Spin The Tangents is an artistic performance on a bicycle across Europe

My Dear Holy Friends, 137 years ago, on March 5, 1886, a certain Charles Gallo threw a bottle of prussic acid into the Paris Stock Exchange, hydrogen cyanide. It was not very nice and a bit dangerous. He was an anarchist and claimed then accomplishing an act of propaganda by the fact. So the idea that the period of affirmation by the text and the verb is over, that we must then move on to a period of action. It can go through revolt or, as I will use it, bicycle wheel revolution. Today I am launching an appeal to Spin The Tangents. I won't get any help from Bernard or his son. So I'm talking to you healthy people. Of course, it's just you. You are so much richer and numerous who will sincerely participate with love and sympathy in the successful completion of the project that I am launching for this beautiful and unforgettable summer of 2023. A challenge. A performance. A whole poem. Spin The Tangents is an artistic performance that will last a little over two months. I want to see if, like Ulysses, but rather Erasmus, Sweig, Dürer, van Eyck, Vermeer or Vinci, Goethe or Van Gogh, we can still go to a few cities, meet some artist friends, scholars, researchers, inventors or poets. I take the road to see if we can cross some plains, rivers and mountains. I get on the bike to find out if discovery can be around the corner. If crossing neighboring countries we can meet other colors. I therefore ask you to enter into the production of this work through a participatory collection. Connecting València to Chambord is a historic race. Not a destination, but a loop to forge links. It also recalls that of a few other ancestors, in other times that are said to be more risky and deadly, but is today's weather so mild? As the roads are not straight, I will go up (in the direction of the planisphere) to the port of Delft to check if it is still as magnificent and luminous, or what the chemical revolution has done to it, the revolution of waterproof comfort . The revolution of sedentary pleasures. The revolution of individualism. For the time of a flight to Beijing and for a higher price than an AR to Marrakech, I will have to reach my starting point, the Ermitage des Saints de la Pierre, by train. I also need some wild sleeping gear (a tent, a light mattress), a few restorative nights in hotels, washes and pounds of almonds and peanuts. And also memory cards and a sun sensor to film and photograph, record my encounters, our landscapes. Spin The Tangents Spin The Tangents is an artistic performance on a bicycle. It traces a concentric flag loop through a space whose borders are invisible to the residents and nationals of the countries crossed. This journey seeks encounters and inspirations in the first quarter of a century that will be upheaval. It dives into the roots, reproduces ancient routes, from the beginning of man to his intelligent robots, to his end. Faster than light, are there still links between each of us, real, between our so superior mind and our surroundings? I still have no answer or point of arrival other than a return to my roots in the land of castles and a time when the industrial revolution and the contemporary digital revolution were emerging, on the banks of the Loire. Starting from the Ermita dels Sants de la Pedra in the Albufera Natural Park near València, Spain, the performance will last two and a half months, from early June to the end of August 2023, for a distance of 5000 kilometres. There are two main axes for this artistic performance, which passes through eight European nations. The first is to travel the continent as my predecessors, our ancestors, were able to do in the centuries when industries did not exist, at a pace that really allows travel and encounters. By bike, a day's drive, 80 to 100 kilometres, is already crossing and often changing countries. Before the 19th century, we crossed Europe to read other stories, to encounter new techniques, even practices with other colours. We experienced the senses. We walked or ride from north to south or from west to east. In a time to soak up, reflect, think, write. Today yet we are arrived, we instagram and we return. It's finish. Intelligence is artificial. The second axis of reading is to meet inhabitants, actors, manufacturers, researchers of the environment and biodiversity. We are a lot in one or two networks. We like permaculture or the small local and migratory birds of the sky. We militate in a party or we act in an association for nourishing gardens. We retype waste or we invent tools for modern comfort. We maintain shepherds' huts in the mountains or we pick up the bottles on the beaches. You build your house out of local wood and straw or you've finished flying. There are a thousand gestures, a thousand actions. I will not make a grid to make an exhaustive inventory, but I will initiate a weaving of links between many of these lifestyles. Five hundred years ago Leonardo da Vinci could see, live and invent everything. Two hundred and fifty years ago Goethe could still write poetry, scientific theories on light or botany or even be a minister. It is quite impossible today. We will no longer find a civil or military engineer at the top of literature or contemporary art. Nor the reverse. On the other hand there are multitudes of eyes, ears, hands, brains oriented in their specialty, already in the process of finding and experimenting with small