Poetry
Voice and images
In her books, Gauthier places a particular importance on the place of the voice that allows her to maintain a tension between a poetry without a subject and an embodied poetry. In kaspar de pierre, "any individuality effaces itself, writing I gives way to the blank page. The author decenters kaspar's voice bringing it closer to our own and within our hearing in order to create a space where living communally, living together, are part of the very act of speaking ..." (T. U. Comte, La Nouvelle Quinzaine littéraire). [10]
Her work on the poetic voice is accompanied by a renewal of poetic imagery whereby the poetic images can be considered a kind of emergence, a meeting point between sensation and idea, or as Johan Faerber terms it, "the image-idea" [11] in Diakritik speaking of je neige (entre les mots de villon). [2] The question of the status of poetic imagery is also anchored in a reconsideration and a renewal of poetic ekphrasis . [12]
Gauthier's work is marked by a polyphonic lyricism; her poetry is neither strictly objective nor entirely focused on the self, but is marked by a fragmented incarnation, a multi-layered chorus [13] that marks a space of vigilance. If her work is lyric, it's a transubjective lyric, [11] allowing for the creation of a considered gap between voices in je neige (entre les mots de villon) when they intertwine "three voices, maybe four, that of François Villon, his others". [2]
Prose and poetry
In Le Monde Didier Cahen characterizes Gauthier's work as that of "materialized sound" [14] [15] where "different tempos fuse together in the same beat, electrifying the senses". [11]
In general, Gauthier's texts alternate between passages in prose, prose-poetry and verse. The poems emerge as a kind of blue note at moments when the text breathes and its structure emerges, becoming fluid or on the contrary suspending its role in response to an external threat.
Gauthier's writing is marked by its sense of movement, its materiality and its kinetic force, the language, "deaf, pulses, surges, laughs, illuminates, revolts, and finally exists on its own and for its own sake". [16]
Poetry, archives, and the tabloid journalism
In Gauthier's poetic work, she constantly questions external systematic attacks from a late capitalist society on the private life of the individual and on their personal expression, their burial under an accumulation of objects, a complacence with violence, a taste for sensationalism, what she calls the "tabloidization" [17] of language or its exoticism. [18]
Gauthier frequently draws on archives for inspiration in her work. For example, La cité dolente, [19] is based on real events while kaspar de pierre was adapted from the biography of the famous orphan Kaspar Hauser. Her collection je neige (entre les mots de villon) [2] establishes a dialogue between the personal biography of François Villon and his work, while maintaining critical distance with her material.
These books adopt a complex position in relation to the archive, [10] where the archives are at once "suspected of a desire for reanimation. As if they were themselves an affirmation ... while the poem only allows for suggestion." [11] These narratives are grounded in archival documents; however, Gauthier positions the poetic narrative slightly out of bounds of historical documentation "in order to allow the document to show itself and what surges beneath it, what is alive and bridles next to the established record". [11]
Transdisciplinary work
Her poetic work on poetic voice and polyphony continues with collaborations with contemporary artists such as Fabien Lévy, Núria Giménez-Comas, and Xu Yi. Gauthier is constantly seeking new poetic forms that cross media where the poet can be considered a co-author, Nun hab' ich nichts mehr, [22] for example is a piece for soprano coloratura, ensemble and synthesizer with music by Fabien Lévy. Back into Nothingness [23] is an mainly spoken monodrama for actress-soprano, choir and electronics with music by Núria Giménez-Comas. Les métamorphoses du serpent blanc [24] is a lyric tale in six songs with music by Xu Yi. In 2018 she collaborated with Pedro Garcia-Velasquez and Augustin Mueller based on fragments of her texts and her recorded voice in order to create a 3D sound installation Etudes de théâtre acoustique, [25] which was presented in the ZKM in Karlsruhe.
In 2022, still in collaboration with Pedro García-Velásquez and Augustin Muller, she conceived Remember the future, a poetic and sound installation that proposes an "acoustic siesta" and for which she wrote the texts and recorded her voice. Created on 24 March 2022 at Cesaré-cncm, this installation offers a journey through lost places and intimate spaces in an attempt to bring out images buried in the absence of real image.
