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Who Are You, François Roche? I Asked Them

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Who Are You, François Roche? I Asked Them MV_QuiEtesVousFRocheEn_09/17_2.indd 2-3 9/17/16 10:32 PM New York City 8/06/2016 Foreword by MarieVic I was a desert that gave up monologuing. Numb, mouth dry and skin like a lizard. The noise outside was muf- fled. The others? I don’t know where they were. I didn’t really worry about it. Loneliness is Fun. A fragile, nice glimmer began to shine in my wakeful- ness and in my sleep. I wanted to get closer but sud- denly the sky went dark. The others also tried to grab it, without success. Extreme body failure. It was a will-o’-the-wisp. The ghost of the swamps wasn’t real. What a relief. It was comforting to think that everything is unique and lost forever. Instead of worrying, might as well distance yourself from it. The glimmer kept coming back, seductive. Its flicker- ing light seemed to burst into song, a sacrificial round whose charm was to spread confusion. Your dreams of war alarm you. I began to become obsessed with the will-o’-the-wisp. MV_QuiEtesVousFRocheEn_09/17_2.indd 4-5 9/17/16 10:32 PM The phenomenon was great and absurd. A misunder- Oh… all right. standing that revealed the indecipherability of the world in which we crystallized our desires, anger and – I am a living thing, hybrid and ambiguous, frustrations. It was our common illness, our symptom. multiple. A network of uncertain exchanges. Since I was blind, I asked the others what they saw. Who are you, François Roche? I asked them. – If you want to know the truth about François Roche, you should know that you won’t get it from – I am baroque and delicateness, they told me. him. Because the most unique and bizarre fantasy, when correctly analyzed, always goes back to the principle – I am a ventriloquist, the voice of an avatar… of delicateness. – I am Mephisto, whispering into Faust’s ear, All – I am the marriage of all human and robotic theory is gray, my friend, but forever green is the tree pathologies. of life. – A narrative principle… I am One Thousand The will-o’-the wisp whistled in my desert like a siroc- and One Nights, a maze, a web, a network, a riv- co. It would have driven me crazy without the help of er with infinite tributaries, a series of boxes within the others, without their monologue voice. They told boxes, a bottomless pool. It turns endlessly on itself, A me about this sibylline, masochistic, fanciful character STORY ABOUT STORYTELLING. who insulted beauty. Everyone saw him as a possible justification, a forbidden antidote and an impossible – I am a subversion. A possible. There are no tool. His disenchantment, tenderness and aesthetic absolute beginnings. Beginnings flow from everywhere, ability to eroticize our ills have made him our martyr. like winding rivers. I am a Deleuzian interrogation. An His infinite work, with no subject or possible accom- architecture of synthesis, a chaos world. plishment, was our symptom. – I am your fantasy, the projection of a melan- Let us each grab hold of it. cholic affectivity. New York City. 8/06/2016. Foreword. MarieVic. New York City. 8/06/2016. Foreword. MarieVic. MV_QuiEtesVousFRocheEn_09/17_2.indd 6-7 9/17/16 10:32 PM Who are you, François Roche? A case study & investigations conducted by MarieVic MV_QuiEtesVousFRocheEn_09/17_2.indd 8-9 9/17/16 10:32 PM Los Angeles 10/10/2014 Interview with Sylvia Lavin A Borromini There’s a long tradition of crazy, troubled, flamboy- ant architects. Probably the most famous and in some ways the one that perhaps has a great deal of reso- nance with François Roche would be Borromini, who did exactly the same kind of things: he was constant- ly insulting the pope, losing commissions, impaling himself on swords; he had a kind of disastrous life because of his inability to operate within certain pro- tocols, and particularly because he was in a constant conflict with a single competitor – Bernini. And this dynamic of one and the other, which would be another form of one plus one, on a psychological level, undid Borromini. He wasn’t able to compete. Bernini would come out at the last moment and substitute models in competitions made out of silver, things Borromi- ni was incapable of. On the other hand, historically speaking, Borromini has been the most beloved by architectural history. So what he lost in his own life- time, he made up for in a kind of endless series of heroic reinventions. Not by himself but by historians MV_QuiEtesVousFRocheEn_09/17_2.indd 10-11 9/17/16 10:32 PM and critics. In some