How do feelings move through the built environment? Marie-Pierre Bonniol’s Summer Currents examines the landscapes and gardens of Portugal’s north coast to reveal their underlying interconnections, where energy pathways are shaped by the perception of water—to the point of short circuiting. Through these images, Bonniol creates a narrative that is grounded in the mystery of the transmission of energy. This image book, presented in the US for the first time in video format with ghost page, is a tribute to the superimposed, contradictory spaces of the imagination. Composed as a kind of silent film about emotions, Summer Currents operates at the intersection of water and fire, up to the threshold of clarifying light, with the collaboration of Érik Bullot, Justus Saretz and Yann Sordet.
Marie-Pierre Bonniol
Summer Currents
Digital image book, 44 pages
Images by Marie-Pierre Bonniol, Érik Bullot, Justus Saretz and Yann Sordet.
Studio Walter, Berlin, October 16, 2024 (original French version: L’Été au secret, 2023)
ISBN 978-3-910910-05-8
Acknowledgements: Susanna Bolle, Shaun Gummere, Till Schröder and Yann Sordet.
“When the eye of Deleuze and Guattari blinks, it is swollen as a lock. Their book is a displacement of voluminous waters, at times released as a torrent, at times stationary, working below, yet always moving and in waves or currents and countercurrents. What is at stake is not a significance but an energetics. The book provides nothing, it rouses a lot, it transports everything. It is a pantograph that takes electric energy on the high voltage line and transforms it into the rotation of wheels on rails, for the traveller into landscapes, into daydreams, into music, into works that are in turn transformed, destroyed, carried away. The pantograph displaces itself very quickly. This is not a book of philosophy, that is to say, of religion. Not even the religion of those who no longer believe in anything, the religion of scripture. Writing is treated rather as a machinery: let it absorb energy and let it metamorphose it into the metamorphic potential of the reader.”
— Jean-François Lyotard, Les dispositifs pulsionnels [Energumen Capitalism], Paris, UGE 10/18, 1973, pp. 10-11. Translation by Vlad Ionescu, Peter Milne, Herman Parret, 2019.