At 623 A4 pages, the Research Notes book contains a small cross section – just under 17 percent – of the notes from the Research Notes Room, which consists of 3,676 A4 pages in total, with 786 on the walls and 2,890 in folders on the tables. The series began during my DAAD scholarship in Berlin in 2007–08, when I decided to devote the whole year to researching Duchamp, with the intention of writing a text on Fountain (1917). It was during this intense period that I began to see certain patterns recurring in his work, the presence of French idiomatic expressions dissimulated behind familiar images such as the Chocolate Grinder (1913) and the Water Mill (1913–15) first and foremost. I noticed these only because at the time I was researching French idiomatic expressions for a word vitrine of my own (which remains unfinished) although I began to question my own sanity because no one else apart from me had seen ‘them’, these abstract entities. Idioms don’t walk the street, do they? Happily, by now I can truly say that they are there, and that they are part of how Duchamp structured his work. And this is why, to end the story, my film Fountain (2009), which features real fountains in Rome, no longer speaks about Duchamp’s Fountain, but rather about his Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage… (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas…) and about the nine idiomatic expressions hidden behind certain images in this work.