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The
Logician of
the Fantastic
"C'est peut-être là le secret : faire exister, non pas juger." Deleuze
Jonas Rutgeerts
One way to describe the work of Clément Layes is to define it as logics. Clément Layes is above all a logician and his performances are all logical systems. Layes develops specific sets of pro-cedures or conventions that fuel his creations and his pieces can be understood as elaborate explorations of these mechanisms and their consequences. Layes, however, is not a typical logician.
They do not try to develop overarching, all- encompassing structures that attempt to capture and control everything, and that reduce singular events to instantiations of a limited set of general rules, or categories. Instead, they are aimed at the creation and exploration of aberrant movements, singular gestures that escape the systemic procedures of everyday life. His systems both produce and trace the particular parcourse of – human and non-human – things, focusing on the moment of deviance, the leakages, the points where things no longer behave as expected. In line with Alfred Jarry’s ‘pataphysics’, Layes’ work could be understood as the development of a ‘patalogics’.
The French theatre maker defined his ‘pataphysics’ as "the science of imaginary solutions”, or “the science of the particular”. Instead of examining general laws, his science examined “the laws governing exceptions”. Similarly, Layes’ logical systems can be understood as the production of systems that result in the creation and exploration of ‘particular’ or ‘imaginary’ movements.
In the short story The Book of Sand (1975), Argentinian writer and thinker Jorge Luis Borges tells the tale of a very special book. The pages of this book can only be read a single time. Once one turns the page, one will never find it again. Moreover, it is not only impossible to read pages twice, but also to locate the first or last page of the book. Several pages always lie between the cover and the actual page. The reason for this resides in the fact that there are constantly new pages emerging, growing out of the front and back covers. Instead of following the traditional linear structure of a book, with a clear beginning, middle and end, The Book of Sand, thus, seems to be in a state of constant transformation, with pages that always change and new pages that continuously emerge in the folds of the old ones. This is also the reason why it is called The Book of Sand: "neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end”.
The structure of The Book of Sand comes close to the organisation of reality. Rather than following a clear path, a linear structure that can be organized into defined (sub)chapters, reality grows from the middle. It should be understood in terms of infinite change, a process of continuous transformation in which new planes are constantly popping up, slipping through the cracks of the old ones. This makes reality into a system that is impossible to control. Just like (the book of)
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