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The installation was designed and created as part of the exhibition “Troubles dans le français écrit” (Troubles in Written French), presented at the University of Lausanne.
The title of the exhibition deliberately echoes that of Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble. In this seminal text, the American philosopher analyzes the mechanisms that disrupt gender categories such as “masculine” and ‘feminine’ and shows that these categories are not “natural”: they are, in her words, the effects of a certain formation of power.
Beyond offering descriptions of various contemporary “distortions” in written French, the exhibition simultaneously questions representations of these distortions and asks how, in a globalized world where citizens’ political and ethical concerns about equality, diversity, and inclusion resonate, the teaching of French can integrate “disobedient” written forms to meet the need for expression and visibility of all “voices.”

With this in mind, the installation’s wall inscription—whose light attracts and flatters the eye, and whose bright color evokes candy—seeks to question the visitor: faced with a word whose meaning remains unknown, the mind hesitates: what can we cling to in order to make sense of this alignment of letters that seems to resist the usual criteria of reading?