emilie payeur {----- interdisciplinary artist 

The Protocols

2026 (ongoing...)

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​The Protocols are designed to direct attention rather than convey a message. They offer conditions that favor subtle shifts in perception, altering our relationship to time, space, the body, and interpretation. The Protocols do not propose a destination, but another way of finding one’s bearings. Inspired in particular by Donald W. Winnicott’s notion of transitional space, the Protocols seek to open a potential space in which the inner world and the outer world can momentarily enter into dialogue. They provide a framework open enough to allow associations, memories, images, sensations, or unexpected forms to emerge, without trying to direct or interpret them. The Protocols maintain an ambiguous relationship with the score. They borrow from the score its capacity to orient an experience, but refuse to fix its unfolding. They offer cues, symbols, words, graphic structures, or brief impulses that act as primers. These elements are not meant to determine an outcome, but to discreetly orient attention and imagination, so that each experience can emerge from the encounter between the device, the environment, and the person who activates it. They may be activated through music, dance, performance, writing, drawing, walking, or any other practice. They may also be experienced as a purely inner experience, without producing a work in the traditional sense. Lacking a fixed duration or a single order, they will be conceived as open systems whose function is less to guide a journey than to make the emergence of an experience possible.

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The idea behind The Protocols was developed during the publication residency Céline Bureau x Pièce Jointe in Montréal during the Summer of 2026. This is an ongoing project.