Projects Foundation

Since 2008, Simon Bertrand has been copying, by hand, some of our great founding narratives, including The Epic of Gilgamesh, Odyssey and The Bible. His process enables the viewer to grasp the whole of each book in a single glance, rendering the narrative’s complete arc immediately visible. The words compressed onto the paper represent the itinerary borrowed by the artist’s hand during the transcription process; each chapter then becomes a locality, like a location on a map. The writing and the reading thus become understood in a rapport completely unrelated to duration, within a temporality and spatiality founded in the movement of the body, both the artist’s and the viewer’s, from one end of the surface to the other. Through his activities, the artist seeks to measure himself to the texts, first in rereading them and then in rewriting them integrally. The new layouts of the texts, the deletions, the shapes and voids refer to various aspects of the story he wishes to highlight. This body of works arises from a need to open a new dialogue about each of the stories selected by the artist; to transform them, but also from a need to physically traverse those stories and be traversed by them.