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Self-portrait as Dorian Gay © David Noir

Why Scrap?

Self-portrait as Dorian Gay © David Noir
Self-portrait as Dorian Gay © David Noir

Because over the years, while practicing my work, while "creating" as we say, I have been led to question theintegrity I had a growing difficulty in believing in their capacities, conscious or not, to follow a straight and honest behavior, in conformity with their convictions, including in my case. I noticed each time a little more, that the "anything", however savagely pejorative and claimed by everyone as the incarnation of what should not be done, was in reality, absolutely fundamental to the logic of behavior.

I was therefore observing for some years, the degrees of manifestation of this idealized integrityI became interested in the human beings that we are in this light and no longer from the only preconceived idea from my childhood that there are my friends and the strangers on one side and the strangers on the other side, but from the point of view of the people I know. In short, I gradually became interested in the human beings that we are in this light and no longer from the only preconceived idea from my childhood, which would have it that on the one hand, there are my friends and strangers who arouse my attachment and admiration and on the other, the rest of the population. It cannot be said, therefore, that I have made life easier for myself by abandoning this usually clear-cut position.

IntegrityIt's a funny word. The definitions given by Larousse are interesting:

- The state of something that has all its parts, that has undergone no diminution, no subtraction: The integrity of the territory, of a work.
- The state of something that has retained its qualities, its original state, without alteration: Maintain the integrity of one's intellectual faculties despite age.
- Quality of someone, of his behaviour, of an institution that is honest: The integrity of a judge.

I find this interesting because, linked to the notion ofintegritywe find the notion of trust of the relationships we have together. It is, among other things, what determines our quality of life, of consciousness and also of our actions.

The examples illustrating the above definitions suggest 3 qualifiers in this sense: whole, intact, honest.

It is not my intention to judge others and myself a little easily by the sheer weight of those three words to decide whether we fit them or not. I am not trying to erect a proof by the absurd by organizing grotesque and vindictive prize-giving. Besides, it would be a waste of time, since a quick assessment of our behaviours in any case evacuates the possibility of responding to them. Too many everyday events reveal that, apart from supposedly "holy" people with absolute courage of conviction, of whom I know no representatives, it is impossible for us to fulfil this task full time. It is even a superhuman task to do it partially. Fears, lies, petty and various complacencies, sometimes even betrayals, totally prevent us from enjoying any purity.
The question is not who can do it, or even if we can do it, but - since this concept of integrity has a heavy implication in our daily, professional and, for what concerns me, artistic and emotional lives - how can we live together in a kind and sincere way if we can only support our confidence in ourselves and in others in a fragmented way?
The world then turns out to be terrible with loneliness and despair. A fearsome jungle where friendship, love, trust are no longer as relevant as we once thought they would be.

This last sentence should not be seen as despair in the romantic sense. If there is despair, it is the despair of the researcher faced with dead ends and fruitless experiments. So what should be done with this aspiration to establish trust, which - and this is the point - in all fields, finds no limits? Can we be satisfied with half-confidence, quarter-confidence, 8th-confidence or what do I know?

Then appears the famous contract which today, manages so many aspects of our lives.

Unions, loans, commitments, jobs, collaborations ... everything is recorded in writing or signified orally to better circumscribe the nature of the exchanges. What is committed is not important in itself. Money, love, goods, sex, work... are only the details of what is agreed to be exchanged or made available. What is important is the framework that defines expectations.
Whether oral or scrupulously written, the contract has its limits. It cannot define the unspeakable. It cannot accurately convey the innermost feelings of each person it binds. From this state of affairs arise so many misunderstandings, disappointments, lawsuits and wars declared on an individual or collective level.

In addition to these limitations, its format also handicaps it from taking account of evolution. It is even antinomic in essence. The contract is designed to establish a situation at a given time and freeze it for a given period of time.

The contract, which is reductive, impossible to be exhaustive or misunderstood, is no longer the way to establish trust between partners.

Engineering does not suit emotional human relations, so I rather appeal to chance to get rid of my personal judgment on things and events.

So SCRAP lets it happen.
But unlike the Amusement parksIts process aims to identify and individualize the relationship with others and not to drown it in the mass of an unbridled fair. Much more "select" then, the project chooses an orientation to express what it has in the belly. And it is indeed in the belly that it intends to place its seat, since its decor is identified with the female womb.
No birth is programmed for all that. It is even its opposite that takes place in the form of an evocation of the periodic menstrual flow, the only space where blood is not "gory" and speaks of biological intimacy without mutilating the body. In this case, no flesh is cut to let it flow. That's what interests me: when the inside speaks for itself, without external abruptness. Male ejaculation could also have been an illustration of this desire to pour out. I am more interested in women's menstruation, in that it comes in the absence of any voluntary movement of stimulation. They share with our excrements, their quality of "waste", of being written off. Defecation being a punctual event, repeated many times during the week, I have naturally left it aside as a poetic support, because it is the relatively unpredictable spreading out in the duration that had to prevail here, as I explained above, by rejecting the rigid contract of trust as an event proving incapable of embracing this indeterminable notion in advance.

No contract, of course, but rules.