inventions that transform the big economic and industrial machines that are drowning us. I want to go to these meetings. Spin The Tangents recomposes a path after the similar performance CDG2CPH, in 2009, which had seen me connect by bike the airport of Paris CDG to that of Copenhagen, CPH, then an exhibition of notes and photographic or video recordings in a Danish gallery during the COP15. This action had demonstrated the possibility, still actual, and more than ever necessary, to use another simple way, just with the strength of the legs and the courage to join a place of work. Almost fifteen years after this project, it is still obvious that we, or rather the political and industrial decision makers, have the will to find another rhythm to our lives than the one that, we are now absolutely sure, destroys life all around us, influences the climate and takes us to an unknown universe. It is of course always an excitement to go towards the unknown, towards the discovery of a new world. This is what makes man since he walks on two legs. However, this universe that is opening up to our eyes and to our understanding seems to be devastated. It is called anthropocene, it is called extinction of species. Are we in it? In the image of what we have inflicted on all wild life. Populations are decimated while our specie continues to grow (until when?). Biodiversity, the living as diverse as it is infinite, loses billions of individuals every year, thousands, millions (?) of species, it collapses, while we rejoice in not suffering any “casualties” in a few disastrous details. Turning in circles, turning in flags, but turning the wheels to reach the source. A source. An origin. An originality. To find the history, nourished by meetings that were not foreseen, nourished by appointments that were prepared, with artists, researchers, inventors, farmers, thinkers, craftsmen, women, men. To underline the great mixture of thoughts that has made us walk upright. To return to the great genius who invented the world of today as well. Who represented the celestial beauty of the universe and the living beauty of our community. Leonardo da Vinci, inventor of our modern world, had no borders. He looked, observed, worked to understand more than the senses could give him. In this performance, the path in the world will take me through, perhaps discovering and observing various secrets scattered in some corners of the continent. Through the discoveries and the retranscriptions in images and texts, further in stories and performances, in transmission, I want to deploy a net and show that experiences, of doing, of living, as many variations as the kilometers traveled, can link together and bring hopes, solutions, visions of our future, far from the useful but often outrageously destructive technologies in front of which we are absorbed, drowned, separated from each other. In two or three months of travel, these weak and tenuous examples encountered, displayed, will perhaps be able to show a fraction of the immense number of tangents, modulations, alternative links, ropes, webs, possibilities for the future. The end of this journey, between Chambord and Amboise, will be accomplished near the house where I was born. A note of intent Engage the body. Engage the self. Engage the ego. Understand the surroundings. To land. To walk. Connecting, linking. To weave. Unveil the fabrics. Browse and show the layers. Documenting the complex and obvious uniqueness. No sooner had we built a continent, it was already outdated by our tools. Too many conflicts must have prevented the loving functioning of our two-headed union. The German remains the Kraut. I don’t know who I am. They never told me. A grumpy guy with no discipline? So little exchange. We know some of each other. But he is always another. We each wear a pretty much waterproof raincoat. Fortunately there are infiltrations. A few drops, a few cracks. Why not enter and rediscover that link from before the borders - so regretted by Stephan Sweig? From the highway to the airport we forgot the journey. Let’s start again some ballads, hikes, expeditions, wanderings, surroundings at a real body rhythm, helped by a nice tool, the bicycle. To understand the Europe of artists and writers, from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century. Engage a loop, draw a flag, a rag. On this historical route, from Valencia to Delft, from Salzburg to Florence and from Vercors to Chambord, reread the history of culture. And to find also on this road from Paris to Cologne, Turin and Grenoble, the culture of the low tech, another counterpart of the search for humanity. Sixty steps to experience the poetry of the encounter and the presence of the other. Is he really there? Still visible in some places or is it already and only replaced by a Zoom screen thumbnail or an AI image, invented by a robot to meet the standards of the constraint of beauty and still please? Is it already completely under the control of some American students, no more cool and no more young. Leonardo da Vinci worked in his various inventions and always to connect the fluids of the imagination. All his work is only syntheses to reveal the proximities of the thought, of the poetry, of the writing, of sciences, of the processes of creation and of the natural processes. Man does not invent anything that the laws of chemistry and physics have not already shown since the infinite birth of the universes. It will be