Protocol #000 – The Builder’s Constraint
Everyone has a constraint here.
Yours, perhaps, is to follow a stranger for an hour. Or to photograph only red things for a week. Or to count the days separating you from your death by writing them on your body every morning.
Mine is this website.
I will probably never submit a Trace in the mosaic or post on the Instagram account. Not because I’m above all that, exactly the opposite. Because my constraint is more demanding, longer and less spectacular than all the others combined: to build and keep alive the space where your constraints can exist.
One constraint per week. An article every two weeks. Artists to document, protocols to invent, an architecture to keep standing, a generator to keep running. Week after week. Without exception. Without respite. With no other trace than the site itself.
This is my protocol. This is my discipline. This is my work.
OuViePo draws inspiration from OuLiPo, the workshop where writers imposed formal constraints upon themselves to liberate creation. Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino didn’t comment on each other’s constraints: they wrote. The constraint was the method, not the subject. This site works the same way: my constraint is not to create, it’s to make creation possible. That’s not the same thing.
There is something dizzying about looking your own existence in the face. Life without a safety net can very quickly be reduced to a succession of days that look the same, automatic gestures, boxes ticked, right down to the final box… without ever really having decided anything. Many people fill this void with faith, and that’s a perfectly acceptable answer: religion offers a framework, a meaning, a promise. It explains the before, the after, and along the way gives a reason to hold on.
I chose art. Not the kind you contemplate from a respectful distance in climate-controlled rooms, in hushed tones, wearing felt slippers. Art as a posture, as a gaze, as a way of inhabiting the world and transforming the banal into something worth living. An art that requires no particular talent, no training, no legitimacy acquired at some school. Just an intention. Just a constraint. Just the courage to look at what you do with your days and decide to make something of them.
Romain Gary said that humour is a declaration of dignity, an assertion of man’s superiority over what happens to him. Art is the same thing… but longer, quieter, and sometimes without a punchline.
This site is an attempt to share that conviction. Not to convince anyone. Just to not be alone in believing it.
Robert Filliou said that art is what makes life more interesting than art. I don’t know if this site is art. I know it makes my life more interesting.
That’s enough.