We share the same sky. Scattered above our heads are stars, stories, bits of life beginning. Around us, multiple landscapes, but always the same elements: earth, water, fire and air that captivate our imagination, fascinating formless, changing matter. To this fascination is added a certain state of contemplation, which most certainly inspires the work of Silvia Camporesi an artist of Italian origin and which makes up, in conjunction with a partiality for dreaming, her distinctive mark.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Describing herself as a storyteller, Silvia Camporesi creates images that find their origin in excerpts of stories drawn from myths, literature, philosophy, religion and science. Exploring her surroundings through a photographic approach, the artist makes unexpected realities appear. Presented in unaccustomed form, what earlier seemed to be factual becomes an invitation to reflect and consider what makes up the theatre of our everyday life with new meanings and justifications. During her creative residency at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, it was Quebec City’s turn to be transformed through Silvia Camporesi’s vision, which skilfully infused a portion of fiction into natural and artificial phenomena encountered during her stay. Within a collection of compiled still and moving images, the artist tells of imagined landscapes bathed in fluid light.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

As you enter into the gallery, the immaculate white of the exhibition space draws you towards the back wall where a pictorial composition made up of thirty-six photographs gradually changes from black to white, from appearance to disappearance. Primarily an effect of weightlessness: In the darkness of still water, the fish inhabit the sky. In fact, the remarkable organization of photographic images “places the bird in deep water and the fish suspended in the air,”¹ recalling the optical illusion of a starry sky reflecting on the surface of an aqueous expanse. This organisation of photographs confuses our understanding of their contents. The depths of the aquatic world and the vast celestial expanse become the same space; at times dark and heavy like thick velvet and at other times, as diaphanous as a veil. In this installation, we become strangers in our own landscape, where the immensely large and the infinitely small keep company. Reduced to a similar format, they give the impression of a romantic study of life with formal associations as unusual as the appearance of a sea animal in a fireworks display. Then finally, snapshots of earth, dunes, a forest, a meadow, and among these photographs, the woolly mantle of powerful waves appear one after another. At first glance, you might think of a mosaic free from traces of humanity. This is not the case however. Based on natural elements, a tarpaulin covering mounds of what we guess to be spreading salt has the effect of an imposter and suggests that we are in well-known territory. Scanning this meticulous assemblage of photographs from left to right, we make out through an impenetrable fog, an emblematic Quebec City factory and finally the Canadian flag. Although the grouping right away stimulates an aesthetic response, one discovers that it reveals a silent and eminently dreamlike narrative framework. Silvia Camporesi juxtaposes urban elements and natural matter with disconcerting ease, at the same time amusing herself as she gives us the impression of an uninhabited world, a New World, all while tracing signs of human presence there. The artist succeeds in presenting visual and discursive contrasts that leads us to dissolve into a heterogeneous, fragmented temporality, as if she is preparing us for her next work.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Full of white light, the gallery presenting the photographic installation is adjacent to a closed space, where one is immersed in darkness. Like “a new artificial star participating in both day and night,”² Silvia Camporesi’s video work opens this pixelated material with a luminous choreography of particles created by the slowed-down explosion of fireworks. In front of this spectacle that the artist has decomposed and recomposed, we have the impression of being present at the formation of the universe, an imagined, mystical Big Bang. These intermittent irruptions of light that emerge from chaos could, by disappearing in the smoky darkness, leave us with the idea of dispersion: it is different however. Their slow and concentric movement instead tends to simulate something like the process of becoming, like the organisation of life. Sounds accompanying this seem to come from far away; pulsations and voices, on a background of solemn vibrations, make the viewer a stroller in the cosmos, even positioning him or her in utero in this world in gestation. Time is suspended until these artificial stars are completely absorbed in the night. A muted sound follows this vision, like the first breath of the earth, and the whiteness of drizzle dances around behind a boulder. This second part of the video seems to be a sequel to the first in an antinomical relationship. Water is the main subject of the sequence. Waves break with force on rocky slopes. Through the artist’s work on distortion, the strength of this element is brought to light. The reversions of movements carried out with videos give the impression of breathing, as if the earth inhales the current, filling its lungs. The sound of reverberation juxtaposed with the noise of the falls gives free rein to this reverie fuelled by impossible landscapes, increasing tenfold. In this play of deconstruction, subtle pictorial research appears in which the compositions and textures give way to seduction. Large stretches of troubled water cross the smooth surface of a rock face following those that are eddying, to form a dense bubbling through the dynamic effect of flowing water. At other moments, the water separates into two and is reflected on a vertical axis, as if to show us its face in perfect symmetry. This strategy of assembled images is found in a previous corpus of the artist titled Le Ragioni del Peso (2009), in which a landfill site makes the photographic subject sway between aesthetic transfiguration and documentary veracity. The images produced recall those of a Rorschach test and take on a related role: that of a projection space in which the viewer elucidates an abstraction. Through simple image manipulations, Silvia Camporesi challenges the apparent immutability of the elements and makes reality take a sudden turn towards the imagination.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