What can they be to make life positively possible, in love, among friends, in society?

Of course, I don't know, and it is from the myriad of philosophers and thinkers of all eras that one must turn if one wishes to obtain some useful reflections on this subject.

My only certainty in this matter is that what we say from morning to night in the course of our conversations says nothing about the reality that overwhelms us, and that most works do not mention it either, aspiring to construct meaning. This famous meaning of things, of ourselves and of life, seems to me to be everywhere. In incoherence as much as in structuring, in absence as much as in creation. For us, the human species, the path we have followed makes everything that is, identically to everything that is not, the support of our existence. For much more than living it, we imagine it. Imagination and the life of ideas are our reality in the same way as birth and death. There is no turning back from the flow of thought.

The rules that guide me today are organized in scenic and, in this case, specifically mine, also vital concepts.
I could summarize them as follows:

- Have a mobile centre so that it is not an exclusive centre
- Question any other rules that do not come from this centre
- Adopt any rule that is foreign to me but able to coexist with this center
- To make the center no more important than anything else that is not that center
- To give unlimited importance to what is not expected to be around this centre

It is for these reasons that SCRAP requires me to be alone.
It is for these reasons that, being alone, I wish to identify with all of you.
It is for these reasons that I believe in the emergence of a personality where nothing pretends to be.
It is for these reasons that SCRAP makes a point of not having one.
It is for these reasons that what will not exist there will, in essence, be no less constructive than what will happen there.

David Noir

David Noir, performer, actor, author, director, singer, visual artist, video maker, sound designer, teacher... carries his polymorphous nudity and his costumed childhood under the eyes and ears of anyone who wants to see and hear.

This Post Has 5 Comments

  1. Didier Julius

    If "Les Parques d'attraction" reminded me of an aquarium, SCRAP made me think of a milky way with a sun in its mobile centre, erupting regularly and releasing X-rays in phases. Once you cross the threshold, you are free to navigate this space structured around this river of menstruation with grenadine. At the center of the hybrid characters reflecting the monstrous sublime of a humanity that does not hold back what overflows. David makes us characters who overflow and flow into this space. It is disturbing this absence of restraint. Maybe that's how we should be in an ideal world. Without restraint, without calculation, in the reality of the expression of intimacy, of fragility, without fear of the grotesque of what we are, clinging to our cigarette packs, glasses, tampons, lipstick or other crucifix. Of course it's moving, I let myself be taken in, I know that there is a lot of plastic, nylon, latex and make-up, but these are precious materials at the service of a life that bubbles up, of a game of reality. and I laugh, I laugh, I laugh until my throat closes. The audience is around, mobile or frozen, it turns on and off, sometimes takes the center, it's fragile, it's babbling, it fills the silence with noise, it moves to the rhythm of the sound, it hangs on a thread, it walks, it's brilliant, it drowns, it doubts quite a bit, it asserts itself, it's intense. But what to do with this possibility, these degrees of freedom? What to do also with this ego? It is advised in case of a solar flare not to trust your GPS, so at some point, I stop asking myself questions and I let myself float in a gravitational state in the middle of the abundance of senses, the abundance of possibilities of SCRAP that makes me want to tinker, to play and make a collage/montage of all that in my head. And I laugh, I laugh, I laugh.

    1. David Noir

      "Whistling while working"

      The hybrid creatures, the crazy incarnations, the silky-bearded singers, seem to be gradually arming themselves, emancipating themselves from their discretion and the bars of Barnum's cages to release an incoherence of meaning. This is what I have sensed and wished for since my adolescence. A sword in the water in the overly euphoric era of Tootsie and Victor Victoria, it could be that this time, the troubled pond will bring the mirror of thousands of new identities to its surface with greater success. Contamination is more effective than the clash of forces. Pagan, Greek, Roman and other centaur deities let men wage war, manipulate them and achieve their ends by magic. Something subtly instilled between the dreams of Father Freud and the video game of our time draws the constellations you describe. A war of time and mind reshaping can be waged against the blind, fascistic brutality that hears only physical oppression and crude propaganda. It's about being fuzzier, being thinner. For that, thank you, the Web. The jumble saves us from the futile ordering of appearances. I believe in it. The mess of a child's room provokes the self-destructive hysteria of parents. It is a matter of nobody ever finding their little ones there. Yes, I believe in it. Thank you for your radiance day after day more palpable through these gaseous spheres, Didier. It is always a privilege to assist in the formation of planets and future systems. The ego is the indispensable matter for its own sun. It is not for as much that it annihilates the potential life around. You, some of the others; I too, I hope for some time to come, will know what to do with all these collages and big bangs to come. Laughing and tinkering are part of the good aspects of life.

  2. Didier Julius

    Thank you David, what you do/are/say/write is very good fuel to get my (and many others I think) gaseous spheres moving, for future explosions of the senses and identities 🙂
    (a message that was probably classified as "watchable" by the NSA when I didn't even write the word "detonator", well now I do...)

  3. Didier Julius

    do/es/dis/write, did I want to write .... glurp (sound of a micro explosion)

  4. David Noir

    Let's see if it works ... Snowden Snowden Snowden ... 🙂

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