Can you start by introducing yourself, tell us who you are?
Yes, my name is Pascaline Jessica Knight and I'm an artist that principally works with
sub-screen printmaking and I've in the past done a lot of installation work.
And a bit of video too.
A bit of performance, intervention, video as well, and I'm presently doing a master's
degree, an MFA at OCAD in Toronto.
But you're originally from Montreal?
I'm from Montreal, yes, and we're sitting in Paris right now.
In the garden of the Archive Nacéna?
Yes, quite quaint and lovely.
And yes, but what I have been doing for the longest part is silkscreen printmaking but
more so is making little books that were always sort of self-made and self-propelled.
I used to back in just the 2000s I had a small press called Ashfalt Press that I was doing
with Brian Sanderson and that lasted for a little bit but on my own I also just kept
making these little booklets.
And so when you were doing this press, were you also publishing other artists as well?
I've never published other artists.
It was always, it's a very personal, yeah, it's sort of a personal endeavor.
Often a theme would sprout in my mind and then I would think about the layout.
The first time that I've actually been working with another writer is right now with a Swiss
writer called Claudine Gaetzi.
She's based in, I think it's Lausanne but I'm not sure, but in any case she's a poet
and it's the first time that I use someone's poem and I can play around with the layout
but I can't alter the text like I do in most.
Because you also worked with other people's writing, so this is an appropriation somehow
of Walter Benjamin?
Yes, I would call it, would I call it an appropriation?
It's more like an adaptation, let's say, where I cut out Walter Benjamin's text, beautiful
small text called Oeuvre d'art à l'époque de sa pré-productivité technique.
I could probably translate that but I won't waste my time looking for the translation.
People will see which one it is, it's very famous.
What I did was I took another title from Giorgio Agamben called l'homme sans contenu.
The man without content?
Yeah, the man without content and I transformed it into the woman without content, la femme
sans contenu and what I did inside the text is I got it out, the content of the text.
The middle?
Yes, I left the words, the margin words, so one word is left just to leave and what it
does, what's nice is that it leaves a silhouette which sort of fits well with feminine stereotypes
that we tend to have still.
It's like a Venus somehow.
Yeah, exactly, a Venus of text.
Nice.
Yeah.
And can you tell us about this one?
Yes, so this one, what I did was, it actually kind of stems off from this one which is
la permutation, les 647 000 permutations sur Marcel Duchamp, which was a collage that
I made, this one is originally 10 feet by 10 feet.
So each square is, I can't remember the dimensions, but in any case this is like a reduced, reduced
version of this collage and it's Marcel Duchamp sort of belt and melted into a structure
and inside you can find, this one is for example, the second, la 22e permutation sur
600 000 de 147.
And so are you going to make 600 000 books?
I'll keep doing it, well, as long as I'm...
So it's an open edition?
It's an open edition.
And the center is...
You'll have to tell me if you eventually come to the last one.
I would love that, I'm not even over 100, so this is a super long way to go.
So from this kind of permutation I also made, found words that could be read and set in
a square format, so it could be read in many directions.
Or like a palindrome?
Yeah, like a palindrome, but also kind of like how the concrete poets would work, which
was really kind of working with the letters, creating a form and I'm really obviously fascinated
by the livre that doesn't exist of Stéphane Malarmé and his whole sort of endeavor to
make the book that would...
The ultimate book.
The ultimate book, yes.
So and this book is called, it's also a play on words, it's called le poids des mots, but
it has a little registered R, so it also has a play on words like le poids des mots.
So the subject is sort of the weight of death, but the weight that words also can carry.
And all the words are around that, the weight that they can have.
And would you say that most of your artistic practice these days is publishing or do you
make other types of artworks?
Publishing or the art book is always at the core of my work somehow, either by...
It's almost like my thinking process is built around the book, the fact that the book has
a spine, the fact that something is read from left to right, what the space and what the
corner affords in terms of potential for meaning and separation and how do you say, association.
So if it's not directly involves publishing per se, it's always part of the thinking process.
And so why do you publish this way, why is it important for you to self-publish?
Well there's a great amount of freedom, I think the more freedom I have, I don't like
to be told what to do and the underground, it's sort of been this kind of underground
approach of just a form of resistance to, I can print the amount I want, it can be crooked,
which is something that I can't help, most of my stuff is crooked.
And also just to be able to experiment too with different materials that I would either
print on through silk screen printing, I have one edition that was a small book that was
folded into an underwear and the underwear was printed over.
So it just affords me a certain freedom that fits with me.
And when did you start publishing like that?
It was with Aschfeld Press and it was in 1999.
And what was your inspiration for this kind of publication?
Actually the desire to say something and put it out there in a form, I was also part of
this sort of underground craft.
We had these craft art fairs that went on around Christmas.
So I was also into book making at the time, so I would make a lot of journals that had
nothing written in it, but I also would just publish these small amounts of small stories
like we had one with Aschfeld Press called No Matter What, which was a beautiful message
which people just keep asking for it.
So yeah, I think the motivation was mostly for I think self-expression and an alternative
way of speaking to things in a very personal way and not even dictated by the demand or
the trend.
And there's a lot of your work that has to do with literature.
Is this one your main inspiration?
I didn't think so for the longest time, but I'm realizing now that writing is a very strong
component in my work and also in my way of thinking that language, the coexistence of
language, all my books are a mixture of French and English.
That also kind of makes me fall into the cracks, you know, I sometimes represent like now I'm
going to go to Lausanne and represent the French-Canadians of Canada to Lausanne for
this.
So do you consider your work to be Canadian somehow?
Is there something that?
It's québécois because it's even more than Canadian because Canada calls itself bilingual,
but by no means is it.
I think if any places is maybe a few enclaves and Quebec, we had to kind of obviously become
bilingual.
But if I, I mean, I've tried to present my, you know, get my, this book, this very big
book that I still screened, I was approached to publish it, but then the minute, and it
was like juxtapositions of French and English text, but not the translation, just that the
poem becomes a free English poem or, you know, some kind of a crisscross between the two.
And as much in England, I was received favorably, but then when they found out that it was both
languages, they coiled it back.
And in France-
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It really does, but the inverses, maybe, but even in France, they couldn't, they were
like, well, we need to translate those bits that are in English.
And I was like, well, if I were to do a translation, if I were to do it, I would have to just make
a whole other writing in order to make it work in what it wants to translate.
So.
Yeah.
So this is the Quebecois part of your work.
And what else is important in your work?
Well, why do you make it and why does it feel so important to make it?
Well, I think because it offers something that I think I've touched on a lot of taboo
subjects in my work, and it's not always linear, it's not never linear, and it's never direct.
But it, I think that's the main reason is that there's a self-actualization.
I really believe that utterance and expression as a writing is a way of realizing oneself.
And I think it's a definite way for other people to realize themselves.
And these little books are very playful, but at the same time, they kind of buy the side
door, treat pretty, either heavy subjects, you know, they treat about universal subjects
like death and, yeah.
Thank you so much.
Well, my pleasure.
Thank you.
