Illustratrice, conteuse, chanteuse...Gisèle s'inspire de la nature

Giselle is wandering, but if you whisper a few words to the Lutin-responder's ear, he will soon be able to repeat them. See you soon! Sometimes it bothers me a bit that people say, ah Giselle, the little fairy, the little fairy, etc. Well, I prefer to say that with the witch, in the end, but... A fairy is something that has no age, it's something that comes from childhood and that remains. It's more of a state of mind, it's rather a way of taking life in a spiegel way, and then without taking too much chou. I like to go to the harvest of ideas in nature. Nature has a boundless imagination, much bigger than mine, which will always surprise me. Even if you already know a lot about nature, there is always a form, a color, an association of things that makes you say, but it's not possible, how could she have invented this great thing? Whether it's plants, animals, or matter, they are alive, because they speak, they move, they are changing, they have characters, they are really strong personalities. And then I try to enter into dialogue with them, or at least listen to them. The stories that I illustrate, it's true that they often have a fairly direct relationship with nature. It's true that you can see things in nature, in a form of leaf, or in a passing beast, it tells you something. In the drawing, there is the magical side, which means that you can just twist the nose of reality to tell what it told me when I saw this thing. It's true that I was born in a family, well, in families, because there is the family of mom and the family of dad, who are storytellers, in their own way. And then we saw lichen, some kind of moss like that, a little grayish, which drags, which gets carried away by the wind, and which remains hooked to a tree. Grandpa used to tell us that it was baby dwarf's beard. And then, already he said, it was baby dwarf's beard, he had the tone with it. So he's not going to tell us the whole story of a dwarf who walks around and hooks his beard in the trunk and all that, he's just going to tell us that it's baby dwarf's beard. It's the beginning of a great story that we could make ourselves, in our heads. So I think that they were all storytellers. Run, run, run! Poo-poo! Hi! Hi, my kids! Oh, well, how are you? That's it! Oh, that's the position. Why don't you come here? Oh, you have beautiful eyes. Living at La Coudre is having the chance to be able to live in the heart of the seasons, of the passing time. I know which way the wind is coming from, so how I should make my fire. The forest, it comes, it comes scratching at the door of the house. You can hear the rooster crowing, there's the owl telling stories. Now, it's the season when she's giving her all to make the winter come. And so, it speeds up my life. La Coudre is also a character. It's a bit like a great lady who has put her luggage here in the middle of the countryside. She's a lady with a bit of... who has a bit of manners. La Coudre is also a bit of a joker. She has a lot of little riddles that we can't necessarily solve. She has little traps everywhere. I don't know if I chose this place of life or if it's the place that chose me. It's a bit like cats. I think cats, we don't choose them, it's them who choose us. It's a place that needed a bit of training. It was an uninhabited place for a long time. So, at first, it was a bit like the Belle aux Bois-dormants. It was getting into the house, getting rid of the old drawers that were still full of things from the former inhabitants of these places. It's my workplace, yes. It's true that it also changes the relationship that we can have with the place where we live. It's true that every time I draw, or at least it seems to me most of the time, I tell myself a story in the drawing. But maybe it's because it's a job that takes time for me. So, I have time to tell these stories to myself. Do you consider yourself an artist? No, artists have big things to say. I don't have big things to say. Artists have a... Well, in my vision of an artist, I don't know, it's maybe a bit caricature, but an artist goes to galleries and has a whole artistic approach that means something. It's tripe or I don't know what. And then... I actually like to stay in the light things. So it seems to me that I'm too light to be an artist. It's true that there are days when suddenly no one comes to work around the fields, the cultures that are there. It happened to me to spend three, four days without really seeing someone coming here. Suddenly I say to myself, you talked horse, you talked cat, you talked dog. Now I talk a little pig. But it would be time to go down to talk to someone. There is something creative in the garden, precisely. You mix flowers with vegetables, you put water with mud, you put plants that respond. There is one that says that and the other will respond to this. This summer there were nine macao caterpillars that were tidying up and it was great. Stories are always everywhere, that's for sure. Here is someone, a pretty green-green, and by the way, this one is very strange. We wonder where he comes from, where he will spend the winter. I don't like to call myself a nature activist. It sounds hard, it sounds like you have to do this, you have to do that. I prefer a more sensitive approach. Here, leave as few traces as possible. But how well they are raised! What I like is that afterwards they are all clean, and then I am the one who takes care of them. Here are the buttocks. Giselle is our neighbor, she is like our third daughter. We are very, very friends with her. We completely forgot that she was a French-Bourgeois. She came from the Côte d'Azur. She is at home. Sometimes I tend to go into the air. I fly away in my little stories, my little whispers. And then he has a side that brings me back to the ground in the right sense of the word. Is Giselle an ecologist for you? Oh, I would say she is all that is most normal. Ecologist, no. I don't think so. She is not very ecologist. She is normal. Let's say we don't always have the same point of view. Maybe we don't always have the same point of view on wild animals. When we talk about fleas, it's a subject that we don't go any further. Last autumn, I had nine fleas under my nest. I like fleas, but I thought we had too many. Giselle is happy to see a lot of fleas. That's all. Yes, I feel like an aerial crane. But an aerial crane that looks all around. If you come back, it's true that there is something that vibrates in the shoes that doesn't necessarily vibrate elsewhere, even if it's very beautiful. It will always vibrate