PARRENO, Philippe
Voices. A Collection of Spoken Works

To endow an object with a voice is to bestow upon it subjectivity, whether that object is a stone, a forgotten fictional character, a group of children, or spirits. To vocalize something we witness is to recognize its uniqueness. An object years to transition into a subject. 
—from the postface by Philippe Parreno

This book gathers transcripts of voices “that breathe life into” the work of Philippe Parreno, from Once Upon A Time ... in “City Bild” (1990, with Pierre Joseph) and No More Reality, the Demonstration and No More Reality, a Videoconference (both 1991), to No More Reality (2021). The text is edited with rare reference to who, or what, is speaking, and the credits of the films may be included, so that an eerie feeling emerges from the reading. According to the back cover, “the voices encapsulated in this book form a creature unto itself, communicating via narraitves that lie between reality and fiction, ideas that transcend time and space, in ways that surpass our conventional understanding of language and communication.” Let’s add that it’s pretty fun to find in their English translation the texts of Yves Lecoq’s performances, The Public Man, explaining the story of Dragon Ball; quite moving to read the text from the video, Birthday Zoé; and really good to read the transcript of the performance, The Ultrasonic Scream of the Squirrel.

Voices concludes with a postface by Parreno, who precisely describes the book as “a varied tapestry of intertwined voices.”

Published by Hatje Cantz, 2024
Design by Johanna Wenger
Artists' Writings