We share the same sky certainly, but its poetry is not the same for everyone. In the creative work produced during her stay at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, Silvia Camporesi appropriated fragments of landscape and elements encountered during almost tourist-like outings to create a sublime allegory that transcends the vernacular from a distance. When in contact with the works that make up the project À perte de vue, time becomes reversible, out of sync. We are invited to look beyond the apparent banality of things: her work has the effect of making a discovery, of revealing a secret. Working from known elements, the artist accentuates her works with the distortions and discontinuities that form reality and presents an open narrative. This mysterious rewriting of the world, carried out during her residency in Quebec City, falls within the corpus in which water is an integral part of the work. In fact, since 2004, Silvia Camporesi has been working with this element: for the series Ofelia, she personified the famous heroine who, languishing for Hamlet’s love, found death in a river. This striking image will be cited many times in the artist’s various works, notably in her very recent series La Terza Venezia (2011) produced at a residency in Venice. Presenting enigmatic and surreal images of flooded monuments, of hazy landscapes and typically Venetian objects installed in anonymous places throughout the famous city on the water, Silvia Camporesi is thoughtfully cultivating ambiguity. Sometimes heavy and stifling, other times light and airy, even clear, water appears as an all powerful element in the ensemble of her work. “The true eye of the earth is water. It is the gaze of the earth,”³ as Paul Claudel affirms, and Silvia Camporesi probes it to her very depths, looking it straight in the eye.

1. Bachelard, Gaston. 2011, Water and Dreams an Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture editions. p. 64 an excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe’s Landor’s Cottage.
2. Mèredieu, Florence de. 2008, Histoire matérielle et immatérielle de l’art contemporain et actuel. Paris: Larousse editions. p. 85.
3. Claudel, Paul. 1929, The Black Bird in the Rising Sun. Paris, Gallimard editions. p. 229.
Anonyme

Invited to LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, Pablo Rasgado chose not simply to perform in the gallery but to turn first to the historical riches that have accumulated within these same walls. Thus, he explored the files in the documentation centre to discover LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s history: all that has happened in this huge white gallery that at first glance reveals nothing of previous encounters with so many artists. However, Rasgado finds traces and brings them to light straight from the exhibition space, through its very materiality.

Beneath the white paint, he discovers layer after layer of mural paintings created by various artists and then covered over. In the centre of the gallery, where a partition sometimes was installed, a structure stands like a skeleton of a wall in which the proportions abide not by the constraints of construction but as a measure of time when the wall was present there. Finally, a portion of wall set up at the back of the space is arranged as a resonance chamber that vibrates with the sound and musical interventions presented in performance.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Rasgado gives his installation the evocative title of Phantoms. They are, in brief, LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s phantoms that he makes resurface and emerge in an ethereal, ghostly form. The appearance of the distant is close at hand, the past in the present. In this, one finds what Walter Benjamin called the “aura.” Works that can be reproduced are stripped down: their link to their distinctive history is no longer essential when they are freed from their origin in order to get closer to the viewer (whether one uses this copy rather than another does not change the experience that one has of a film, for example). The aura, ultimately linked to the cultural function of art in times gone by, belongs to a unique work that, through its presence, carries an historical weight within it, and everything that makes up this object. There is no equivalent in any reproduction, however much it conforms to the original. The in-situ work acquires such uniqueness by taking root in the place in which it is formed. Here, Rasgado has made visible the aura of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE itself, both as a building and as an institution.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

