it’s a membrane
it’s a cell,
it’s a prison.
– Where do they go when they need help? I mean, what do you do when you don’t know what we’re doing here? How do you treat without coercion? How do you invent something that isn’t a hospital, a rehab centre, a convent or a museum? What is the between help, refuge and confinement?
– That was the aim of this magic soup, a kind of fusion, a mixture or digestion, something that dissolves the toxins in the body.
digestion, something that dissolves a little, digests a little, and then nourishes. We welcome sensations first, then ideas. The sludge becomes a promise, proof that we’re there that you’re there and that you’re expanding.
– Something that penetrates the straitjacket and spreads. Something that has the possibility of representing itself.
– It’s funny that you should talk about spreading. It’s also what I feel when I show what I do. It’s as if someone could come and gnaw at my insides and observe things that are invisible. Basically, I just wanted to respond to desires. To be protected and reassured.
reassured. To be presented with THE answer. To let my loved ones live, to pop bubbles,
And that’s it.
– Well, no, not that. When you forget Deligny, Tosquelles and all the others, you switch off, you suffocate and contain yourself. When is rest?
– Rest is the end and then we start again at the beginning.

— Camille Juthier & Ugo Ballara