CHTO
prohibited for under 15s
Sonia Chiambretto: voice/text
Deborah Lennie: voice
Patrice Grente: electronics.
CHTO prohibited for children under 15 by Sonia Chiambretto (Actes Sud, 2009)
“Chto Prohibited for under 15s” is written from work on the collection of testimonies, a European crossing, border crossings, various communities linked to war and exile. It recounts the journey in the language of three individuals. Emergence of a new language, erasure of bodies until the erasure of the text, or almost: words crossed out, hatched, gridded, holes, silences, fragments of documents, testimonies, the notions of identities are translated into the language of the poet, in the sound. CHTO offers us, through listening, a look at Europe, at the world, at our century.
In CHTO (“what” in Chechen), barbarity precedes the text. We disembark from any agreed language to take note of what bodies are, there, in Saint Petersburg, in Grozny, in the company of Sveta, a child, discover bodies in transit reduced to the binary of CIRCULATE / NOT CIRCULATE , to the hammering for any response of the limited expressive possibilities of the “RAH”, a guttural sound which to be produced requires both closure of the larynx (retention) and brutal expulsion of air (rejection).
they burst out laughing / come on / come with / want to / it shows / yes / cold / all with you / rah rah rah rah rah / in grandmother's ear against: / come with / why not / I hide my face/they: CHTO! CHTO! / I have a cough
AS
THAT
CHTO results from a meeting with a Chechen child. Sonia Chiambretto works (at least for this project) from interviews - an added hallucinatory veracity to the density of this short book, very written by dint of being minimal.
The accuracy of Sonia Chiambretto's tone is that of fundamental concern. From the war documentary to illiteracy and exclusion upon arrival, the sections of CHTO articulate a known journey, that of exile in times of war.
The immemoriality of the situation is “equipped” with a lexicon, as if to better signify that the language (which s(ympt)omatizes the state of possible relation) here is no longer that which we suppose, precise of decomposition , LIKE THIS: chapter headings in _Glottal stop _Terrorism _Motif, or further in typology _Cat-tongue, _Nostalgia-tongue or _Soldier-tongue. Not without the tragic humor which in places is striking when the refugees are excluded from Chat because they only know how to replicate the war they are waging there, when we learn that Chechens and Russians like the same songs. Because there is already a question of music in the text. He wrote a rap there, already written in Latin letters and then translated into a particular font made of drawings, resembling graphics more than words.
“They said [the police R]: Oh why don't you look at me / What / Did you see a ghost or something / What / They drank / They smoked / They're like crazy / LIKE THAT. »