{"id":2296,"date":"2015-07-22T11:21:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T09:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/?p=2296"},"modified":"2022-10-24T10:41:52","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T08:41:52","slug":"last-words-de-vanessa-place-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/last-words-de-vanessa-place-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"LAST WORDS, de Vanessa Place (2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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LAST WORDS<\/strong> <\/em>(Last Words)\u00a0 is an artist\u2019s book combining a sound piece with the last words of prisoners sentenced to death, collected just before the start of the execution procedure\u00a0 \u2013 and made public by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on its website,\u00a0 To date, \u00a0since the resumption of capital executions\u00a0 on 7 December 1982 in Texas, 527 inmates have been put to death by lethal injection.
Vanessa PLACE\u00a0<\/strong> speaks the last words of the condemned, collected just before the start of the execution procedure, and made public by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on its website, as are the portraits of the executed gathered here in the book. To date, 527 inmates have been put to death in Texas since 1982. All by lethal injection.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be inappropriate to hear in this reading any kind of music, or even a sombre sound poetry. One would have to ask\u00a0Vanessa Place, an American poet and also a lawyer, what\u00a0she came looking for in these last confessions of those sentenced to death by Texan justice since the resumption of capital executions in December 1982 \u2013 a poetic use of\u00a0testimony, as\u00a0Charles Reznikoff\u00a0did before her, perhaps; an inspiration that digs into the blackest depths of the human \u2013 whether the human in question be judge, murderer or even (who knows?)\u00a0innocent \u2013 perhaps also, in the manner of Kathy Acker, Peter Sotos or\u00a0Dennis Cooper\u00a0(whose striking\u00a0Jerk\u00a0was published by Dis Voir in the same series.)
These \u201csleepers\u201d whom we find photographed in the book \u2013 images and words come from the archives of the Texas Criminal Justice website \u2013 crowd against one\u00a0another: six portraits per page, and\u00a0Last Words<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0has sixty of them. Since she cannot quote each of these three hundred and sixty condemned, Place forbids us, in her own way, from linking, as in\u00a0a children\u2019s game, a given face to the words it may have spoken, just as she has refrained from attaching to a given utterance the crime that will have silenced it.
In a monotone voice, even a withdrawn one, she then tells off a rosary \u2013 God and his ambassadors are often in question here \u2013 of apologies, regrets and words of love, of forgotten details and of the hopes that may be attached to them (of going \u201chome\u201d, of being welcomed \u201cinto heaven\u201d, of believing that the death about to be injected into you is a kind of rebirth\u2026), of tributes and dedications, of thanks (more alone than it would be possible to be in the middle of the desert, religion would still manage to guide you), and finally of farewells \u2013 the most terrible perhaps being this \u201cNo last statement, no.\u201d
Poignant, obviously. Delivered under a leaden sky, the administrative thing catches the last words of its condemned and makes them public:\u00a0Vanessa Place<\/strong>, for her part, recites and illustrates today what Michel Foucault once wrote: \u201cAt the heart of madness, delirium takes on a new meaning.\u201d Yet perhaps it is not this \u201cnew meaning\u201d that strikes most here. \u00a0\u201d Guillaume Belhomme \u00a9 Le son du grisli<\/p>\n

Vanessa PLACE<\/strong> (born in 1968 in Stratford, lives and works between Los Angeles and New York) is an American writer and performer. The first poet to have taken part in the Whitney Museum Biennial in New York, she has notably given performances at PS1, New York and at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. She\u00a0 is also a critic and criminal defence lawyer.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Format<\/th>\n\n

165 x 215 mm<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

Pages<\/th>\n\n

64<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

Illustrations<\/th>\n\n

60 color<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

Binding<\/th>\n\n

paperback<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

ISBN<\/th>\n\n

978-2-914563-77-2<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LAST WORDS (Derniers Mots)  est un livre d\u2019artiste associant une pi\u00e8ce sonore avec les derniers mots des condamn\u00e9s \u00e0 mort recueillis juste avant le d\u00e9but de la proc\u00e9dure d\u2019ex\u00e9cution  \u2013 et rendues publiques par le D\u00e9partement de la Justice Criminelle du Texas sur son site internet,  \u00c0 ce jour,  depuis la reprise des ex\u00e9cutions capitales  […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,62,66,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acr","category-bibliotheque","category-collection-zagzig","category-juke-box"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2296"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2299,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions\/2299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}