It is indeed the institution’s uniqueness as a physical space, as the place of an artistic event that the artist presents. LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE (The White Room) as the name says so well is a pristine space made available for artistic interventions. Always freshly painted white to receive new works, new encounters, new events; it is not however really pristine. The gallery has an extensive history and this can be covered up physically with layers of paint and by restructuring the space and so on. But only by forgetting can this history be eliminated.

A gallery that exhibits in-situ works must also be concerned with the ephemeral. The works appear here but then nothing is left in the end… except that when a work disappears in order to make room for another, the memory of it remains and there are traces that vouch for it. By summoning up the gallery’s history through the materiality of the space, the artist reveals the hidden past. He extracts the walls from the passivity in which he finds them, transforming them to make them speak (this is what the performance on “prepared wall” produces in a very concrete way, because it is the wall that produces its own resonances).

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The past is also present but in a different form: its presence passes through memory. We could recall Saint Augustin, who in his Confessions questions the nature of time in order to find not three phases of time there but three kinds of present or presence. The past is thus the present time in memory – which differs from the present attention corresponding to what we call “the present”, and that of the waiting that corresponds to the future. This memory is fragile and to persist, it must be attached to more stable supports such as the narratives that one passes on of events, the literal documents, photographs and videos, monuments and so on: thus, the files conserved at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE. These represent the continuity of the place, acting as a counterweight to the ephemeral space that is the exhibition gallery itself.

These are two aspects of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE that Rasgado brought into dialogue, using the building’s materiality, the gallery walls, to reveal the institution’s duration. Here are the phantoms that he summons. In his installations, the past is present in a ghostly way: it appears, so to speak, in the presence of another kind than that of the present. This sends us back to the origin of the word “phantom”, derived from the Greek phantasma, which refers to an apparition, an image or an illusion, in this sense, the apparition has an unreal, even an immaterial nature. This is to say that by making LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s phantoms appear, the artist is not content to reveal the works and structures intact in their original form. They appear both again and in a new form, which shows the previous presence of these works as well as the passage of time that separates us from them. Today’s imaginary phantom also has this aspect: the presence of another kind, immateriality, light, reflection… More than unreal, it is of another reality, more diffuse and unstable as well. Nevertheless, the phantom moves in reality, and its presence intervenes here only by the fact of being perceived. Like the past that, in the vaporous form of memory, moves among us without always being noticed and emerges in broad daylight when it is attached to an appropriate support.

The sanded wall area –– fresco that, like an engraving, emerges from what the artist removes and not what he adds –– reveals under layers of recent paint the mural works produced earlier by Robbin Deyo (2009), Brad Buckley (2005) and the participants of Residence Story (2005) to name a few. The result is a visually poetic surface in which the fragile forms and colours of these meticulously recovered works are brought to light and come together. The image evokes a spectacular scene from Fellini’s film Roma, relating the archaeological discoveries that took place when the Rome subway was being constructed. Here the summoned group of archaeologists discover an underground hall decorated with wonderfully preserved ancient frescos but almost as soon as it is discovered, it started to crumble through contact with the air entering into the hall. As if the past is only preserved if kept from sight, as if the trace always threatens to evaporate. A terrible dilemma: either let the works keep their secret and preserve them by giving up the idea of seeing them, or else look at them on the condition of fully accepting their ephemeral nature. Orphic dilemma in short, Orpheus is allowed to bring back his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld on the condition of not looking at her before getting out of there, or he will loose her for good. Orpheus succumbed to the temptation and gave Eurydice a loving but fatal look. What can be said? Without a doubt, one cannot regain what is lost: that is to say, one cannot revive the past without altering it. And precisely, Rasgado makes the works from the past resurface in a gesture that uncovers them while avoiding their destruction, in a movement that reveals the past and the works’ fragility at the same time.