way, this is a terrible thing to much money involved, I’m not entirely sure what the say and I hope that François will understand that I explanation would be, but a lot of those people end- mean it with great affection but, part of the problem ed up pursuing pretty typical forms of practice. The is: he isn’t dead yet. He’s still there and so he’s not forms of their buildings might have changed in some yet fully available to be reinvented by criticism. The way, but the structure of the field and practice stayed other thing about François is I always imagine him the same. The rules of the game changed around a as clever enough to know this. Perhaps this is part certain set of figures. Some of them decided to go of his own tragedy – there is a big and potentially along with the new rule set, which looked a whole ultimate cost in the kind of road he’s traveling. But lot like professional practices of the fifties, and some at any rate, there is a tradition of architects who pro- of them didn’t. And I would say that François is one foundly change things but not through typical means of those people who didn’t. In a certain sense he’s a of practice; I think of François is one of those guys. kind of futuristic anachronism. He’s somebody who seemed to enter the world as one who thought about I also think he is practicing at a complicated moment. radical ways of changing the future. And his own When he first came to my attention, he belonged to commitment to architecture’s potential to change the a generation of people who were interested in theo- future has made him kind of outdated, in a concep- retical issues, interested in the relationship between tual way. So François is really out of sync, which, I computation and form, computation and construc- think, is why he is not in the position one might have tion, who were thinking about computing less as predicted 15 years ago. But if he were given the job job-management or information-management – they of doing the City Hall of Lyon, would he want to do were not really interested in what has become more that? I don’t know… I’m not his analyst, but there predominant today, which is to say the aesthetics of is an underlying question: is there a psychological administration by means of a computer. That gener- bloc that makes it impossible for him to complete ation emerged from the generation of the ‘70s and things that he would want to complete? Or is not ‘80s but we think of them as the early 1990s people. completing precisely his form of resistance? But in People who put a new kind of value on theoretical that case, he has to pay the consequences. When I work. There was a generation that was almost lulled think of Thailand… I can’t tell whether it’s an escape into a sense of security, that you could have a mean- or alternative. My feeling about François is that his ingful and contributory life through an alternative commitment (I’m not sure to what) – the ethos of form of practice. Somewhere in there, I don’t know commitment and the willingness to pay a significant whether it was just because there started to be too cost for it – is an essential part of the ecology. I think Los Angeles. 10/10/2014. Interview with Sylvia Lavin. Los Angeles. 10/10/2014. Interview with Sylvia Lavin. MV_QuiEtesVousFRocheEn_09/17_2.indd 12-13 9/17/16 10:32 PM it’s unfortunate that isn’t a more constant pressure al principles and produced different forms of inscrip- on the field. When he disappears, a certain potenti- tion. In one of Latour’s discussions of the laboratory, ality for architects disappears with him. I don’t know he goes into some detail about trying to understand of anybody else who is willing to do the acupressure about how it was that the average cost of a paper was in the way that he does. And this is a little bit what 60,000 euros, read by four or five people, four or I mean when I say he’s out of sync, too. I think that five people generally already in the laboratory. Now there are other people who want to apply pressure. it’s an interesting question when you place that in It’s just that the way of applying pressure these days the gallery, because normally, when you think of the is generally understood to be more from within. Peo- gallery, unlike the laboratory, it is a site for making ple who want to work with industries, who want to work accessible to lots of people. But there is a sense work with institutions, who want to work with these of the gallery as being a site that puts the notion of kind of things because they feel that you could really value in crisis.
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