A crow landed in front of you, in the field.
It didn’t look in good shape.

You even thought it might be dying.

For a moment, the crow was all that mattered.

You, watching it die,
and the crow in its last throes, dying unceremoniously,

without flapping its wings, its eyes already glazed over.

A few days later, back home on the polar circle,
you get a message from your mother saying she’d found it,
out in the pouring rain, lying near the cherry tree.

© Antoine Jaccoud - Anne Golaz

Un corbeau s’est posé devant toi, dans le pré.

Il a l’air mal en point.

Tu penses même qu’il va peut-être crever.

Pendant un moment, il n’y a plus que ce corbeau qui compte.

Toi qui le regarde crever.
Et lui qui agonise sans cérémonie, sans battre des ailes, les yeux déjà vides.

Quelques jours plus tard, revenue chez toi tout en haut sur le cercle polaire, 
tu recevras ce message de ta mère qui te dira qu’elle l’a retrouvé près du cerisier, 
sous une pluie battante. 

© Antoine Jaccoud - Anne Golaz

Corbeau was made over a long period of time – but the story remained incomplete, with an ending deliberately open.

Finir comme prévu (To end as expected) is the continuity of this work and more precisely an epilogue. Just like the main body of work published in 2017, it is a complex construction made of diverse visual materials and texts resulting of the collaboration with the author and screenwriter Antoine Jaccoud. This development took two directions; a video piece (preview bellow) and the experimental unbound book following multiple layers of story telling and challenging the narrative further.

The video piece, built in 2 parts (preview part 1 bellow) was made as a continuity to the book Corbeau published by MACK in 2017 which contains 3 chapters ( I Le travail, II The Nebula, III The other side). The film adds new perception of the same story world by the use of new texts, moving images, voices and music. The “epilogue book” – Finir comme prévu, comes from the film while bringing the next chapters (IV The trap (la trappe), V The dream (Le rêve). 

This collaboration was made possible thanks to the talent and enthusiasm of:
Antoine Jaccoud: texts and advices on narrative construction
Laetitia Striffling: video editing
Sara Oswald: music
Kerrith McKenzie: translations

Corbeau is the story of an end. The end of a way of farming life, the end of a shared complicity between siblings and the twilight of a man's life. 

Together, these pieces are the exploration of a deep story world, they are intertwined languages within the same narrative. 

Corbeau - Finir comme prévu:
C'est l'histoire d'une fin. La fin d'un domaine, la fin d'un temps, d'abord celui d'une société paysanne. Puis celui de l'enfance et d'une complicité entre frère et soeur. C'est aussi le crépuscule d'une vie d'homme. Cet ouvrage est le second volume d'un diptyque intitulé Corbeau dont la première partie fut publié par les éditons MACK en septembre 2017. Finir comme prévu, sous une forme narrative plus expérimentale, esquisse l'épilogue d'une histoire qui se déploie sur 13 années.