Monday 12 June.

It's been several weeks since Jocelyn and I touched base. Just a Walk is following its course without my seeing the slightest image, without my keeping up on its progress. When we last talked on the phone, he was enthusiastic about his trip to Scotland, and especially about his stay on the northern islands. And that's what I see first this morning in a few rushes that, while still quite rough, make one sense the intensity of the experience. Straight shots with no frills. A ferry porthole lashed by rain looking onto the rocky mass of the island that alternately looms up and dissolves. I resist a bit at first before giving in to their particular, captivating temporality.   I also detect in them the recent tradition of traveller-artists, especially those who head north: Pierre Huyghe, Marcel Dinahet, Anne Durez, Nicolas Moulin, Marylène Negro. Each in his/her own way captures their own particular vision of the northern landscape, sometimes embedded in the details. Here, as in the two other films that show insular landscapes, one is struck by the immobility of the viewpoint. A gaze as if hypnotized, or petrified by the panoramic landscapes that oscillate between ancestral lands and decors for westerns, but are swept by the wind that pushes the clouds along and distributes the light. Like a painting in the process of being painted; an unknown painter, an invisible brush.   For the moment it's just material. Maybe we'll see traces of it in the exhibition at la criée next January. I can sense that's what's on Jocelyn's mind now, that the bulk of the work being done at present, the trips, the residencies, the shooting of pictures and gathering of texts - all this is related to the exhibition more and more specifically. The process of crystallization, which is one way of defining the exhibition, has been set in motion. He mentions the idea of luminous emission as the founding principle: simplicity and circulation, uninterrupted movement, reflection.

With the approaching summer come new journeys. Jocelyn will spend another week or two in Scotland and then travel to Portugal. He seems to have abandoned the idea of a work session there, but it is still very probable we'll see each other since Yvette and I have decided to spend ten days of our holidays there, between Lisbon and Porto, sometime in August. He's also thinking about travelling for a while in the company of Marcel (Dinahet). It's an excellent idea for those two to set their eyes on identical (common?) places. Speaking of which, Marcel has just come back from ten days in Corsica where he's working on the preparation of an exhibition at the Corte museum. The idea was that he travel the roads of the island on buses belonging to a company who, for the occasion, would sponsor the project -something like what he had so often done by ferry - or, alternatively, simply go by car. If I mention Marcel, it is because apart from the fact that he has just come back and I'm anxious to hear from him, I see Just a Walk as the form - one of many - of all these experiments my friends undertake. In some way, Marcel's trip to Corsica can only rejoin Jocelyn's project, even if this possibility has not been discussed.

In fact, Just a Walk is never simply Just a Walk . It's a nebula, or a myriad if you prefer. It's the transcription of various activities, a way of residing (“Residence on Earth” as Pablo Neruda used to say).

The conversation continues and naturally leads us to Dinan where, in a cultural centre designed by David Cras, Jocelyn is putting the finishing touches on an art project of which he shows me a few picture. His intervention concerns the building and the adjoining gardens; photographs integrated in the architecture, sentences at the bottom of the water basins. I recognize the pluralistic, oblique approach, the diversity of viewpoints, the way he surveys spaces equipped with the tools which are the image, the object and the graphic arts, the fluidity that is decidedly characteristic of him.

Jean-Marc Huitorel