In the latest book in the Portraits d’Art&Fiction collection, Vaudois author Bruno Pellegrino takes an interest in the work of French visual artist Lou Masduraud, whom he met during a residency in Rome between 2021 and 2022. A joyful tale of a budding friendship.
“It’s not the first time I’ve written about real people, but it’s the first time I’ve written about someone alive.” When Bruno Pellegrino arrived in residence at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome in 2021 with the aim of writing his next novel, he only knew the visual artist Lou Masduraud by name. Above all, he didn’t know that he would be writing her portrait.
Originally from Montpellier, Lou works with stone, ceramics, and marble. “I think she’s the first sculptor I’ve ever seen in my life and I don’t even think about looking at her hands,” the author writes about this woman who for months will be his roommate.
Very quickly, Bruno Pellegrino felt as if he were being driven by an inexplicable intuition: “It’s like when I have an idea for a book. It intrigued me straight away, it made me laugh a lot. But I felt in its way of existing something that fascinated me. So, I started taking notes, but without a plan.”
If Bruno Pellegrino is in Rome to write, Lou intends to explore an area that has interested him for some time: fountains. In the eternal city, there are countless.
Lou looks a lot at mouths, where words, saliva and bacteria are exchanged, mouths as the beginning or end of a system: the underground network joins the surface, something passes and happens, the invisible becomes visible.
Fascist recovery
But for the sculptor, if it is a question of treating the fountain as a symbolic object, it is also essential to see it as a political object. Under Mussolini’s regime, these mouths through which water was offered to the population and which still constitute a major issue of sanitation in today’s Italy, were for many moved from their original place. A redevelopment justified by the Duce’s desire to restore the grandeur of the Roman Empire.
Ironically, the city of Carrara, where the marble for most of the fountains comes from, is also the birthplace of Italian anarchism, and one of the greatest bastions of anti-fascism. This is where Lou Masduraud must go if she wants to find the material for her work. The opportunity for a road trip in the company of Stefano, owner of a marble shop in Rome, micro-publisher in his spare time and fan of Einstürzende Neubauten, a German industrial punk band.
In Carrara, Lou Masduraud hopes to find small pieces of red and pink marble in which she will carve real mouths, with teeth, tongues, smiles, grimaces. Some will look like anuses.
After some time, she returns from her class in possession of her first marble mouth, a white, irregular, strangely heavy object that fits in the palm and that I turn and turn over in my hands for a long time.
Combination of circumstances
In May 2022, the Roman residency is coming to an end and Bruno Pellegrino receives an email inviting him to paint a literary portrait of an artist. “I’m afraid Lou will refuse, I’ll wait a bit before talking to her about it. But no, it’s fine, she agrees”. Then an announcement falls, that of a competition that the visual artist has won: that of a public fountain in Geneva which, if all goes well, will be inaugurated in 2025. One more mouth.
Ellen Ichters/olhor
Bruno Pellegrino, “Les bouches – Portrait of Lou Masduraud”, ed. Art&Fiction, August 2024.
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