The wall structure evokes similar themes in other ways: one does not know when looking at it whether it is an unfinished construction or one in ruins. It is surely both, a construction in which the elements belong to right away to the past, a collection of bits of history, this time in symbolic form. It stands as a complex monument, offered in memory of earlier appearances of the place, to a wall that at times, is erected precisely on this spot and then again, is often not there. Once more, the past is expressed in its fragility through memory and its trace.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

This fragility, moreover, is fully achieved when Rasgado’s installations in turn disappear. Was his memory work not right away doomed to vanish by its own destiny? Let us consider instead that it becomes part of the history of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE and the signs of its ephemeral appearance are placed in the archives, as is the nature of all the works presented in situ. Rasgado’s work becomes part of the spirit of LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE in the awareness of its own temporality. But this will resonate only in those who accept the responsibility that memory involves. Here is one of the strong impressions that the installation leaves us with: the past is a delicate matter. In order not to be mutilated, perverted or lost, it requires serious study, patient and meticulous handling, and an alert and committed engagement. Rasgado succeeded in communicating this not only conceptually but also aesthetically. His work on time goes as far as making feelings resonate and through this, incites viewers think about the fragility of their existence. This is one of the work’s distinct qualities. On departing LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE after this visit, the installation is left behind but phantoms remain to haunt one.

The road-movie is an opportunity to travel the highways and learn about an area. Since the novels of Jack Kerouac and others, the representation of a protagonist’s inner thoughts and initiatory progression also are expressed outwardly and figuratively through the landscape bordering traffic routes. When Takao Minami appropriates this powerful form of American narrative fiction, he adds a subjective truth to the representation that of the active viewer, who, having the last word, ultimately must draw from the fiction of others, as a basically impersonal starter, thus it becomes possible to show his story.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Going from the impersonal to the personal would be the concern of Takao Minami’s recent work. Following his residency at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, in the winter of 2012, the Paris-based Japanese artist presented a process of accelerating and decelerating the projection of a film emblematic of this road-movie genre, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, made in 1969. Using GPS digital technology, the images of the artist’s numerous journeys taken on foot, by bus and taxi during the creation period of his project were juxtaposed on the film during its projection, reproducing the speed of his recent urban movements. In other words, the superposition of the artist’s travels gradually takes over the film contents. Doing this, he also reroutes the methods of accelerating and decelerating, using the simple base function of a DVD player and he has done the same with the GPS, the usefulness of which now serves the new purpose of representing personal, private journeys.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The matter of a journey connotes the artist’s residency, in which the creative space consists of his involvement with the place to which he is adapting, by controlling the specificities and understanding its signs. In this sense, it is logical that Minami, like composers, also has only the music itself as a subject, because the rhythm of the journey is where he situates his main contribution. The appropriation of a space, taking the place of signature is a problem, it takes the artist back to his intrinsic confinement and it is true that there is a form of humour in the implicit critique of this other film that Takao Minami reread: an historical road-movie this time in which the subject heralds all the road-movies of cinema on the North American continent, that is to say Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America. In its reworked version and always involving the combination of altered speed and rhythm, Ridley Scott’s bombastic representation for the 500^th anniversary commemorations of this fantastic expedition shows the derisory aspect of the appropriation process. The artist, by denying the pretence of his stratagem develops a form of liberating commentary, allowing him to negotiate with tactfully tinged irony the issues and objectives that he set himself for his residency.

But again, Takao Minami makes an effort to develop a narrative about the self under the influence of advanced media platforms. One knows to what extent the cinema can affirm the expression of the road for itself, in the cinema that was concerned with going back to the road-movie genre around the years 2000 (David Lynch, Vincent Gallo). Identity blurring is recognized here, the representation of the self surreptitiously interferes in the representation of the road, until it merges the state of the mind and mood of the viewer and the artist. This confusion of points of view gives us the opportunity to check what is hidden behind the logic of linking images in movement, in which the road-movie would be one of the purest expressions.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Why would the projection of the road concern us in any way? What has it to do with US? The abstraction of movement, for a connection to the self, shows how much Takao Minami’s work takes note of the specificities of the digital era. David Lynch has demonstrated already in his Inland Empire how much this interrelation between the viewer and individuality was also a concern of the interface, that is to say the context of actual digital expression. This being so, it is now possible to be inside and outside at the same time.

