“Annabelle Verhaeghe lives in Marseille and carries out multidisciplinary work which tends to bring the text out of the book. Aware of the apocalypse that awaits us, she writes and speaks frank and unvarnished texts which she enchants with mischievous video productions. Homemade montages (uses of toys, everyday objects, sound effects) whose apparent simplicity highlights creative ingenuity, they invite a shift, to experience the tension between text and montage. Annabelle Verhaeghe writes text-poems and does performances, readings, photos and painting.
Presentation by Yves Arcaix (director of Bifurcations, Literary & Artistic Festival), for the Maison de la Poésie de Nantes (Poetry institution), 2019

Le poème se porte bien, photographic series, 2022; performance and text (release fall 2024 by Ni fait ni à faire editions, Rennes)

Artistic approach

At the beginning, I painted as a self-taught artist. Then things accelerated. I studied theater and cinema, to confront myself with body and space. I was particularly interested in the work of voice and speech, in understanding how language works. This is how I discovered contemporary poetry and started writing. Quite quickly, the text became a sort of binder allowing new emulsions between all these practices, and generating others. It made sense, like a Fibonacci sequence: 1 plus 1 makes 2, then 3, 5, 8.

I try to detect the strange, the incommunicable, and translate it. I look for what makes poetry, what makes – a little too much – meaning. It's exponential, like rabbit reproduction — and my portfolio.

My works are often protean: music can become a film, a text goes oral or musical, then becomes a painted stop-motion animation, a photographic series, or gives substance to a sculpture that I activate in performance. From one form to another, things happen and are built. My projects also advance simultaneously, little by little, over long periods of time, like a weaving to which I constantly return, and to which new fibers and pieces are added to create their own island, their own rules.

Sahasrara, installation and preparation for reading, residency at La Factorie, Normandy Poetry House (Poetry institution in Léry), mai 2021

My work questions what is different and wants to be understood and experienced. It can be recognized through certain manic tendencies. Already, I work a lot, in performance, on the fact of hiding or of inhabiting, of making another body speak. I like to shape embodiment by creating costume structures — a house, a fox tank, a yeti ghost. I love building volumes, playing with space, creating surprise. Only the storage problem keeps me from doing it more often (the population of rabbits in my workshop has reached the food industry's critical threshold).

I use the friction of the unexpected, the shift of certain words or the absurdity of meta-fictional situations to move people towards a comic zone, to be able to explore subjects or feelings that are not necessarily funny. Like, for example: the relationship to solitude, to the place of nature within the Anthropocene (and not the other way around), to the loss of childhood (and the innocence's notion), to temporality or even to current society .

My projects use poetry and (meta)fiction to bring orality into play: I think that orality is the place of possible movement. In counterpoint, my paintings or photographs (non-series), mediums which by nature last over time, remain frozen, show very silent universes, empty landscapes, catastrophes or fantastic moments, people who sleep or think.

At the same time, my work is a bit like the French language: there are a lot of rules, and there are a lot of exceptions.