Don’t take care of yourself. Lettres à Christine. 1974 - 1983

1979. Lizzy Mercier Descloux was 23 and had just finished recording her first album, Press Color, which would go down in post-punk history. She had published a collection of poems and collages (Desiderata), and was performing, drawing and taking photographs, freely following the programme she had devised in 1976: "CREATING A BIG MOVEMENT OF FREAKING ENERGY in New York".

From the United States, she wrote constantly to her friend Christine in Paris. The letters she sent her carried the sounds of the city, sketching the silhouettes of Patti Smith and Richard Hell, the nights of CBGB, the days devoted to music, literature and cinema - everything that nourished her desire to create in the midst of debacle. She invokes Lautréamont and Isadora Duncan, applies Rimbaud's fulgurating style as far as possible, and invents a fractured language made up of verbal inventions, changes of register, shortcuts, surrealist collisions and ellipses.

Transcribed in their entirety, these 78 letters written between 1974 and 1983 are accompanied by collages, photographs and drawings that visually extend Lizzy Mercier Descloux's musical outbursts. They form a singular, teeming diary, in which sensitive seizures take precedence over meaning, carried along by the hasty rhythm of an impatient heart.