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Benjamin Seror is a French artist and novelist who writes in front of an audience while performing.

Many artists write novels, many novelists consider writing as art. And each of them has its own way of dealing with the process of writing itself. Thomas Wolfe was so tall that he was using the top of his refrigerator as a table. John Cheever wrote some of his stories wearing underwear. Flannery O’Connor was writing facing the back of cloth dresser. And French artist Benjamin Seror has been writing his novel Mime Radio, as he calls it “in public”, which means a use of public events as a possible writing technique.

The story appeared in orally written occasional chapters that have been presented as a series of improvised performances in different venues (such as Witte de With in Rotterdam or LACE in Los Angeles) and being recorded, then transcribed and edited are waiting to be publish in a form of a book. It’s allegedly last, twelfth stage took place on 26th of June 2014 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and was preceded by two other performances (of chapter X and XI) at Kunstverein Amsterdam.

For one evening the Stedelijk’s Teijin Auditorium transformed into a vision of a fictitious bar Tiki Coco – a place in Los Angeles where gather the protagonists of Seror’s story: Angie, Bernhard, Benjamin, David and Marsyas. However, the atmosphere of the place was evidently more official than befits a local bar. Tables were covered with white cloth, wine was served during the event, dim light. Everything to celebrate “The Very Ambitious Final Chapter”.

Although personally I am not entirely convinced if this glamour fit the intimacy of Seror’s performance. One thing is certain, it made him even more nervous than usual and it needs to be add here that Benjamin, as he says, reaches the numbing level of adrenalin easily. On the other hand Seror did this his asset by trying to overcome the stress in a very charming and funny way and thereby gaining some time to calm down and winning the sympathy of the audience. And that was even more important as the novel had been written addressed directly to particular public of the evening.

Inspired by magical realism, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Roberto Bolano’s prose, Mime Radio is a staged novel that while extending of its story it studies how the memory act, evolves and migrates to become eventually fiction. Accompanied from time to time by live music in a spirit of New Order (as Benjamin Seror is also a musician) could be placed somewhere between radio play and monodrama.

Seror, playing with imagination, made people conscious where they were in the story but he was not trying to make them to be a part of it or forced to visualize things he was talking about. The audience was a reader whose only control of time had been distorted. One couldn’t any more steer the time of turning pages.

The narrative of Mime Radio seemed to be pretty developed and expanded, however it was the language that was the main protagonist in this story. It had a power to transform the space into book which pages were unfolded into time. Written word became spoken, and the speech – a tool for triggering fancy. The phantoms of literature appeared in dialogue with living artists with whom Seror is befriended.
In these realms the events organized at Tiki Coco around “Challanging Reality Open Mic”, during which the people are invited to introduce techniques or ideas that could extent or shake the reality, presented by Seror as a part of the plot, became reality itself. Fictional and the real emerged as parallel presents. “In ancient times one could be killed by fiction”, said one of the last sentences of the “Mime Radio”.

Books are records of events that haven’t happened yet, claimed Blanchot. Seror’s journey with a novel is not entirely completed yet although he managed to leave particles of his story in our heads. I am wondering if the printed version would be necessarily then…

Benjamin Seror: Mime Radio, The Very Ambitious Final Chapter, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, June 26, 2014
Benjamin Seror’s “Mime Radio”: Live Audiobook at Stedelijk Museum