The Tale and the Tongue: Birds and cats

Episode nine of The Tale and the Tongue series follows a conversation with artist Laure Prouvost. The title of this podcast stems from one of the first questions Sonia Fernández Pan asked her during the conversation, inspired by the multiple characters the artist embodies through her projects, where fiction becomes real, where art calls to experience. Laure Prouvost’s answer to the question about who she would like to be if she wasn’t herself was “a bird”, commenting on this animal’s ability to fly. Sonia Fernández Pan added that she would like to be a cat, perhaps because one of its great talents is the daily right to laziness in a world where life works relentlessly. They ended the conversation by returning to their animal relationship as bird and cat, with Laure Prouvost flirting with the possibility that one catches and eats the other. In the many biographies that Laure Prouvost has written about herself, she strays from traditional artist biographies, describing her work according to the narrative and experiential drive of her projects and her way of naming them to ones where the institutional curriculum is replaced by a list of situations that her projects were able to create: Melting Into Another, an Occupied Paradise, Deep See Blue Surrounding You, a Waiting Room with objects, a New Museum for Grand Dad, A tearoom for Grand Ma, a lobby for love among the artists… Within these places we are no longer an impersonal audience, but characters who enter temporal worlds where fiction becomes materially present and real. The difference between fiction and lying is a question Sonia Fernández Pan also shared with Laure Prouvost, inspired by how she never fully reveals in her work what is fiction and what is not. The storytelling surrounding is another element of her artistic practice, strategically confusing spheres that the traditional art system insists on keeping apart…