ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

Keynote with Laure Prouvost in conversation with Annika Kristensen

·36 min·2 clips

Prouvost says her grandfather’s last concept was “to dig a tunnel from the north of England to Africa.”

The room starts with arrival. ACCA places Laure in Melbourne at the end of a slow trail through Zoom, email, and quick meetings across cities. The film has already travelled. The host sets Les Palais Idéal between its Venice installation and this cinema screening, where scale and sound make it land differently. Then language takes over. Laure is asked about voice, narration, intimacy, mistranslation, and the odd trust created by a speaker who may not be reliable. Her answer stays close to frustration. She says she came to art because words could not quite carry what she meant. Color and sound became another language. Still, words came back as something she could tackle, cut, swallow, and work like clay, image, or paint. London sharpened that feeling. Misunderstanding left room for imagination, where one word could break open into sea, seeing, density, and sensation. French comes back too, folded into the work after long immersion in London, with sentences sliding between languages and textures. The exchange keeps the loose feel of a public program. Questions arrive with praise and context. Laure answers through partial phrases, small corrections, and images that refuse to settle. The ending gets bodily and weird. After thanks and an invitation to see Every Sunday, Grandma, she imagines a final voice as oversized lips over the audience. It kisses, swallows, surrounds, and leaves the body on the floor. Speech stops sounding decorative. It has weight.

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