Brucelles

Brucelles (lat. Bersella) are very fine spring-clips used for picking up small objects, a sort of tweezers. 

Brucelles is the encounter between three universes (Glabelle(solo),Les Taroupes(duo) and Keep Smiling* (trio)) around Robert Walser’s Institute Benjamenta (cf. the film by the Brothers Quay). This source material was like a central point or a shared place through which were articulated the rites, codes, games and traditions of each of these worlds. Hybridization and co-existence, reorganization of a  mini-society out of a confrontation with solitude, with a duality and a threefold unity.

Since I arrived at Institute Benjamenta, I have already succeeded in becoming an enigma to myself. I, too, was contaminated by a very strange sense of contentment which I had never before experienced. I obeyed reasonably well, though not as well as Kraus, who has perfected the art of bending over backwards to follow orders (…) we are all alike in one respect (…) we are humble,  humble to the nth degree of servility (…) We wear uniforms, and this  uniform humiliates us and reveals everything at the same time. We look like slaves in them and it may be a shame, but we also look good, and this separates us from the profound ignominiousness of those people who  wander about in clothes that are fine for them, but dirty and torn. (…) No, what Mademoiselle Benjamenta teaches us seems to me to be  worth meditating on. It isn’t much, and we keep repeating it, but perhaps there is a secret behind all of these vain and laughable things.  Laughable? We, the boys of Institute Benjamenta, are never in the mood to laugh. Our faces and attitudes are very serious.

(…) What I know is that I will grow up to be a beautiful, big round zero.

Excerpt from Institute Benjamenta by Robert Walser [Original title. Jakob von Gunten. Ein Tagebuch 1909.]

* Keep Smiling is a work in progress performance by Éric Domeneghetty, Juan Benitez and Jean Fürst. 

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