Letter from the Labyrinth
Or how it took me a year to find myself again
I’ve finally found my way back to this desk. I hadn’t seen it since February 2024, as if it had been hidden in the winding corridors of the labyrinth. It appeared to me this morning as if it had always been here, in front of me. I’m seated now with a mug of coffee I brought from my kitchen, tapping on the humming computextwriter, its monochrome LCD flickering faintly across the battered wood. Forgotten papers and unfinished notebooks are scattered around me like abandoned maps. It feels good to write again for you.
The labyrinth is where I live, where I create. Endless corridors lit by tungsten lamps, closed windows that let natural light, coming from God knows where, put rays through the dusty corridors, rooms that shift and never quite keep their shape. Wooden doors line the halls leading to a different project. One project, one room. This is how I have always worked. I usually wake up determined to find the same desk I left the day before, but the labyrinth does not always cooperate. Some days, the path is so clear it feels like destiny. Other days, a fog drifts in, and I might wander without direction, lost, or ending up in another room working on another project.
It’s surprisingly easy to go outside. There are doors to the outside everywhere. Stepping through one feels like emerging from Plato’s cave, the sudden brightness making me dizzy. When you see me in the outside world, that’s where I come from. But it takes energy. If I stay too long, I feel like I might dissolve entirely.
The last time I sat here, it was February 2024. I was deep in a video project for Cahors Juin Jardins, an AI piece I’ll share with you later even if today is not the day. It was shown at the end of a dance performance for the art festival, a slow, meditative 10-minute sequence, like watching a life unfold in suspended time. It was well received, but the audience was small, and I want to show it to more people in the future, if only to show how fast the generative AI world goes. I poured myself into it, using those old, cumbersome generative tools we had a century ago in generative AI progress time, which means last spring. By the end, I was exhausted. I needed to rest.
So I drifted into other rooms and outside. Over the summer, we traveled. At night, I could slip back in, but my dreams felt untethered. In truth, I didn’t rest much because I can’t really stay out of the labyrinth for that much time, even if, paradoxical as it sounds, I take it with me everywhere I go.
I spent a lot of blissful time fishing with my son inside the labyrinth. He lives here too. We find rooms where rivers flow beside mossy stone, the water still as a mirror. You might think it’s impossible, but that’s the way it is. Some rooms are so big inside, bigger than what they appear to be from the corridor. Some are connected to the outside, some aren’t. We cast our lines into the quiet and wait. Ripples spread like whispers. Time stretches. Those moments are so calm they feel almost outside of time, trying to attune to the depths of the water, guessing where the fish are, wishing for the best. Seeing patience and contemplation rewarded.
During the summer, a childhood friend of mine who lives in Montreal gave me his old Japanese sunburst Stratocaster, forgotten for more than twenty years in his mother’s attic. I replaced the pickguard, removed a volume knob, and swapped in a DiMarzio Super Distortion S at the bridge and a Freeway ten-position switch. It’s not just a guitar. It’s a meditation machine. I call it the Dronecaster.
I have for a long time observed I could change my mood by listening to different music, but the effect is much stronger if I play myself. The Dronecaster is how I tune my mind when I need to. When I play through the bass amp and pedals, the walls of the labyrinth vibrate. My sound is somewhere between raw, overdriven tone and massive, immersive textures. Thick, organic, and harmonically rich, it balances clarity and sustain. Even at full saturation, chords ring out distinctly, like ripples through the corridors. Even at high volume, it’s thick but non-aggressive. It sustains with dense harmonic richness without piercing the ears. It is both dense and breathing, a wall of sound that never crushes, always moves. It’s a way to still the mind, to take control of the space around me. A form of meditation through distortion.on.
Then came a day when I met an old, elegant man in a dim-lit chamber, seated at a heavy wooden table, his long beard lending him a hieratic aura. He offered me coffee. I remember the taste, the way it shattered the veil that had clouded my sight. And then I understood. I have always lived in a labyrinth. For the first time, I closed my eyes and saw it from above, as if I had risen high enough to see its interwoven patterns. Every hallway, every chamber, forming a strange, perfect order through apparent chaos. Seeing my son growing in it felt natural, but I didn’t realize I had simply brought him where I had always been.
This year, I turned fifty. I went looking into archives I hadn’t touched in years. Shelves full of notebooks, analog photos, Polaroids, cassettes labeled in my old handwriting, reels of film boxed in dust, and piles of hard drives. I am sifting through them now, trying to find a shape, something to share. It feels like mapping out a place I have always lived in but never fully understood. They were all in a room full of piles I had to go between and try not to get lost to get to a part I wanted to reach. I realized they were a labyrinth, and that’s what they were talking about.
My father also dwelled here, in his own wing of the labyrinth. My brother and I recently entrusted twenty-six boxes of his film reels to the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, some donated, some on loan. His news footage, personal films, work on Gaudí and Dalí, maybe even images of our family I have never seen. It is the first time his life’s work has ventured beyond these walls.
My own path as a visual artist began when words stopped flowing at twenty-five. I had always wanted to write since I was eleven. But at some point, I wanted to make films and realized I didn’t need to learn how to make images. I started photographing, and the results were astonishing. It became easier for me to photograph than to write. Photography said everything I had to say without words.
Now and then, I tried to write again, and I did so in a satisfying way for me for many works peripheral to my main image work, but nothing like what I was after in my twenties. It came back around in 2022 when I started writing again for Substack, especially for the series Seasons. But as always, I pushed too far. I started making longer articles with more photos, then videos with original music. Bigger stories, original music, videos. The publications were more and more spaced until the burden was so heavy it was swept away by the AI revolution I found myself drawn in. It’s okay, as it puts a retrospective finished line that’s completely logical if you read through it. And so, I’m drawing a final line under Seasons 1 to 15. Perhaps there will be another chapter, but for now, I want to write to you and want to focus on one thing at a time.
Here’s a curious fact that some of you already know. It is simply easier for me to write in English. It’s like English is the language in which I can experiment, have fun, and tell things as true as they are without much fearing immediate consequences. So maybe I am an exophonic writer in my own country. Or maybe it is just the best way to send messages out of the labyrinth. On X, and here, I default to English. I will still provide French translations, but I prefer to keep them on my own site, preserving the original in its most direct form.
I have also begun a new film project with a musician. He’s been invited into the labyrinth, and together we are starting to explore its rooms while I continue my own wanderings.
I have many projects, the problem with me is not how many ideas I’ll have but how many I’ll bring to their end. The most important maybe to me would be beginning the publication of my twenty years of photographic work, from which I have shown a part on the internet since 2004, but never in an exhaustive way that makes it logical for people to get into what I was really saying through these works. I feel I am now in a position to supervise the editing and publishing of my work and hope I’ll be able to do it in the best way. Wish me luck.
The coffee is cold now. I should probably end this for today. I wish I could promise I will be here tomorrow, but the corridors twist and turn, and I never know how long it will take to return. Still, if you don’t see me, know I am just somewhere else in the labyrinth, searching for that next door. I will always come back, as soon as I can.
For now, I am here. And I have written. That is enough.
Your friend,
Alain.
All the images illustrating this text were generated via Artificial Intelligence with Midjourney 6.1, using a function that allows me to take my own archives, my ongoing work, and my photographic material as an aesthetic model.
You don’t need AI to create your beautiful work, trust me, you don’t. Keep going! Best wishes from Denmark.