Volte Face

In art as in life, the 'volte face', when someone turns around to confront someone else, is a moment of truth and a gesture of recognition that implies the acknowledgment of the other and the assertion of the self.

Volte Face by Dominique Hecq engages in a philosophical and aesthetic conversation with other arts. It comprises ekphrastic prose poems operating within a surrealist intertextual register. The poems are enmeshed in the discourses of writing at large, painting, music, dance, sculpture and architecture. They are arranged so as to create a rhythm with varying tonalities following the thematic thread of 'making'.

The volte face is an event of making sense of the senseless. It functions as a punctuation mark. It creates a moment of tension and high expectation that generates an affect. Volte Face creates this kind of effect by using 'extraliterary' connotations sourced from other disciplines, including psychoanalysis and philosophy to enhance the ludic dimension of the text, enacting a collage of kinetic and kaleidoscopic gestures.