Steve Giasson:<\/strong> Dear Claire, 17 years ago, you began a vast and wonderful project called Aujourd\u2019hui (dates-vid\u00e9os)<\/em>. On the Vimeo page dedicated to the project, you define it in the following way: \u201cThis project, which has been on-going since 2006, consists in trying to make one video per day (the title refers to the work of conceptual artist On Kawara: Date Paintings<\/em>). The presentation of this body of work varies depending on the dissemination contexts, whether in the gallery or in the theatre. My working method involves using only what each day (the date inscribed in the video) offers me in terms of visual, sonic, and textual material.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - \u201cAujourd\u2019hui (dates-vid\u00e9os) – 2006,\u201d Vimeo<\/em>, https:\/\/vimeo.com\/showcase\/1748945 (our translation).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet in an interview with Marie-\u00c8ve Charron titled \u201cI Am Telling You That I Am Incapable of Ending This Activity,\u201d which was published in a catalogue under the same title (2007), you describe an evolution of your initial method: \u201cThe initial objective\u2014which constantly left me bankrupt\u2014was ambitious: gather data (video, audio, text) and edit each piece in a single day. (The new game plan allows for editing to be done at a later date, but using solely the data or notes recorded on the date that corresponds to the image. The image alone determines the date and hour of the date-video.)\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Marie-\u00c8ve Charron, \u201cI Am Telling You That I Am Incapable of Ending This Activity\u201d<\/em> in I Am Telling You That I Am Incapable of Ending This Activity \u2013 Claire Savoie<\/em>, ed. Marie-Jos\u00e9e Jean and Bernard Lamarche (Montr\u00e9al: VOX, centre de l\u2019image contemporaine and Rimouski: Mus\u00e9e r\u00e9gional de Rimouski, 2008), 117.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Since then, have you taken other liberties relative to the constraint you set yourself initially?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Claire Savoie<\/strong>: I haven\u2019t changed anything in this regard. The basic method has remained the same. That said, my ways of approaching the shooting and editing have transformed over time. The same goes for the requirements that drive the project. Given the technological advances over time, the status of images has led to various editing choices in terms of how sound and text, in addition to the image itself, are used. This means that as cameras became increasingly sophisticated, it became increasingly necessary for me to reduce the layers of information, the result being that the recent videos are significantly more pared down than those in the initial years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to having a method that needs to be followed, the project is also a constant learning process\u2014in this case, an exploration of video (in terms of recording images, sounds, notes) and approaches to editing (choice, rhythm, mood). Various decision are taken once a multitude of choices have been made based on the period and inclinations at the time in response to what exercises should be done to keep learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SG:<\/strong> As you yourself emphasize, your date videos have changed aesthetically over the years: the texts and soundtracks have become more pared-down, and nature seems to take up more space. For example, the date video of May 6, 2006 shows a high-angle shot of a hand rotating two Baoding balls, in which we can glimpse the camera, against a grassy background. The shot has a lilac tint. Phrases scroll from right to left: \u201cMay 6, 2006 2:18 PM\u201d; \u201cI keep my mother\u2019s wedding dress in a box at the back of the closet\u201d; \u201cNotes on H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous\u2019s Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite<\/em>, Sophie Calle\u2019s La Cravate<\/em>, Alain Cavalier\u2019s Le Filmeur<\/em>, and On Kawara\u2019s postcards\u201d; \u201cRepeat Heraclitus\u2019s phrase that we cannot step twice into the same river.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Throughout the interview, all quotations from Claire Savoie\u2019s videos are my translation. (Trans.)<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The soundtrack consists of percussive sounds, the clinking of the balls, and a female voice off-screen: \u201cLet me tell you: I\u2019m trying to seize the fourth dimension of the instant-now so fleeting that it’s already gone because it’s already become a new instant-now that’s also already gone.\u201d Perhaps contradicting Heraclitus\u2019s phrase, the footage is repeated twice. Much more restrained, the video Aujourd\u2019hui (07.08.2022)<\/em> shows a vertical shot of water being pounded by loud, heavy rain. The date and a short phrase appear: \u201cYour dream was full of anger.