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<h1 class="centre">Dana Thomas: How are you going to die?</h>

<h1 class="centre">Michèle Lamy: Violently.</h>

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<h1 class="left">DT: Where would you like to be buried?</h>

<h1 class="left">ML: In the desert. I’ve already thought about this. I did a project with [multi-media artist] Frederik Heyman—my virtual tomb. It was set in the desert. We did a 3D scan of me, in Sheffield, with 280 Canon cameras. And set me in the desert.</h>

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<h1 class="right">DT: You are dressed in a Rick Owens earth-tone draped tunic, your hair combed back slickly. You’re standing on the tomb, with a stone greyhound at your feet, and an old, twisted, leafless tree behind you, painted ghostly white. In your narration of the video piece, called Virtual Embalming, you quoted the Lebanese-American poet and visual artist Etel Adnan, who died in Paris at 96, in 2021.</h>

<h1 class="right">ML: Yes. “The voyage is infinite. The voyager is not.” That, in fact, is the story of my death. Humanity is nomadic. It keeps going.</h>

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<h1 class="centre">Lamy’s hair is crow-black, enviably thick, and fabulously long. Her fingers are enrobed in big silver rings, her skin inked here and there, her teeth capped in gold. She is dressed in simple, sensual black — second-skin pants, softly draping tunic top, boots.</h>

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<h1 class="left">DT: Do you see yourself being reincarnated?</h>

<h1 class="left">ML: I never got into that, because I’m not religious. But I do believe that genes have memory. And that's the same thing.</h>

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<h1 class="centre">DT: Are you not religious because of how you were raised? You were raised in the Jura, in the mountains of Eastern France.</h>

<h1 class="centre">ML: The region of Savoie, where my family is from, is very Catholic. But my grandparents were not. They were very republican–not the American way, but for the republic.</h>

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<h1 class="right">DT: Anti-monarch, pro-democracy. And your parents?</h>

<h1 class="right">ML: My parents were in the Resistance [during World War II], and that's how they met. My mother was bringing food to the people in the woods. My father was a mountain climber, and he helped people get across the border, to Switzerland.</h>

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<h1 class="centre">DT: So they were heroes.</h>

<h1 class="centre">ML: When we think of war, we think of heroes. To think of death is too horrible. All those young people sent to war for something so fucked up? They are heroes.</h>

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<h1 class="right">DT: And you?</h>

<h1 class="right">ML: I was raised in a nun-boarding school. Not a convent. A boarding school with nuns.</h>

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<h1 class="left">DT: You went to prayer every morning?</h>

<h1 class="left">ML: There was church almost every morning.</h>

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<h1 class="centre">DT: You learned about the saints?</h>

<h1 class="centre">ML: I learned the history, and the Bible. But I was forbidden to go to catechism class. When I was 12 or so, they said I couldn't be there any more because that was going to make my little girlfriend doubt the existence of God.</h>

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<h1 class="left">DT: Did they teach you about heaven and hell, the nuns? Did it scare you, hell?</h>

<h1 class="left">ML: Oh never! I never believed anything.</h>

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<h1 class="centre">Parisian women, as a rule, don’t laugh; it’s not seen as chic, or ladylike, or something. Michèle Lamy laughs at that, and at every restriction society tries to put on her. A roaring, raspy laugh. She is charming, sharp-witted, hilarious, a true intellectual. She embraces life — and death —robustly, with an eye for creating something wildly, shockingly new, but always, always rooted in beauty.</h>

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<h1 class="right">DT: When you said that genes have memory, what did you mean?</h>

<h1 class="right">ML: The first time I went to Tunisia, I felt as if I was home, like I had been there before. On my father's side of the family, everybody was sort of darker than me. My father looked like Gandhi. People would talk to us in English because they thought we were Indian. When I go to India, people there think I am Indian too. In the Emirates, all the girls want to speak to me. Anywhere south of Marseille, I pass.</h>

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<h1 class="centre">DT: You spend a lot of time in Venice—you and Rick have a home on the Lido. Do you go to the island cemetery there, San Michele?</h>

<h1 class="centre">ML: Of course. You know, my parents got arrested fucking in San Michele.</h>

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<h1 class="right">DT: Do you think of dying?</h>

<h1 class="right">ML: Every morning when I wake up, whether I’m 20, 40, or now almost 80, it doesn't make a difference. I feel this same energy. I’m lucky. I’ve never had an experience of being super sick and thinking I am going to die. So, every day, no matter my age, I think: “Let's go forward. Let's imagine something.”</h>

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<h1 class="centre">DT: How do you see your place in society? In the history of civilization?</h>

<h1 class="centre">ML: I feel a little bit like a little grain of sand. At the same time, whatever we do matters—or could matter.</h>

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<h1 class="left">DT: How would you like to be remembered?</h>

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<h1 class="left">ML: What would be written on my tomb? Or on Instagram?</h>

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<h1 class="left">It's like electroshock, that question.</h>

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<h1 class="centre">I’d like to answer it later.</h>

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<h1 class="right">Now, I’m going to go smoke a cigarette.</h>

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