TO DANCE WITH THE DEVIL
Mickaël Vis

Notes on To Dance with the Devil

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"I believe that in a modern-day society which judges everything and everyone in 280 characters, the only worthy attitude is to reject this and to try to understand. Although we can hardly penetrate certain individuals’ motivations, we can try to determine the structures and logics that their actions fall within. 

Therefore, how may I know who Catherine, Georges and Sébastien are without having ever met them? For me they can only exist as characters in a story. No matter how autobiographical a story may be, facts always become part of a narrative device.

[…]

The device that Mickaël has created seeks to organize his chaos and to put some order in his memories through an act of recollection. Family pictures, letters and official documents are layers and levels of meaning that the text then mixes. Signs are added to signs. As for the evanescent black and white photos that he took, I see them as blanks in his memory, silences in his speech, ellipses…

What I can therefore try to understand are the questions that Mickaël’s work raises: freedom and marginalization, society and ethics."