\u201d Can you tell me more about this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n CS:<\/strong> Your feeling is accurate. While several reasons could have led to this paring down, I believe it came about because of the repetition of gestures over time and the duration. Perhaps it is also due to the confidence gained by doing the exercises\u2026 or to a willingness to let breath the elements more for what they are. It\u2019s important to note too that when one applies oneself to such a daily task, in a way one limits oneself to doing only this, or rather to \u201cwanting\u201d to do only this. You know all about this, I believe. Life is thus taken hostage by the art project and vice versa. It becomes a way of experiencing the world, a way of being where vigilance and sensitivity get refined. Yet practically speaking, how can the rhythm of production be maintained with constancy when so many other tasks, duties, and responsibilities require time and attention? I\u2019m not saying that the paring down arose to compensate for a lack of time, but that it could have occurred due to the project\u2019s organic evolution in terms of its underlying concrete facts and requirements over the long run. Applying oneself to an activity that is highly time-consuming (and sometimes \u201cprocrastinatory\u201d or \u201cprocrastinative\u201d) over the course of one year is not at all the same thing as doing it over fifteen years, nor is the fact of repeating the same gestures. And every consideration gathered by these gestures gets inscribed in me in a profound way precisely because it is enriched by this duration duration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short, I think that the economy of means developed gradually over time without my deciding so at a precise moment. It was one exercise among others, to see what would come out of it. Then realizing, after some time had passed, that there was something really fruitful there, I continued in this direction without making it into a steadfast rule. Perhaps this is to say that the project itself has driven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SG:<\/strong> When On Kawara died, his friend Bernar Venet mentioned that after the passionate ping pong matches that they would play all afternoon, he would often invite Kawara and his wife to eat with friends: \u201c\u2018Impossible!\u2019 he would tell me, horrified. He needed to make notes about his entire day, the time he got up, the places he had visited, the people he had met.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Val\u00e9rie Duponchelle, \u201cMort de l\u2019artiste conceptuel On Kawara : L\u2019\u00e9ternit\u00e9 et un jour,\u201d Le Figaro<\/em>, July 14, 2014, accessible online (our translation).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ve often talked about the \u201ccompulsive\u201d nature of your practice, which we could compare to Kawara\u2019s, and you state now that due to the incredible challenge that you\u2019ve given yourself, your life has been \u201ctaken hostage by the art project and vice versa.\u201d Do your date videos still capture fragments of your life or have they become an integral (or devouring) part of it, sometimes taking precedence over it, imposing their rule on it? What impact do they have on the rest of your art practice? I\u2019m thinking, for example, of the wonderful, spectral intervention that you did at Ch\u00e2teau Dufresne in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CS:<\/strong> Excellent question. I drag my camera everywhere I go, always in an observation mode for a possible narrative, but this happens in the wake of a larger narrative, which builds itself statement<\/em> by statement<\/em>. In other words, the editing cements the statements<\/em>, which are based on the preceding ones, sometimes cutting them down in order to try out new ideas. I often catch myself thinking just like in my videos, in short haiku-like phrases scrolling along with the different elements of the montage. In a sense, while the project Aujourd\u2019hui (dates-vid\u00e9os)<\/em> forms a personal composition, it also fictionalizes a moment actually experienced. That remains in my mind within the hours of the day. The project has given me ways of thinking, which in turn inflect the videos in new ways. Aujourd\u2019hui<\/em> reveals a mode of understanding that was already present in a series of site-specific works created between 2000 and 2007 whose generic name is Fiction<\/em> and from which the intervention at Ch\u00e2teau Dufresne takes up certain codes\u2014although they have evolved a great deal since then. For that matter, since I have a vast archive of video images that have never been used for the date videos, I can use them to make other works. This was partly the case for some of the shots used in the video installation Sans titre (Ch\u00e2teau Dufresne)<\/em>, to which I added other ones specifically recorded on site, as well as for the sound installation set up in the building\u2019s various rooms. What is particularly interesting in this recent project is that this time the support for the fiction was a historic site, a family history, and the biographical components of the lives that have lived there. I did something similar in 2014 at the Mus\u00e9e des Ursulines de Qu\u00e9bec, in trying to evoke the life of Marie of the Incarnation without illustrating or documenting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SG:<\/strong> Shown at VOX and at the Mus\u00e9e r\u00e9gional de Rimouski in 2007, your date videos were presented on small screens fitted with headphones, inside white booths.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - It\u2019s important to note that the date videos were also shown at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art as part of Mois de la photo<\/em>. The presentation apparatus was very different: calendar images representing the videos created between 2006 and 2011 were presented in the main gallery, whereas the videos themselves were projected chronologically, one after the other, in the small gallery.