Interviews (volume I, 1995-2006).

For all these reasons, Gilles Barbier, from the outset, favored epistolary interviews, giving himself the luxury of the reflective time of writing. The first, in 1995, was with Jean-Yves Jouannais. The Internet was still in its infancy, and letters were still sent by post, making time-consuming correspondence the norm. He continued to favor this form of communication, which would become more fluid with the arrival of e-mail. He conducted dozens of interviews, with critics and curators of course, but also with philosophers, artists and writers. He accumulated pages and pages of texts, reflections, digressions and theoretical gropings. He would later integrate the flow of these exchanges into the body of his work. The handwritten record of these interviews in a notebook was to be the medium for this circulation, embodying, along with the systematic practice of portraiture, the references that paraded through his progress.