With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to Audrée Wilhelmy.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
Hundreds and hundreds of names that multiply, split, first names repeated and repeated and repeated in the terrible cadence of the typewriter. The clicks, clicks, clicks of the keys sound like gunshots in my ears. A long salvo punctuated by the bell that marks the end of the line. Each letter, anger. Each name, the meeting of a sister. I take the time to hammer each of them into my heart, into my body, to the beating rhythm of my old Underwood.
A few weeks ago I finished making Sepulcher, an artist’s book printed in a single copy in which soberly combine lace inlays and black ink stains. What matters, however, is the text: for days, I transcribed the names of all the women who were victims of feminicide in Quebec, since the Polytechnique massacre. More than 1,150 names, missing those of murdered Indigenous girls and women, because they don’t even end up in the horrific registry of shattered lives. If they were there, the book would contain almost double the pages.
For them, I am currently working on creating a second collection, a silent mirror book. I embroider white crosses on it, one by one. Of course, I took care to inquire with different Nations before starting this second project. I want it to be the occasion for a meeting, for a real recognition of the Other, of his suffering, of his hopes too. In all communities, the pain is searing. It is now a question of celebrating the memory of these women, of maintaining a serenity that sometimes requires anonymity and of denouncing the unspeakable loss of these daughters, these mothers, these sisters, these spouses, these friends, so that morals are transformed and that no more human losses are concealed in this way.
As a novelist, I portray women who face all kinds of violence without flinching, fierce, sovereign even in death. I need to master this possibility: to be killed because I am a woman; I need to do something else with it, to give back to my characters the agency that has been wrested from murdered girls and women all over the world, through all the ages of Man. Literature opens up this possibility: reinventing a world, right next to ours, in which women are immune to violence.
In my artist’s books, it’s different: the emotion can be raw, generated by the format, the very aesthetics of the book-object. Whatever the form, however, to create, you have to know how to fix the pain somewhere in yourself, to delimit it: a star next to the heart, a throbbing point between two parentheses. By placing pain, anger, indignation in translucent amphoras, we can look at them as so many distinct objects that become material to create, manipulable material: a piece of the world on which we have a hold. This distancing, in the intimacy of art, makes it possible to delve into violence to bring out works that inspire empathy, untie hearts, reveal the complexity of emotions, of bereavement.
These missing women who haunt Sepulcher, I hear their suspended voices in the middle of a sentence, never-ending words, aborted ardor. I’m not just talking about metaphorical voices, but about literal voices, intonations, accents, ways of saying “I love you” that will never be heard again.
What text could do them justice? Imaginary words are not enough. Detailed description of the lives lost is impossible. Nothing can be said that will have greater magnitude than the relentless chain of names, of crosses that continue to accumulate. Faced with a project like this, each reader has his or her own duty of reconstitution; there are no instructions, no right and wrong ways to get overwhelmed by emotion, it’s an exercise in empathy that can take any form.
Art opens questions where the political, journalistic and philosophical spheres seek answers; it is in the juxtaposition of the pure emotion generated by the works and in the rational reflection that follows that real social change seems possible to me.
There are projects that are planned for a long time – a novel requires months, years of preparation; others arise unexpectedly. They impose themselves, transform us. Sepulcher is one of those. I cherish the memory of the victims there, take care of the little ones, the big ones, I preserve them in a case of grace and I let myself be crossed by the powerful sorority that emanates from them.
Soon, the salvos of the typewriter are transmuted into tenderness: my fingers now know the extent of the drama, but they have also taken care of each deceased. The sweetest part of mourning was accomplished at the time of binding: I sewed page by page the sheets, the names, the memoirs, and I tucked these women into their lace shrine. Their names are sheltered, gathered. I have a heart large enough for them all to settle there, to calm down there.