CAC Brétigny

Après is a project of the TRAM network for which the CAC Brétigny invited the artist Fanny Lallart, in residence at the art center in 2020-2021, to present the piece:

Sans Contact [Contactless], 2020
Fanny lallart

These three images are scans from a 72-page publication called Sans Contact [Contactless] dating from March 2020. Like a diary, the text records daily experiences of work, wandering, and love. These short notes follow one after the other, giving voice to an on-going writing project dealing with money.

Translation from the french:

Image 1

The first time I saw a 500 euro banknote I was 18 years old. I was working at Grand Frais in a suburb of Lyon, a store that claims its fruit and vegetables come from local farms, whereas half its produce is imported from Spain or South America. I was working the shelves but that day I was replacing a colleague at the checkout, a shopper handed me a violet banknote to pay for their items. I remember exactly the way I tried not to let my surprise show so as not to embarrass them. I felt I had that responsibility, to make them feel they were there like everybody else and that at our store a client would never be discriminated against because of the color of their banknote. I was afraid of being vulgar while I guess pulling out a big one like that to pay for a few kiwis and some cheese, well, that is vulgar. Since the banknote is clearly much larger than the others, the feeling in hand was different. I checked twice, though in the smoothest, most natural way possible, that it wasn’t a counterfeit bill, then I slipped it into the till before handing back the change. The spacetime of the transaction lasted a few seconds only but was long enough to remind everyone where that transaction stood. Together we had touched that scrap of slightly crumpled paper; he was the one who could use it, I the one who will never touch its fruit.

Image 2

I would like to write
On the space between
These two hands.

Image 3

She told me to come dressed in black in order to become invisible: “It’s fashion week here. You do the cleaning, everybody wants things to be clean but nobody wants to see cleaning going on. You are the tiny hands of the shadow.”
You have got to disappear in order not to break up utopia, pretend that all of that sprang up from the earth, as if by magic. The floor they tread is clean because it has always been and definitely not because an army of exploited people scrubbed it on their hands and knees.
We have to be discreet. My body, in its power to work, must disappear.
My strength and my numb muscles have sensibly withdrawn into themselves.
Must take particular care not to toss my effort in their face,

(always cordial)

so as not to reflect their own image back to them. So that they never have the chance to consider their place in the world, i.e., that of sitting with their fat ass on my gob.

(smiling in every respect).

It’s no use my being dressed all in black,
nothing can stop the smell of my sweat from hitting them
and the anger in my eyes
like a laser
tzzzzzz
from piercing them all over.

Fanny Lallart (born 1995 in Lyon) lives and works in Paris. She will be graduating from ENSAPC in October. The final piece for her degree involves an open radiophonic wordspace. For several years she has been developing a body of critical work through her writing practice and a number of group projects. She has published a memoir in the form of a fanzine called 11 textes sur le travail gratuit, l'art et l'amour [11 Texts on Free Work, Art, and Love] in which she questions our relationship to work, drawing on the thinking of several women writers like Elsa Dorlin, Sara Ahmed, and Sarah Schulman. She is a cofounder of the Show, a participatory student review which is currently preparing its third issue. Lallart, with Thily Vossier, is also behind an initiative called Minimarket, an exhibition cycle held in a Lyon minimarket from 2016 to 2019.