In other words, a psychic leap is put in place with the representation in art since the web, concerning a sublime non-association between the so-called “passivity” associated with the viewer who at any moment becomes “reactive.” Questioning traditional forms of expression in that way, the passing of time is no longer inevitable and bound to happen but gives the opportunity of a takeover in which the world of representations (even the most famous, the most worshipped) is only the other side of the same image of the self.

In the spring of 2012, LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE invited Marc Dulude to spend six weeks at a creative residency in Quebec City. In order to recreate his usual work environment, he converted the large gallery on rue Christophe-Colomb into an ephemeral studio: wood and rope structures, tables covered with diverse materials, temporary pedestals, machines and so on. In a laboratory typical of his artistic practice, objects create movement, are shaped and made into images, are transformed by natural phenomena like flowing liquid or oxidation, are manipulated by supporting structures that give them unexpected appearances or are captured as they explode, like the “water balloons” that burst day after day in front of a camera as an experimental process. For Marc Dulude, the art object seems the fruit of diligent research that is both technical and meaningful in which manipulation and thought are articulated.

Marc Dulude used his residency for experimentation. We took advantage of his time here to talk to him about this and other things, such as art and life, his views on creative production and the present-day reality of the artist. The following are extracts from a rich and fascinating interview that tell us much about making visual art today.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Is the way you’ve been working for the last few weeks your customary modus operandi…

… I look for a guideline, I find a thread and I also work in my parallel universe, on my computer. Usually, I don’t take my computer to the studio, unless I need it to make calculations. When I take it to the studio, at a certain point I stop working, it’s as if the computer takes over. And then, you no longer feel like working because working is also a physical activity, it’s a rhythm, if you loose this rhythm… then forget it.

I’ve noticed that art practices have tended to become modified because we’re all in front of a screen, and I think for some people the change in artistic practice is to give up the studio, to use it as a production space instead. The studio space now takes place within the screen, in a virtual sphere.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Artistic practice, is it a craft, is it a profession?

It’s a vocation. It’s life. Someone told me: “you’re like a fish in the water here.” Like a fish in the water because for me I have the impression that there’s nothing new in what I’m doing here, in the sense of being in residence, working day-to-day, because it’s something I’ve done everyday for 15 years.

What do you mean by vocation?

A little like a religion.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

You don’t choose, some how? And you believe in it?

Oh, you know, we artists live a bipolar life. In fact, we aren’t bipolar but have a bipolar life. It’s fantastic good fortune or really slack times. The artists that are functioning best are probably those who have a head on their shoulders. We’re very down to earth and at the same time, we’re able to put things in perspective, in any case, those who succeed in functioning, in breaking through after so many years.

The practice is this: it’s something that you do everyday. This’s why it’s a vocation. You spend three days in the studio but you’re not paid for this. You do this because you believe in it, but you believe in what? You believe in: “OK, I’m going to the studio.” It’s not about winning a medal: it’s not sports! It’s narcissistic: it’s believing in an idea that YOU have.

Apart from the studio work, I imagine that you also carry out continual documentation work, in notebooks and so on?

Yes, I’m always walking around with my camera. In fact, the idea is to look for what you don’t see. I walk a lot in Montreal. When you always take the same route, the challenge is to look constantly where you’ve never looked before. It’s like a contemplative moment: in fact, it’s like seeking an awakening. I don’t know if you seek an awakening or if it comes to you… but I’m on the alert for it.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Do you think this is the specific work of an artist in society: to show things, make them stand out?

…showing what’s not seen, yes, I think so. It’s said that an artist should say something, whether there’s a social or political commitment. I think that the artist’s commitment can take another form, this form here. It’s like using binoculars in fact. We’re the ones who highlight in fluorescent to say: look, there’s something happening, did you know that you could do this and this?

Have you found an audience for what you do: are you satisfied with your work’s reception?

