Tuesday 11 April 2006.

I've just got back from Joceyln's and once again it's Tuesday. As we both said: it often is Tuesday. This morning, at assembly, the students at my lycée put an end to their strike of over two months and went back to class. Yesterday, the President of the Republic decided to withdraw article 8 of the law on equality of opportunity, thereby signing the death warrant of the CPE (first job contract law). Last Tuesday there were more than 30,000 of us in the streets of Rennes and I thought of the earlier demonstrations close or near that have punctuated my meetings with Jocelyn and the partners of the Just a Walk project.

Two hours spent in the Mail studio. What's coming into view on the horizon, even if it's a long way off, is the exhibition at La Criée. It will open in late January 2007. On the big table in the studio Jocelyn has put images and texts, or rather, fragments, excerpts from the writings given to him by Yves-Noël Genod. It's quite beautiful in itself and, because of the “roots” font devised by Jocelyn, the text becomes image or the image, text – it's hard to tell. These roots, which are also hairs, make the letters and words vibrate and eat into the space, coming closer here to the strange photograph of that burned seashore from which a child is running, a child who is Noah. This stringy nerviness fascinates and upsets me. What shines out here is an untenable fiction, a bit like black light. Jocelyn talks a lot about the real coming together with fiction. For example, we read these words of Yves-Noël Genod's: “Making up love stories.” Transcribed like that, it's inevitably much poorer. But I'm simply trying to say something about the power of the text. Love stories are always between “inventing” and “living”. It's always a bit of both. And it is this double concomitance, too, that comes out of the photographic images that Jocelyn has laid out on the table: young girls immobile by the seaside, boats coming or going, planes. Facing us or with their back to us, it doesn't matter, it's just the idea of the possible.

Today, in the middle of this still cool April, it is a question of light. He sees his exhibition in these terms. Of course, we're still a long way from thinking of hangings. It's more principles. Today, it's light: the light of photo boxes, of videos and neons. More generally, a light which signifies that nothing ever stops or is frozen. It's excitement as much as circulation. It's a way of apprehending time, his way. He also says, more clearly than before, that elements from his own life, the surreptitious presences in an image, articulate and form his relation to time. I don't know why but the word that comes to mind as I listen to him is DESIGN. Perhaps because design constitutes one of the possible forms of the personal relation to space and to time.

We also talk about the Art Cup , the project by Nuno Sacramento and Roderick Buchanan. I mentioned the difficulty of integrating this kind of event into the framework of Just a Walk when these conversations started. However, what does really belong to the shifting, everyday reality that Jocelyn is trying to construct are the exchanges and discussions about this football match between national teams of artists and its accompanying exhibition. These discussions will continue and at the end of Just a Walk , as one of its welcome by-products, I would like us to be able to organise the Art Cup in Rennes. I am already dreaming of a match between the French artist's team and the Scottish one on the pitch on the Route de Lorient.

Later in the afternoon I meet Larys near the Pasteur bridge. It's cold. We exchange just a few words, mainly about the Art cup .

Jean-Marc Huitorel