Anne Le Troter

Anne Le Troter is a Paris-based artist whose work combines sound installation, performance, theatre, literature and poetry. Having authored two books – L’Encyclopédie de la Matière and Claire, Anne, Laurence – she went on to study the role of speech in the workplace, inviting groups of people such as ASMR practitioners and telephone interviewers to make recordings with her (L’Appétence, sound piece, 2016, winner of the Salon de Montrouge and Palais de Tokyo Prizes; Les Mitoyennes at La BF15, 2015; Liste à Puces at Palais de Tokyo, 2017; Les Silences après une Question at Institut d’Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne, 2017). She then began several new series of writings focused on notions of biography, fiction and utopia in connection with our methods of reproduction. In 2021 she was awarded a grant as part of the Mondes Nouveaux programme, as well as a research grant from Bétonsalon – ADAGP (Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques). The resulting solo show, Les Volontaires, pigments-médicaments, was shown at the Bétonsalon Centre d’Art et de Recherche in 2022.

Anne Le Troter has been invited to produce works by the Pernod Ricard Foundation, the Biennale de Rennes, the Le Grand Café contemporary art centre in Saint Nazaire, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

During her residency, Le Troter invited Japanese poets and sound artists Tomomi Adachi, Ami Yamasaki and Pero Fukuda to work with her on a new sound piece inspired by Jun Tsuji (1884-1944), a self-proclaimed vagabond, Egoist Anarchist and Japan’s first Dadaist. After reading Romance of the Vagabond and Illusion of the Wheeled Grotto, Le Troter composed a work whose three protagonists decide they will no longer uphold the status quo and, taking their bodies into the forest, choose to extract themselves from society. A discussion of Jun Tsuji’s work ensues.

“If it’s about being useful, I’d really like to be a dog toy. That’s why I refuse verticality and the status quo, it’s ‘cos I’ve got this thing about being a dog toy. I’d like to fly off into the air. Think about it, someone sends me sailing over freshly mown grass, I land face first against a tree trunk, then a dog grabs me in its mouth.

Just picture it, a dog comes racing up to you and hurls you into the air before nibbling at you, it’d chew at my stomach and my stomach would squeak, it’d gnaw at my curls and I’d tickle its nose. I’d love that, being nibbled all over, wounded by joy and desire, for me, that would be the complete opposite of solitude, you know.

Can you imagine how much desire you provoke when you’re a dog toy? The percentage of joy you represent? Obviously, the graph would have to peak at some point, it would be a mountain of desire, a fountain of need, it could make a pile of money. You’d have to design, no, become part of a whole new economy. Risk it all, dare to be reincarnated as a squeaky toy and stay at the centre, the very centre of desire until you’re totally destroyed. That’s the plan.”