Laure Prouvost

Language, communication (and miscommunication) and the relationship between language and images form the red thread running through Laura Prouvost’s oeuvre. This pulsating video, a virtuoso work of editing, draws us – the viewers – in and nearly hypnotises us in the process. Prouvost entices us to learn a new associative idiom and to forget the old, familiar one. With the ‘DIT’ in the title, she refers to the French verb dire (‘to say’) while the prefix de- in English has the same sound and means ‘off or from’, i.e., to undo or counteract. To ‘de-learn’ would therefore be to unlearn. Through her new language, she wants to make us aware of sensations, emotions and smells that cannot be captured in words. Prouvost then uses rapidly-moving images, texts and sounds to manipulate our senses. By the end, the distance created by language has disappeared and we are once again able to meet the world with the open gaze of a child.