Chicanes

Clara Schulmann has been working as a contemporary art critic for over fifteen years. Her writing tells of meetings, exchanges and collaborations with artists. She has taught art theory in a number of universities, including the Paris Beaux-arts. She also holds a doctorate in film studies for her thesis Les Chercheurs d'or (The Gold Diggers). Her first book Films d'artistes, Histoires de l'art, was published in 2014. Chicanes is her first book to be published in English.

'This is a book to treasure and love.' - Deborah Levy; 'In this beautiful and original book, Clara Schulmann reflects on the voices of women. She has assembled a dazzling 'cacophony', varying in rhythm, rapidity, hesitation and flow, from a wide range of fascinating and unexpected sources. Chicanes captures the sounds of women's emotions; the perfectly expressed, the overflow of excess and the lapse into silence. Schulmann's own voice is a vivid presence, inspiring readers, as they discover the words of other women who enliven her pages, to summon up their own treasured voices.' - Laura Mulvey; 'This essay addresses the matters of affect and unease, inviting reflection on the voice as a tool for the emancipation of the body. Through Clara Schulmann's sensibility, the words of women who speak up start disrupting the tedium of routine and wreak havoc.' - Critique d'art; '[Zizanies] reads like a thriller (...) an idiosyncratic collage, born of the critical examination of the things the author both reads and hears. In just over 200 pages, Schulmann spans a vast imaginary community; bringing together innumerable feminist figures - from the well-known to the unrecorded, to the unexpected. (...) Situating the act of expression is at the centre of Schulmann's project, convinced as she is of the need to include the colours of emotion, words' occasional fragility and awkwardness, and the constant gentle curiosity that motivate her research in the articulation of her thoughts and ideas. The aim is to free herself from the constraints of academic writing and to find a freer hybrid form, while still preserving the richness and precision of her references.' - The Art Newspaper; 'A veritable mille-feuille of moods, allusions and digressions' - Switch; 'Writing gives [Schulmann] the chance to reflect on the voice's physical vibration, in order to discuss its fragility, emotion, inflections, or its hesitations. On a more fundamental level, the modularity of the voice is understood here as the sign or the symptom of women's condition, a sign whose existence, for a long time, was intentionally ignored. Over the course of the book, Chicanes, conceived as a series of fragments, depicts an emotional and intellectual landscape shaped by feminism while allowing the author's own personal journey to show through.' - Issue; 'Written in the first person, we find [in Chicanes], through a series of fragments, a polyphony of personal situations narrated by voices 'thinking out loud'. These fragments are mingled with other texts and podcasts, mapping out a cartography of thinkers who play out, through the prism of intimacy, the 'affective turn' of the social sciences and academic writing in gender studies. As they move away from a linear narrative of technique and knowledge, they leave behind the clear language of rationality experienced in full light and, in its wake, something else is heard like a voice in the night, full of silences, ramblings, hesitations and stutterings.' - Zerodeux /02 magazine