"I tend to think in terms of chance – but perhaps it is all Maktoub."
Writer Lucy Sante was born in Belgium and emigrated to the USA along with her parents. She’s a multi-awarded poet in the English language, a prose essayist and writes lyrical descriptions and stories of life in New York and Paris. And now she’s written the lyrics for Alice Visentin’s Maktoub Sonata, which will be performed on the streets of Paris during Fashion Week.
Despite being primarily a writer, she’s a living embodiment of the idea of a ‘university of curiosity’ – an approach that reflects Maktoub’s essence of culture and experimentation. Her interests span music and photography, water courses and cultural historiettes, comics and postmodern art. She’s also a dedicated collage-maker. Here we present a selection of new and recent collages.
Sante began collaging as a teenager in the 1960s. Her timeless source material from paper ephemera – magazines, postcards, photographs – that she acquired while working at the Strand Bookstore in the late 1970s and kept amassing in later years. Sante has turned these scraps into works of the visual vocabulary of the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century.
What does Maktoub mean to you? How do you envision this collaboration?
As regards the lowercase maktoub, it definitely applies to my transition! From the start I thought of it in terms of destiny – that after decades of fighting destiny I finally gave in to it; it is more powerful than I am. And so many of the most important things that have happened in my life have turned on matters of apparent chance, landing me in places I could not have foreseen.
Do you somehow believe in ‘all is written’ terms?
As an antinomian skeptic I tend to think in terms of chance – but perhaps it is all maktoub.
What is collage for you?
I’ve been practicing collage at the dawn of my adult years - around 13 years old - and then had a burst of activity during the covid quarantine months, in 2020. Collage in many ways has been the dominant form of the late modern era, affecting such areas as music sampling and architecture in the incorporation of pre-existing elements into new constructions.
But for all of its links to other forms of art, the cut-paper collage is a specific tradition all its own, which may now seem to be narrowed by the extinction of most paper ephemera, although it always had a retrospective quality. It is usually dated back to Dada, but is actually rather older. I have on my wall a collage that looks very mid-Twenties Surrealist—sea creatures and mythological characters disporting themselves amid oversized flowers against a field of stars—but was made by an English clergyman in 1864.
How do you work on these projects?
So I’ve been making collages in consecutive series determined by physical constraint: a ledger, a stenographer’s notebook, mounted industrial photographs, a deck of lotto cards. I have a vast trove of imagery to draw upon: the disbound and damaged books I collected while working at the Strand Bookstore after college, the New York Post headlines I hoarded in those same years, the bag of half-shredded movie posters I bought from a street peddler in the Nineties, the wildly random ephemera.
What is the relationship between social media and your collage project?
Getting an instagram reaction stimulated me to keep trying to top the previous thing I put up. After about a year, though, even that flare-up subsided; my hobby ceded to more pressing matters.
But then the quarantine came along. All of a sudden I was in need of a form of expression that would bypass the usual cognitive pathways. I had no reason not to make collages, and seemingly all the time in the world, since every day had become about a month long.
Is collage a sort of ‘Maktoub moment’ for you? An intersection of what is already ‘written’ and what has yet to be written? Of existing things and newly created things?
It’s an interesting point: the collage as Maktoub art form! Actually, I like to work at the point of intersection, where both things are present but neither dominates. I enjoy the challenge of making something that can be consumed by the eyes with no thought involved, and at the same time introduce a thought that lies just on the edge of meaning, preserving maximum ambiguity. Collage-making suits the moment; it is a meditative practice that requires the regular exercise of fine motor skills.
The other Paris is a book of yours that tells stories of ‘the unsung part of Paris’. Can you tell us how this impacts on your lyrics for the Maktoub Sonata?
Many of the things I write in ‘the other Paris’ about are known to the French, but not all of them, and especially not by the young. Historical memory is another casualty of the corporate media – some matters are absorbed by pop culture, others are allowed to vanish. The French are nostalgic about their bistrots even as they replace them with Starbucks, but bistrots were social and leisurely and low profit, and those qualities don’t fly anymore. Also, don’t forget: all the cities in the world were at one time unstable, freaky, and colossally sordid. A few still are.
How do your musical passions – punk, especially, but also obscure Americana and other genres – influence your position as lyricist in this project?
In a way, collage and music lyrics are connected. You have to conjure up words for existing musical landscapes. Like in the quarantine moment, like in ‘teenage wastelands’, you don’t have to do it but do it anyway. I had no reason not to make collages, and seemingly all the time in the world. Not so different as a process than writing lyrics on a traditional tune.