The issue of the audience… I don’t make a work to please someone, but I’m concerned with the other in what I do. I don’t try to make my art accessible to everyone, but the codes are there, if people make a little effort, they will be able to understand something, but in a world in which they are not accustomed! I think this is the magic of the visual arts.

This makes me think of an anecdote. Visual art is a universal language: you can speak another language, come from another culture, and you’re going to understand. When I went to Niamey in Africa,¹ I showed my sculpture with the moving water. The evening of the opening, there were four Tuareg people, ladies who appeared older than they were. I was standing beside my work and I was speaking, and it was clear that they knew that I had made the work. They came over to see me, pointing a finger at me saying: you made this? They were speaking to me in a language that I didn’t understand and the four of them began dancing around me… I said to myself, OK, here I’ve done something that has surpassed the boundaries of my own space. As my teacher in the master’s program told me: you know that your work functions when another culture tells you “I understand what you’re doing.” It’s abstract, this…! It isn’t a landscape! It’s a table, it’s water that vibrates… there’s all this imagination here that’s going on in the head!

I’ve always liked playing with the boundaries of abstraction, of being able to look for this limit in which I don’t represent the object: what does this do? I prefer to play with peoples’ imaginations. But today, this can take forms other than a patch of colour, or abstraction, I think that it’s here, I say it and I think it, it’s something that has not yet been really explored: this type of relationship, the association between the object and the mental image…

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

It’s true, I think it’s something in particular that one could explore, perhaps it’s even research specific to our time, in art, because we’ve broken down the boundaries of figuration and of pure abstraction.

Yes. What do you do to be able to… not go against it, but to play with this kind of association here? In your head, when you do whatever, what is it that makes it a piece that works or doesn’t work? This is the boundary. Right now, I’m working on sheets of paper on the floor. Honestly, in my head it doesn’t work, it doesn’t click: it’s not there yet. It’s things like this. Do you see that white piece there, it’s a gesture that I made quickly and for me, there’s something there…

…yes, there’s something there, I agree, it caught my attention right away, I feel like touching it! There’s a potential connection that takes place, in any case…
For you, you’re making sculpture?

I’m making objects. Objects because the object can be an installation as well. I consider that photography is also an object: it’s a photograph! In fact, it’s all new what I call this, because I find it’s shorter than to say I make sculpture, installations, photographs and sometimes video. I find that saying I’m making objects covers all this. In fact, it names what I do a bit more than just saying I make sculpture.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

You could say that there are some who make objects, others who make images and still others who carry out actions.

That’s right, but I don’t work with images, I’m not a specialist in images.

You work with volume and mass.

That’s right, even when I do photography, even in this case here.

It’s still a matter of volume…

Yes, it’s still the object. I work with the idea of recycling. I recycle the object: I take it and play with it. I even go to places where artists generally don’t go, which is to the craft.

And you accept this completely in your work as an artist, the matter of know-how?

The matter of know-how is significant because it’s part of learning about the object. When I talk about the material, it’s a way of understanding physically what it is, what’s there.

I find that your work is closely related to this. It’s the property of the material itself that is taken in another direction or diverted by a small intervention. Looking at your Website, I thought to myself, it’s really these properties that are exploited in your work. And in looking for the significance…

Yes, yes, the significance is there, in fact it’s a matter of heightening it, it’s always this that I like, it’s the poetic gesture in the object: “Ah! There’s something beautiful in it.”
Yesterday, when I presented my Website, there were people who told me: “it’s fascinating Marc, you go in all directions, the core is there but it’s fragmented.”

Do you have this impression about your work?

No, it’s this… In all directions, probably is more in the way I deal with things, but the heart of the work is always there. For me, the lineage… there are many artists whose style we’ll recognize in ten years, recognize that it’s their work. With my work, this won’t necessarily be the case. I find this interesting: life, it’s never the same story!

1. Marc Dulude represented Quebec at the Jeux de la Francophonie Games in 2005 and won the silver medal for sculpture. The installation was presented at Verticale in 2007 and at Circa in 2008, having the title Œuvre sur toile.