only in the acute and deep observation of the world, in the manipulation of any natural element that, as in a work of chlorophyll rubbed on a sheet of Giusepe Penone, we draw from the sap and the pigment, the conditions of the creation. It is in the path that the poem is generated. I take it. I will join him. I will write it. To return to the banks of the Loire that saw one of the greatest geniuses of humanity at work, after having gone around in Europe. After having met. After having recorded portraits, landscapes. After writing poetic stories. After having touched. After having been touched. To return to the banks of this river is to return with a thread of thoughts of craftsmen, engineers, farmers, artists, who are, each, a few fragments of time after the beginning of the Renaissance, today, as many inventors of poetry as the genius of the parachute and the Mona Lisa. Digital proximity is a “dead positivity”. (Byung-Chul HAN, “From the handshake”, Socialter – For a radical turn, p. 139) To leave and roll, to roll and find, to get out of digital relations, out of time and distance. It is to seek the proximity annihilated by the screens in our hands. The development of the great means of digital communication makes us glimpse an optimized and radiant happiness. The one that is being experimented for the least executives, the least engineers, the low potentials, the happiness of distant relationships and virtual travels. Services have become competitive markets. The post office no longer delivers mail. University lecture halls are empty spaces. Trains are only accessible with a digital, smart device. Medical care is operated by software. The artist, the philosopher and the poet are no longer necessary because robots and AIs invent, write, conceptualize and create. Direct and even virtual contacts between people are obsolete and useless. We remember well the useless activities. The spring of 2021 is not far away yet and yet we don’t know when, or if, it will take place. We have all been voluntarily confined. Since then, the brand new normal is taking its shape without rejection and hardly any protesting wall vomiting. Steering decisions are so complex and require so much soul-searching. One can easily imagine that we are, all together, in this century of general globalization, like this ship in the middle of the night and at full speed, one hundred and eleven years ago, approaching the iceberg. We may even believe that we have already touched it. So the skippers, obtuse and afraid, close the doors and the emergency exits. They go on, stubborn (the names are certainly not insignificant), talking about poems learned by heart, without a sensitive mind if not a given tune, and continue their work. To tour Europe will be to ask the question of whether there are still individuals in any place capable of surviving, of meeting and welcoming the unknown that arrives in their home. Is it possible to meet similar people who do not have to ask a software to make decisions? Today employees are not thanked anymore. Today self-employed people are blocked by work apps. There is no more listening to bosses or colleagues. There is a software that is updated every two months, optimized for the profitability of the boss, the owner, the shareholders, the investors. Certainly not for the independent users who have no choice but to hope for the best shifts. At four Euros an hour. Until death. What seems to be paramount in the pursuit of the confinement of bodies and spirits, undergone, accepted, voluntary, is the greatest fear we have. The fear of injury, of falling, the fear of suffering, of insecurity. The fear of death. We have designed, we use machines with artificial intelligence that invent digital images and calculation actions to buy and sell on the stock market as fast and at the best price, separate platelets from plasma, extract blood, measure the wear of socks. All these tools make the living useless. They are added to the dust-eradicators and tomato-cutters, to the films that last a hundred hours, to the infinite parade of Realities. We don’t even know when the brain will be unavailable. Tomorrowa are the sales! It’s the sales all year long. So, the tangent. You have to look a little to know if there is another choice than the globalized siphon. A whirlpool in which some languages and identities melt, little by little, into each other. Sometimes gently, but often rather violently and always financially. There is always a seller and a sold. We invented this black hole before we ever saw a real one. But we are social animals, out of the competition in which it is necessary to eliminate, to make disappear, some enemy. But nicely, no doubt. Or else, leave for forty days, fasting in a desert. And afterwards? To lock oneself up in a monastery. That’s another track. And a little furrow between the two? Between the behemoth and the hermit? Between the diplodocus or the tyrannosaurus and the mosquito or the virus? Before finding a few chosen, narcissistic elites, like Damasio’s Furtifs on a distant planet a few months away, why not try to find on our known, original territories, in an identical travel time, a few nuggets, a few seeds, young shoots, wriggling, wild and barbaric nourishment? Are there not some old lights (Lumières), descendants of Leonardo da Vinci, who invent a life of reason? A curved tangent, which does not seek to flee, to move away, but to weave, to bind. A tangent like a needle with an eye.