Loreto Martínez Troncoso

A few years ago, I started working, reading, and writing on the desire, indeed the need, to take leave, to withdraw, to extricate oneself, to stop being here. Although not long enough for a real truce, my stay on the island of Ouessant offered a chance at isolation. Wishing for isolation… dreaming of it… But what does this isolation mean for those who live on the island? Insularity? How do they perceive it and feel about it? What does it entail? “I left … and later … I came back … but I can feel myself itching to go again.” “I was born on this rock, and this is where I shall die.” These are some of the things I was told as I went on walks, met people, sat around cafés… When I left for the island, I wanted to hear these voices, the silence, the wind, the sea. I also had some books, films, and music with me… Ewen Chardonnet and I worked together to reactivate the function of the Sémaphore as a radio by broadcasting a series of five programmes entitledradio creac’h, radio lanuit. Students from the local secondary school, the Collège des Îles du Ponant helped us to make and compose one of these programmes, which we streamed on the Internet, broadcasting it live for a week. These programmes were based on these voices, their recordings, the sound of the wind and the sea, maritime radio frequencies, and things read and written on the island. (…) Later, my work approached, questioned, and summoned this island. It was not so much a geographical island, as the land of the self, the “I-land” Thoreau’s pun had made me come across. A space of one’s own… A “proper” space … There was a desire, a need, to define and delineate it. Who lived there ? What bound it ? How do we inhabit such vital spaces? And how do we root them, and/or root ourselves, day after day, into a corner of the world? These “proper” spaces were not just physical but also mental…

Loreto Martínez Troncoso
extracts from the logbook