L’AIR DE RIEN
with THIERRY MOUILLÉ
WORKSHOP PROGRAM
The On Air session proposed a simple protocol for each day of the workshop: participants were challenged to not use the English language, but instead, the languages of each participant (Portuguese, French, Latvian, and Italian) to compose dialogues, texts, and artistic proposals that developed the exchange based on means of translation imagined by the students; air, breath, voice, echo, gestures. An exchange on notions and expressions in the air, from one language to another, took place.
At the end of each day, the experimentations took the form of a radio broadcast (a 5-minute live), with a second protocol: each participant presented a form in one of the shared languages, highlighting a foreign language to the one who was speaking.
‘L’air de rien’, a French phrase used to describe a gesture, a comment, literally ‘the air of nothing’, with casualness or without any fuss, was discussed.
The main figure of this proposition was Salvatore in the novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. In the framework of a European project about sculpture, the translations about what everyone understands by sculpture as a work in ambient air were questioned.
“The digital experience, the globalization of economies, invites us to live in a medieval age. It is the result of a thousand years of the exchange of data compressed into a few milliseconds without the time for a breath”. Thierry Mouillé
Translated extract from the article “La Folie de la traduction”(1):
“The multiple language of Salvatore
Salvatore does not speak only one language, but all the languages in one or, as Eco says, ‘all the languages and none'(2). The novel explains that this is the deliciously mad fruit of his nomadic life, because, as Adso tells so, the madman had invented ‘a language of his own, made up of shreds of the languages with which he had come into contact'(3). An exceptional find: a character who speaks all the languages with which he has come into contact, and who therefore, in a monastery where the rule is to speak Latin, speaks this language and at the same time all the languages born of Latin on the European continent.
Salvatore gabbles a mixture of Latin ‘vernacularizations’ with Italian, French, Spanish, Provençal and various dialects. The narrator admits that he is no longer able to reproduce this language with precision, but roughly speaking, Salvatore freely draws terms from the lexical cauldron of the neo- Latin languages, composing sentences like the following one:
Mais Salvatore non est insipiens ! Bonum monasterium, et aqui on baffre et on prie dominum nostrum. Et el reste valet une queue de cerise. Et amen. No?”
Source: LATINI, Beatrice. “La Folie de la traduction. Salvatore dans Le Nom de la rose de Umberto Eco”. L’esprit européen. [online]. 2020 [accessed on April 14th 2023]. Available at this link: https://www. espriteuropeen.fr/2020/10/27/folie-traduction-salvatore-umberto-eco/
(1) “The madness in translation”
(2) ECO, Umberto. Le Nom de la rose. Paris : Grasset, 1985. p.54.
(3) Ibid.
FULL GROUP PARTICIPATION
Pedagogical approach — fact sheet
Workshop title: L’Air de rien
Author/coordinator: Thierry Mouillé
Duration/time span: 5 days
This workshop was part of the first masterclass of the YES (Young European Sculpture) program, focusing on the relationships between art, sensitive ecosystems, and collective creative practices. The theme “Air” called for an immaterial, performative, and ephemeral approach, directly involving voice, breath, spoken language, and the atmospheric conditions of the Loire River. Thierry Mouillé conceived the module as a linguistic and sensory dérive across the native languages of the participants (French, Italian, Portuguese, Latvian), exploring the materiality of breath and the creative disjunctions of translation. The goal was to navigate polyglot communication without relying exclusively on standardized verbal language.
Context and program
Materials and methodologies
The primary materials were intangible: breath, voice, silence, gesture, and radio waves. The workshop used recording and broadcasting devices (recorders, microphones, FM transmitters), alongside practices drawn from performance, physical theatre, and sonic experimentation. The methodology centered on movement (walking, wandering through the city and along the river), non-verbal exchange, and the overlay of codes, enabling alternative forms of translation. Emphasis was placed on creative misunderstanding, slips of the tongue, sonic and gestural détournement, working with both amplification and erasure.
What constitutes a shared language in a multilingual group? How can breath, rhythm, or gesture act as translation without words? Can translation be treated as a creative act rather than a faithful rendering? How can collective performance emerge from fragments, hesitations, or linguistic gaps? These questions gravitated around the figure of the “mad translator,” inspired by Salvatore in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose – a hybrid, animal-like translator, possessed by multiple voices.
Key issues
Results and observations
The workshop culminated in a collective radio performance, recorded and broadcast live at the end of the week. This hybrid output layered human voices, mixed languages, breath, mouth sounds, laughter, sighs, and orchestrated silences. The experience deepened active listening among participants, revealed linguistic vulnerabilities, and made visible the power dynamics inherent in translation. It also fostered new awareness of the speaking body, the role of breath in communication, and the poetic potential of fragmented speech. This experimental approach, at the edge of the absurd and the sensitive, was praised for opening unexpected paths to collective creation by embracing imperfection and opacity as poetic resources.
Eco, Umberto. (1980). The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt.
Flusser, Vilém. (1991). Gesten: Versuch einer Phänomenologie. Göttingen: European Photography.
Flusser, Vilém. (2014). Gestures, trans. Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ingold, Tim. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
Nicolescu, Basarab. (1996). La Transdisciplinarité, manifeste. Monaco: Rocher.
Nicolescu, Basarab. (2002). Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, trans. Karen-Claire Voss. Albany: SUNY Press.
References
Information provided and reviewed by each workshop coordinator. Content may be revised or updated.