Nathalie Quintane on Writing, Film, and Performance

In an interview with artpress, French writer Nathalie Quintane discusses her approach to writing, which she describes as working from already saturated symbolic material—proper names like Jeanne d'Arc and Saint-Tropez, or generic nouns like 'shoe' and 'beginning'—rather than from reality. She employs typographic shifts, juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements (citations, images, raw notes), and a focus on the 'cut' or break in linear reading to create what she calls 'surfiction.' Her unit of composition is the sentence, not the verse or narrative flow, drawing models from Diderot and Wittgenstein. The book 'Mortinsteinck' emerged from a film by Stéphane Bérard, where the film shoot acted as a phrase trigger, allowing a looseness and freedom she would not have achieved otherwise. Regarding performances and readings, Quintane deliberately uses obsolete technologies (slide projectors, cassette recorders, digital video) to create distance and humor, contrasting with the narcissism of tech-savvy poets. She sees performance as a vital development for poetry, enabling a unique bodily and textual staging that cannot happen elsewhere.