Biography of Julien Antoine Bovier, writer and poet
Emerging in 1989, Julien Antoine Bovier lives in Valais, where he practices writing, philosophy, and analog photography. Baroque music sung at the end of his adolescence, this vocal rendering of both secular and sacred texts, led him to the stage during varied university studies.
His first collections, Pour l’oubli and Croquis (Éditions L’Âge d’Homme), weave moist, fragmented, and lightened bodies. Later, in 2022, he initiated an intimate exploration of the connections between smell and poetry with the lecture “Le Parfum des mots – l’écriture de la fumée.”
Currently, he is finalizing Disposé[e] du corps, a poetic research capturing the ways bodies are affected by events (2023 Focus Grant). Sub Rosa Amplexus, a carte blanche for the first issue of the Maison Suisse de la Poésie, will be published in 2025.
I am not a being; my flavors dwell in others, moving from smiles to distances.
A poem-chair
“I adopted the chair, this familiar object, a few decades ago, at a time when I wanted to create art on a human scale in public spaces, while everywhere else people opted for the monumental: it is an object shaped like the body and serves the body. It is difficult to feel exclusive ownership of an object so universally shareable. It is mine when I occupy it, but if I leave it, someone else can claim it as their chair.” Michel Goulet, artist-sculptor
The project Prendre position
Prendre position is a sculpture-installation project of 47 chair-poems to mark the 100th anniversary of the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris. They were installed in a flowered meadow created especially for the occasion by the campus estate service.
This artistic installation was conceived by the Quebecois artist-sculptor Michel Goulet, in collaboration with François Massut, founding director of the collective Poésie is not dead.
Each house on the campus is represented by a chair, thanks to a donation from the Maison des étudiants canadiens and the support of the Labrenne group. Each of the 47 chairs is a unique work.
History and architecture of the house
Classified as a historical monument in 1986, the Fondation suisse is one of the most remarkable achievements of the interwar period. It is the first modern building constructed at the Cité Internationale. The exceptional value of this architectural work is also linked to its pioneering furniture design.
