ARCHIVES 2018 / And why should I speak like you?

People thought they were simple, deranged. They were just resistant to norms, or more receptive to certain channels of the mind. During their years of imprisonment, they wrote letters, so people would remember them. Words of hope, love, confession, reproach, incomprehension, and mad desire, their so-called raw art texts are true songs of life. “I don't want to be removed from circulatation,” wrote Daiber Samuel Ernest, whom no one had read until today. Most often, those men and women didn't know why they had been institutionalised, and none of them, of course, thought they were creating art. And yet. “It's art in its very infancy,” according to Anouk Grinberg who, with the help of Nicolas Repac, has decided to give voice to those stories never before heard from which explode words of absolute power, full of linguistic invention. By joining their “voices” as actress and musician, they put those unknown authors alongside poets such as Henri Michaux, Emily Dickinson, or Ingeborg Bachmann. Because what matters is to “take those texts out of the ghetto of insanity, and to embrace the life they contain. It's always happy, even when it is sad. Because in them, we find our brothers.”

Anouk Grinberg
Anouk Grinberg began her career in cinema at age 13, and has since appeared in films by Bertrand Blier, Philippe Garrel, and Jacques Audiard. She has worked with Jacques Lassalle, Didier Bezace, and Patrice Chéreau, and in 2018 with Alain Françon (Turgenev's A Month in the Country). Her work has always pushed her towards texts full of humanity. She started painting over ten years ago, and regularly appears in exhibitions.

Nicolas Repac
A close collaborator of singer Arthur H for the past fifteen years (L'Or noir, L'Or d'Éros), guitarist, composer, and arranger Nicolas Repac has worked on many musical projects (Swing Swing with Malian singer Mamani Keita; Black Box, which returned to the origins of blues). He is particularly adept at bringing together genres and people, and is always on the lookout for new artistic collaborations.