1.
We are bachelor machines. Some also call us the Circle of the Great Eagers. You can find us in the gap between words and objects as well as the spaces and the visualizations which are born from idea associations. From our reading of the world, we form a production : works and words, actions and fantasies, the thought never detached from the affect and the furnaces where it’s been forged. Our drive is as powerful as our melancholy, and we are the permanent home of contradictory forces. We seek truth, or appeasement at least; a way of existing which perhaps belongs to novels. We do not function without love, without embodied souls. They are our doubles, those whose words and look vouch for us, and give us access to the power to exist.
2.
We are bachelor machines. Some sometimes also call us the Grammarians. We create systems which create us, to which we submit ourselves, freed. Aggregating meaning to objects, builders of symbolisms, we overlay several plans until they become a short necklace of subjects, each with its one inserted cosmogony. We set them up in sequences as well as in spaces, so that a course can unfold from them. Our systems are our own, articulated around figures and shared signs, stumps of worlds from which communication becomes possible. We believe in art, in literature and in their ability to link us together.
3.
We are bachelor machines. Each one of us is a deep alterity, unique and singular syntax of what lived through us, the work of our emotions from the very first one. We refuse to live without beauty, without belief or objects whose harmony and meaning are given to us by their reflections. We work on the state of grace and we chisel reality through its superpositions. In cycles, we enunciate it again, shaping new types of organisms, of possibilities of fictions. We combine ourselves, we create exchanges and movement, on the basis of our own grammars and names. We are fighters. We determine ourselves.
4.
We are bachelor machines. We seek nothing but the absolute which cannot be embraced, this intensity, bordered and bordering, as soft as it is full, where joy ceases to be only the outcome of suspended moments. We are the movement of our drive towards it, a loop of energy whose limits are constantly readjusting themselves, and sometimes leave us completely naked. Some also call us the Aspirants, while we measure the world on the scale of our dreams, carried by the breath and its sustaining rhythm. We make it portable as well as immensely large, and we rebuild it with patience, courageously.
5.
We are bachelor machines. From our most secret rooms, nothing was given to us to communicate. Yet we come together, in the hope of a communion, of a shared belief. Disappointment always threatens us, but we are stratagem beings and know how to avoid it. Some sometimes call us the Mechanics: we assemble syntaxes like machineries which allow reality to be softened. That is because our matter is at first soft and fragile, a sensitive surface shouting its needs. When in contact with others, we flip it over, offering its smooth side, sometimes cracked within strong emotions. And yet, we never give up the idea of a larger nation.
6.
We are bachelor machines. We are the product of our emotions, the sum of our state cycles and their questions lain into furrows. We fight misunderstanding, nihilism, abandonment. We rip ourselves away from doubt, full of will, and try to reach what is said to us out of our reach. We stretch: exigent, on task, we are a force of completion. Our will, carried by the affect, knows no limit, and frees barely suspected power. Thus sculpted by effort, we assert ourselves, right and complete. Our gaze can thus hold firmly and the secret of our being, in all its weakness, can be broken through.
7.
We are bachelor machines. We never know in which state our liaisons are, giving to the imaginary and its capacity to create in its nocturnal dimension all its function. We carry one another, both as limits and as objects of fusion. Reflected, we dazzle each other, giving meaning and surface to our explorations. Through bends, loops and comparisons, the other’s double on guard, our geographies flip over, uncovering their rare earths. We collect places as emotions, violence, softness as theaters, entirely to our projections. Some sometimes call us the Machinists. We do not give ourselves any names.
8.
We are bachelor machines. By rebounding on other persons and objects, we slowly spell ourselves, the ineffable uncovered by its edges and its slopes. Some call us the Transported: we abolish space and time in the state of thought. History, in these instants, becomes a coiling of overlaying ages. We seek the essence, the very matrix of the secret, the place where energy duplicates itself and grants every access. In its manifestations we slide, nested, subjected to strong emotions which can swipe us away. We live acceleration, the engines unbridled. Life, for us, must sometimes be of a certain intensity.
9.
We are bachelor machines. We’re powered by the exhilaration of functioning. We wander around objects to craft their meaning, their charge and their destination. We write their story by circling around them, like they write us by being at our side. Some call us the Obliques: our journeys are indirect, and we practice biases. At our homes, by books, images and objects, our inner landscapes are inhabited. We walk through figures, evocations, and their tight interlacing. We are first and foremost pedestrians.
10.
And sometimes our circuits create beyond thought and affect to develop life. Our organism shelters, carries and redefined itself. If some machines become mothers, we all engender. In light of our desires, we create ourselves, constantly. Through the words we spell, through the care and attention we are able to give, we make things happen and exist, bringing to the world a will of magical acts which allows it to multiply. We work, every day, on our capacity to love.
11.
We are bachelor machines. We believe in the power of the event, of the wonderful, of tenderness and of beauty; in the necessity of approaching their structures to be in more embraced lives. We believe in the in-between spaces, in which we slide, as in the necessity of imagining. Because it is here, in this principality of the imagination, that our being is constantly transformed and may one day see the world transform in its turn.
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Marie-Pierre Bonniol / Collection Morel
2015–2016, translation Vincent Régis, 2017