Salomé Mercier

About

Most of my writing practice isn’t writing as much as it is gathering, going around all of my belongings, all the open tabs on my laptop, emptying my pockets on the table and holding onto every word that falls out. I line them up, weave loose mismatched threads together carefully, stack sentences around me like a bird building a nest of everything it finds. Like a bird’s nest, my writing looks different every time, a reflection of what surrounds me, what my hands could reach for. Lately the nest has been looking like books about architecture, and questions about mistranslations, gaps and cracks between languages, and longing for community, and London trains and insurmountable small distances between hands. I am interested in unclear, in-between writing, in hybrid forms that develop in margins, corners, parasitic writing that takes root where it shouldn’t.

Over the past few years I have slowly centred my research on art education, with a focus on the way spaces for art education impact learning and teaching practices. I have been setting up collective workshops, screenings and conversations around art education and art school, working with Visual Communication student Ujwal Mantha on the Common College of Art, a student-led, experimental space researching alternative education through practice more than theory.

This is also the subject of my final masters research project, Our Strange House, a narrated diary of my journey between three different art schools, in three different countries. I have been telling everyone it is about the architecture of art schools but it is mostly about longing for community, and remembering places and spaces, and how I love art school so much that I would like to undo it entirely and build it anew.

I am based in London, where I write, translate from French to English and the other way around, and do all sorts of odd jobs that often end up being part of my writing too.