Général Instin

Literary Performance

Général Instin is a trans-disciplinary and collective project in progress, initiated from a tombstone window of the Montparnasse cemetery representing General Hinstin (1831-1905), a moving photographic portrait erased by time under spots drawing other silhouettes and landscapes. This figure renamed Instin (one could say: the historical H erased in favor of the I of the imaginary) becomes a ghostly protean entity whose elements move and interpenetrate. All the particular manifestations of the General (soldier’s ghostly character, fractals and avatars, artistic gestures, elements of the project’s history …) modify it to draw a work being done but which does not succeed: the materiality always escapes the ghost. In the general nebula, one never has the last word: the first word as the last belongs to him, and none of the participants can boast of being the general. It is a project devoid of center, acephalous, proliferating, simultaneous, which grows from its successive deposits like a geological landscape (even if it would rather hold the gaseous element). It is therefore impossible to really answer the question: Who – or rather What is General Instin?