Unknown 2

UNKNOWN #2 - THE ENDLESS REWORKING OF A BOOK.

In 2007, Stéphane Duroy published Unknown, an anthem to anonymous rebels and people in exile. A few years later, he remade the book by tearing the pages of the original edition and once the new version was completed, he repeated this method over the years to make 29 different and one-off variations of the same book.

What is to be said about this disconcerting, dizzy-making challenge? A displayed desire to be always re-writing the same story, differently? Does it call to mind the quest for a truth and its opposite, supreme chaos? Does it have to do both with the exercise of an extreme concentration and an anarchic outcome? At the beginning and end of Unknown, there is a geography, on the one hand of Europe and its centre, Germany and, on the other, North America, pivotal continent, mealting-pot of exiles and dreams, graveyard of dashed hopes and failures. And as in all geographies, there are rivalries here between centre and periphery, between new world and old, and armies of proletarians and exiles who periodically go from one to the other. At the origin of Unknown there is also the everlasting recommencement of a story, deliverance and oppression, going beyond history and oblivion. Horizon and loss.

Ezra Nahmad