'Ghost Member: Prosthesis/ Symbiosis as a shelter' by Naomi Maury at L'Assaut de la menuiserie, Saint-Etienne

Patientia

Frédéric Montfort (l’assaut de la menuiserie)
09/2021

"Illness must serve a purpose like everything else. For me, illness is not an enemy, it is not something that gives the feeling of death, it is something that sharpens the feeling of life." — Gilles Deleuze

What is a refuge? For those who are 
deprived of it, the refuge is the sovereign good. Those for whom
The relationship to others and to themselves is destroyed - the exile, the outcast,
the slave, the owner, the unfortunate - need it
(the artist, naturally, dreams of it). The refuge refers
To an imaginary, that of the broken primordial unit
In the garden of Eden. Now, according to the kabbalah, the fault 
of man is not so much to have wanted to acquire 
knowledge than to have detached the fruit from the tree,
to satisfy his immediate desire: impatience would have
Thus engendered the catastrophe.

The problem we are invited to reflect on
could be the following: how to reach the
Refuge? To the powerful symbolism of the myth, 
Naomi Maury answers by the immanent expression,
Horizontal and concrete expression of pentience. The quest
Of the unity takes shape in fragile systems,
Altered, shifting. To rebuild, to reweave, 
To look after, to repair: the sovereign to reach the 
Sovereign good requires an aesthetic of the fragility.
This aesthetic seems the necessary condition
To reach the Other in all its dimensions
-As Deleuze said, to be sick is to be at the
Aguets, it is already to proceed of the animal.

The gesture of symbiosis is thus a test
Of patience: we must - unlike Adam - be patient, in the medical sense of the word
be patient, in the medical sense of the term 
(patient, from the Greek pathos, "suffering"), we must 
To accept ourselves as patients. The prosthesis, which heals us
And constrains us at the same time, is this privi- springboard
towards synthesis, synesthesia, consciousness, and the
Increased of the possibilities of reports.

Then driven out of Eden, Man was condemned to
death and (especially) to labor: some Jewish interpreters of the
interpreters of the Bible deduced that the only "work" of Man before the
of Man before the Fall was to care, to have
concern for the other. This work of the shadow, put in 
in Naomi Maury's exhibition, is what 
Repairs the light.