Writing, with Olivier Bodart, was born from his personal earthquakes. From his frequent moves over the last decade, but also from his wanderings on the American continent which finally landed this Parisian of origin and visual artist by training… in Montreal.
In his second novel, After me the desert, Olivier Bodart recounts his installation, after a painful divorce, in the Sonoran desert, in California, with the intention of founding a small school of photography with his new partner. But she is slow to join him, his divorce dragging on, and he finds himself alone, in the first weeks of the pandemic, to contemplate all his projects collapsing like a sandcastle.
“Everything that is said at the beginning of the novel is totally real,” confides Olivier Bodart, whom he met in a Montreal café.
“When we met in Chicago, my partner, who is a photographer, was going through pretty much the same story as me with her ex-husband. We said to ourselves: this city is too marked by our failed marriage, let’s choose a place on the map that excites us and create a project that belongs to us. »
Then everything was put on hold because of this mysterious “germ” that he evokes in the novel. What happens next is a mixture of the real and the fantastic. “We had real financial setbacks, the coronavirus really took place,” he laughs. But in his solitude, in the middle of the desert, his romantic alter ego begins to suffer from strange olfactory hallucinations. Then, unable to remain confined, he begins to drive on deserted highways, where curious visions appear to him.
On his way, while he is haunted by the idea of finding a place where he could take up residence – at least temporarily – he comes across cities erected in the middle of nothing: Slab City, “a kind of camp, a bit of a dump, of people left behind”; or even Felicity, this community “completely invented from scratch by a Frenchman, only for two people”, he says.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
Olivier Bodard
I am fascinated by this question: how to live somewhere? How do we deal with the environment, with the other people who live there? The desert is so huge that you can completely invent your way of living. Because I understood well that living is not simply about shutting oneself up in a space, but also about leaving the door open to the outside. And this question, I still ask myself here, in Montreal.
Olivier Bodard
The American Anti-Dream
After this parenthesis in the desert and another in Los Angeles, Olivier Bodart and his partner feel the need to reinvent themselves. “And that’s no longer in the book, but it was ultimately to create our anti-American dream, that is to say to ourselves: ‘Enough, the United States, we have been too shaken.” And it was above all my partner – she is Canadian – who said that: “I am tired, I want to go back to my country.” »
So they pulled out their map, expanding it to include Canada, looking for a place where they could catch their breath. “We counted our rooms and looked at where the cheapest place to live in Canada was; it was Prince Edward Island. I didn’t even know! »
Determined, they bought a house online, rented a U-Haul truck and hit the road. They reached the border between Maine and Canada 13 days later, on March 10, 2021 – in the midst of a pandemic – when entry was prohibited for foreigners. “I wasn’t sure I would be accepted in Canada, so we built a thick file like that to explain that we had been together for two years,” he explains.
Luckily, he obtained permission to go to their home in Prince Edward Island, with a ban on stopping in New Brunswick. “It was quite a magical and quite euphoric moment,” says Olivier Bodart – especially since his first novel, Risk areasappeared the same day in France.
It was during this transitional year that he wrote After me the desert, accompanying the writing of plastic works, as for the previous one. Since settling in Montreal with his girlfriend last summer, he has found a job – he teaches visual arts at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf. “We bought an apartment, it’s still a sign that we’re going to stay for a while. Now I have learned never to think definitively; I was sometimes told that I was on the move, that I was unstable – that’s for the negative side. Those who see it differently tell me that I am adventurous, that I like experiments. But maybe my place in this world is in movement,” he says thoughtfully.
Olivier Bodart will be at the Librairie du Square d’Outremont this Wednesday, at 5:30 p.m., for the launch of his novel as well as an exhibition of his works produced in parallel with the writing ofAfter me the desert.
After me the desert
Olivier Bodard
Uncultivated Editions
338 pages