<\/span> This minimalist apparatus encouraged an intimate reading of your work, and the screen format, comparable to a postcard, evoked their epistolary origin, as your date videos were initially intended for your loved ones. Since then, you\u2019ve been disseminating them online, mainly on Facebook, often several at a time, logically on the same day as the date they were made. I find this choice particularly judicious since social media (which we often check on the small screens of our cellphones) encourages us to connect and at the same time reveal aspects of our private lives. What impact has social media had on your date videos and your practice overall?<\/p>\n\n\n\n CS:<\/strong> In the same spirit of learning, I wanted to test out these modes of dissemination in order to understand how they might prove to be conceptually relevant and how these contexts could lead to new ideas. This intention has two timeframes: making the video clips in order to post them on social media for a wider community, then, over the course of the year, publish online the videos made on the same date over the years. In doing this, I realized that once I knew that what I was making was for this online community, I found myself using more generic statements, as though their basis was stripped of subjectivity. The nature of the other being addressed changed, shifting from intimate loved ones to undifferentiated Facebook \u201cfriends\u201d and Instagram followers. The idea of assembling existing videos and releasing them according to the date seemed viable for a time as it allowed me to gauge what they had in common or not with autobiographical, excessive, compulsive, extimistic<\/em> practices of self-representation. It also allowed me to evaluate the project in terms of its exhaustive aspect and editorial possibilities of presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SG:<\/strong> In the 2007 interview with Charron, you mention wanting to free yourself from the net of \u201cbeautiful images,\u201d a statement that you then left hanging. In a recent date video, Aujourd\u2019hui (01.01.2023)<\/em>, which shows various birds at a birdfeeder in winter, an analogous question comes up and casts a shadow over the joyous circle of chickadees: \u201cIt\u2019s already 2023, you think. What do you plan to do? I don\u2019t know. Stop making images? Happy new year.\u201d Do you feel capable of \u201cending this activity\u201d now? Are you actually considering it? And if so, why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n CS:<\/strong> Yes, casting a shadow with words over the image that holds its own promise. For me, this is a way of making the context speak, that is out of the frame of image, and of thwarting beauty, or making it lie, or showing its flaws, and, at the same time, creating an open form of an image-sound-word haiku in the spirit of incongruity or ambiguity. Let me follow this with another question that certainly didn\u2019t come up in 2007\u2014at least not in this way before the development of Facebook\u2014the seeds of which can nonetheless be seen in relation to the aestheticization of the image (and my issue with \u201cbeautiful images\u201d): Have all our images become \u201cInstagrammable\u201d? In other words, what makes them necessary now? What mode of understanding reflects their necessity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ending this activity? Ah, the great question\u2026 that has been in my mind since the start of the project. Although I have allowed myself recently to take a pause in order to get a taste of the everyday outside this exercise, I still don\u2019t know when I might stop it in time.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"Claire-Savoie\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CHR_Giasson_Claire-Savoie_SBC_055-C-FLAT.jpg\")
Aujourd<\/em>\u2019hui (dates-vid\u00e9os)<\/em>, installation view, SBC galerie d\u2019art contemporain, Montr\u00e9al, 2011.
Photo: Martin C\u00f4t\u00e9, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Claire-Savoie\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CHR_Giasson_Claire-Savoie_2006-05-06.jpg\")
Aujourd<\/em>\u2019hui (06.05.2006)<\/em>, 2006, video still from the series Aujourd<\/em>\u2019hui (dates-vid\u00e9os)<\/em><\/em>, 2006-ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Claire-Savoie\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CHR_Giasson_Claire-Savoie_2022-08-07.jpg\")
Aujourd\u2019hui (07.08.2022)<\/em>, 2022, video still from the series Aujourd<\/em>\u2019hui (dates-vid\u00e9os)<\/em><\/em>, 2006-ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Claire-Savoie_chateau_dufresne_installationvideo\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CHR_Giasson_Claire-Savoie_chateau_dufresne_installationvideo_01.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Claire-Savoie_chateau_dufresne_installationvideo\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CHR_Giasson_Claire-Savoie_chateau_dufresne_installationvideo_03.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CHR_Giasson_Claire-Savoie_chateau_dufresne_capturevideo.jpg\")
Sans titre<\/em>, 2019, video and sound installation views, Ch\u00e2teau Dufresne, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photos: Richard-Max Tremblay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Claire-Savoie_vox\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CHR_Giasson_Claire-Savoie_vox_IMG_5531.jpg\")
Aujourd<\/em>\u2019hui (dates-vid\u00e9os)<\/em>, installation view, VOX, centre de l\u2019image contemporaine, Montr\u00e9al, 2007.
Photo: Michel Brunelle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Claire-Savoie\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_CHR_Giasson_Claire-Savoie_2023-01-01_04.jpg\")
Aujourd<\/em>\u2019hui (01.01.2023)<\/em>, 2023, video still from the series Aujourd<\/em>\u2019hui (dates-vid\u00e9os)<\/em><\/em>, <\/em>2006-ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n