You are oblivious to the speculative considerations that exist in the behavior of artists who are, in many instances, contaminated by their supposed value
Having seen your films, I don’t think you work like an actress. Instead, you’re an artist looking for a certain truth and yourself. You don’t act, you speak of yourself and your story. It’s very tangible. There is always a moment when the audience wonders if it’s you or your character. It’s the same process for an artist, making choices and projecting oneself through a role onto the world. That may be why you disappear sometimes because, at certain moments, you have nothing to say. Through your roles, you gradually paint the canvas of your own life!
Y.N: Yes, but you make me talk like that. I have seen you act and I get the impression that you’re on a mission on Earth. You are here to be a voice, an idea, to express something and disappear. As if you didn’t really exist.
I.A: It seems to me that I haven’t so far expressed what you describe, but I want to have that courage, strength and Desire- with a capital D, meaning the desire that brings life back to the libido. As an artist, I have censored myself on occasion. When I read your interviews, though, you never seek to justify yourself or obtain approval for your words and deeds. You stay yourself, take it or leave it, without wondering what people think. We have made them businessmen or women above all else.
Y.N: Yes, it’s in their nature, but you’re not like that. There have always been artists who are businessmen in disguise. They inundate us with bad movies and bad art, but they also foster an audience in http://www.datingranking.net/icelandic-chat-room/ their image. You see how people live today. We are entering a new era, where everything is digital and faster than ever. Everybody has a phone with a camera, video, internet. Without wishing to sound nostalgic, I think things were better before. All these machines make us less human and more automated. For a guy like me, who develops his photos in a dark room and paints by hand, it’s hard to envision a digital world. What about you? How do you see the world we live in today?
I.A: It barely interests me, and I don’t see it at all. It goes over my head and I don’t want to spend my time in futile pursuit of it. This free access to absolutely everything is not based on desire, but on triggering responses to a variety of temptations. We are in contact with “everything,” except ourselves. I think that engenders confusion, malaise and absolutely unimaginable solitude in people. In that world, it is difficult to feel a little happiness for and through yourself, rather than through what is on offer and similar to what everybody else has. That, I find, really is a way of atomizing individuality.
Y.N: But you are creative!
Y.N: I think that sums up globalization. A single currency in Europe, chain stores everywhere, social media. It all erodes identity. We all end up being like everybody else, with the same codes and references tying us together. Gradually, the world is becoming a village. And yet. Isabelle, do you feel lonely?
I.A: Yes, of course. Although I dread inhibitory solitude. For all the life force we can generate, we are more vulnerable to the blues. We are fragile, very fragile. I think solitude may be positive only as long as you don’t feel threatened. The main thing, as you said earlier, is to learn not to let solitude dominate, to make it.