somewhere, but here, I don't know if it's something that is reassuring. It's at home. It inspires me a lot because in the aerial crane, I find two facets that comfort me a lot. On the one hand, it's a sweetness and on the other hand, it's a little more wild. Even if it's true that I don't know much about cranes. But at the same time, what I like about the aerial crane and what makes me feel good about it is that it is very mysterious and that it always has surprises to make me discover. Fortunately, I don't know everything about the aerial crane. I think I will know it better for the rest of my life. Here, in this valley, and everywhere in the aerial crane, there used to be red bonnets. Red bonnets are a kind of red cap with, as its name suggests, a red bonnet. And then there were servants, peasants and carpenters. Red bonnets are great workers, but they are also little jokers. They like to make little jokes from time to time, but always nice enough. But since they are a gang, like a gang of friends, they always like to make a few little jokes. If we forget to say thank you when they have done all their work during the day, if we forget to be grateful for their work, they can be very, very, very mean. If the little dwarf helps you peel your vegetables, in the evening, you will give him, they love it, they are gourmands, a little bit of double cream, a little bit of cooked wine so that he can draw and if we have a little cake left, we put an apple with it. Then the little dwarf, but he is happy, the red bonnet, and so he comes to give a hand the next day with an impossible potato. What is this? I got a little beast out, you see it there? You have to try not to scratch them in the panther. Hop! So I did a training at a school in Fribourg. Then I did a training to be a drawing teacher. I feel relatively close to the world of children because I think I left a large part of the kids at the bottom of me already. We are at the dimension of the mountains here. It's curious, a child, it's wonderful, and then it's this ability to marvel and then to find things a little bit In 2004, the Gruyère editions offered me to illustrate the re-edition of the book Les légendes de la Gruyère. So I was quite scared at first to start this work. When I was offered it, it was a great joy, and then I said to myself, oh, it's great! And then especially, I immediately thought of the red bonnet and then these little dwarfs coming out of my childhood. I saw that there were precisely all these stories of devils, stories with a lot of morality, with the weight of religion, which was something very heavy. And then I said to myself, wow, you're moving on a field that is still delicate. And then, well, you have to let go of all that and say, well, I'm going to show my vision and make a footnote to all the weight of the past and then tell where it works for me, all these stories. You understand right away why there is a story that revolves around this lake. Because this lake is like a big hole like that, very deep. And then, in addition, we were told the story right away. I think one of the first times I went, I was told the story of the spectra that emerged, that were vomited by this lake I'm going to see what's going on around here. Oh, not much. Heart affairs between Saint Theodule and Saint Christine of Lévis. I'm going to count the bells too. That's exactly what I meant. You come to see your friends, your great friends. Giselle, in the image of her illustrations, of her drawings, of her voice, it's a little dolphin, it's a bird, it's angel wings, it's a phenomenon, it's a fairy. She knows how to express the things we would like to be able to say or express with a pen, with a few notes of music. She is brave. She is healthy. She has a beautiful philosophy. And she is faithful. But above all, she is my niece. No, no, we're going to go under the immaculate. The most impressive. The first carillon was put by the great uncle Tobias too. The bells are a little bit the ancestral figures for me. Absolutely, yes. They have the head, they have the brain, they have the dress, they have the leg. Absolutely. And there is a lot of sensuality too in the bell. When you take them, we come to hide to tell our little secrets. The bells have a soul. They have been baptized, they have a name. They are kind of our little Tibetan prayer flags. What is inscribed on them, the message they carry, the moment they ring, in the order they ring, they tell something. They spread their message in the air to the mountains. And then there is everything we can put there without formulating. They are just vibrant. In Gruyères, I have several little corners that I like to find on occasion. And then the Pardieu, it's a corner a little bit withdrawn, a little bit secret. It's an old cart, something quite refined, an elegance. It is elegant, the Pardieu. And then at the same time nature has reclaimed its rights. And there is the moss that has returned on the cells that have been destroyed. There are the swallows that pass through the corridors. And then suddenly you have to lower your head. The roofs are inhabited by little bat wings. And I like this mix. So this mix there maybe suits me. Or at least that's where maybe I recognize myself. I make a living by drawing, but also by singing. It's a little bit like the cicada and the ant. There is on one side the music with the group Norn, and then on the other side the life of the workshop. What unites the Norn? I think it's our narrow attraction for a kind of mystery, a certain mystique, I would say, but in the beautiful sense of the word. Everything that is mysterious and that we cannot explain black on white, it attracts us. And of course we find it very, very strong in nature. We find it very strong in places like the Pardieu. This relationship to the past-present and all these questions that have no answer. In the Norn, we embody three characters. Giselle embodies the present. There is the past, the future and the present. We sing in an invented language. She puts images on it. And so it's extremely useful because afterwards, when we are in the show, when we build the show, she brings a lot of ideas about how to embody these musics. I don't see a big difference between Giselle on stage and Giselle in real life. She is that. But we say lute, and I think it's broader than that. She's a woman too. And she's a very beautiful woman. She could come out of a chain, appear like that. I can see her aging in there too, becoming a kind of witch, like that, with a lot of little tricks that she can give to the people around her who have forgotten what it's like to live near trees.