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Sculptor of Sound

In the spring of 2013, LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE invited So Kanno for a residency. A native of Tokyo, the artist is accustomed to producing “eye-catching” works that represent his boisterous, animated city. Confronted with a quiet place, and with the perspective of research more than production, the Japanese artist chose to be concerned with the minuscule, paying attention to the almost imperceptible noise of his daily life. In the exhibition Objects of Sound, he invited us to give our full attention to sound as a phenomenon in four different installation works. In this respect, the exhibition title is enigmatic: is it the object that produces sound or is it sound that is considered the object?

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

During his residency, So Kanno endeavoured to explore the sounds that emanate from the most ordinary small objects. The components, the majority being of metal––a stainless steel bowl, an iron, a guitar string, ball bearings––were used to construct his installations. From these found objects, he discovered corresponding sounds: “I got the idea when my sink got blocked and the dishes floated in my washbasin. The sound was marvellous,” the artist explained. With his knowledge of robotics, So Kanno attempted to reproduce the everyday sounds mechanically, the drops of falling water, the hum of the refrigerator, and so on. The unobtrusive events of reality thus became the material of his works.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The formal simplicity of the installations is in keeping with the commonplace nature of the components, and thus makes the works’ visual appearance fade in front of the sound aspect. Being hardly audible, the sounds require all the viewer’s attention. The effectiveness of this minimalist aesthetics lets one appreciate the poetry of the mechanics. In turn, the installations emit either a hum, in which the viewer can hear the variations, or a regular pulsation. The sounds follow a recursive and organized structure, completely controlled by a kinetic system. The movements that provoke them however are almost imperceptible: the guitar string hardly vibrates, the ball bearings and the drops of water that fall on the ground are not seen, while the sound in the stainless steel bowl is produced by its magnetic field. So Kanno therefore has looked for the minimum threshold for perceiving the slightest movement. Only the sound indicates an impulse.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The sounds thus created invite the viewer to a sensory experience. Whether this involves a continuous or repetitive form, the passing of time seems to stop. The high or low tonality, the duration and the resonance in the space transform and activate the spatial-temporal experience. Exploring the various physical qualities of the noise heard then leads to an architectural sound construction. The sound is integrated into a broader definition of sculpture: as sculptural material, it is an immaterial object that can be shaped, manipulated and organized in time and space.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

However, this structuring of sound as material does not lead to the elaboration of a musical discourse. If there is a sound narrative, it appears only through reference to the objects, to the visual elements in the installation. This is why So Kanno has chosen not to use an electroacoustic system, but rather to present objects that are visually capable of backing up what one is hearing. The sounds are looked at and not only listened to. The steam that comes from each drop that falls and the progressive oxidation of the steel plate emphasizes the importance given to the visual aspect. This steam is associated with that of the iron, an everyday object integrated into the installation moreover.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

In renouncing the microphone, the sound is created in the place itself and in the present moment. The works are completely independent, created on the basis of a simple mechanic borrowed from that of the loudspeaker. In fact, the installations work with magnets that serve, for example, to make the guitar string vibrate or to operate a metal rod in the magnetic field of the bowl. Resonating easily due to the acoustics of the space, each sound carries a poetic charge: they evoke the sacred sound of the gong and the pulsations of nature. The works in Objects of Sound thus operate according to an enclosed, independent mechanism, as artificial creatures would. By multiplying the sensorial aspect, they enable one to live and hear the reality in what is fundamentally experimental. So Kanno builds a bridge between the orderly motifs of our everyday machines and the mysterious energies of the universe.

Box de somba: Time, Space and the Body Under Projectors

Entering into the gallery, in the middle of the space, the viewer is overcome by a strange sensation of vertigo: a loss of balance and control. But the vertigo does not come from height: instead, the impression is that the body is thwarted, notions of space and time shattering the visitor’s habitual world. This is because in the work Box de sombra, everything is to be redefined. Even the gallery space, so familiar, does not manage to give the minimum of stability. Free from its function as an exhibition space, it becomes for a moment or infinity, the work itself.

crédit photo: Étienne Baillargeon

To create Box de sombra, the Mexican artist Miguel Monroy placed four projectors on the ground. On each of the walls, he projected the image of this same wall, on which one can see the artist and LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE staff move about in an endless kind of round. Each one in turn enters the exhibition space, as if we were at the stage of mounting the work. The image of their body is lost for a few seconds, the time it takes to cross the gallery for instance, and then it reappears on a wall, in order to install one of the projectors. While the viewer’s gaze is still fixed on the moving image, attempting to grasp the duplication of the space, another member of the staff makes his or her entry. Then another and thus it continues. Caught in the middle of this choreography, where the visitor seems to be the only one not knowing where to stand, wanting to catch the eye of those who continue to come and go. Because even if this person is completely aware that it is only a play of projections, he or she cannot help but be constantly troubled by this place in which fiction and reality intersect. The markers are constantly shifting, leaving one in doubt about the boundaries of the work.

crédit photo: Miguel Monroy

In a complex process of mise en abyme, usually described as the work within the work, Monroy leads the viewer to question the structure of his work. The history of art has many celebrated works that use this procedure, such as Jan Van Eyck’s Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife (1434) in which a mirror is place in the background, allowing us to see the painter at work. This view of the work––that prompts “a return to the signifier,”¹ according to the terms Christine Dubois uses in her study of mise en abyme–is recognized for its introspective power, causing the viewer to become aware and question the making of the work itself.

But what is the actualization of this process? Following the preoccupations of contemporary art today, it seems that mise en abyme tends to be concerned with the implications of exhibiting works and the viewer’s immersive experience.

On this subject, it is interesting to make a parallel between Box de sombra and Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs in which the latter shows photographs of viewers looking at paintings.² In front of these works that repeat the action of the moment, the visitor is directly concerned, almost forced to question his or her behaviour and situation in the exhibition space. If the same kind of reflection is produced in Box de sombra, it is however, with a somewhat different intensity because the viewer is directly part of the action. Like it or not, the viewer is at the centre of Monroy’s work. What is more, one could say that he or she is literally in the spotlight. The beams of light from the projectors create a shadow of his or her body and show it on the wall, propelling it into this space where two distinct realities interlock. While becoming familiar with the work, visitors can play with their shadows, changing the scale as they move around in the gallery, accessing the more playful aspect of the work, which is a recurring feature in this artist’s practice.

Having a strong multidisciplinary approach, Monroy initially worked with the idea of the ready-made, diverting the meaning of everyday objects and changing the conditions of their presentation. In his works, the artist at times pushes the play until it reaches the level of the absurd, such as Walking Machine (2008) in which he experimented with the possibility of riding a scooter on a moving walkway. Box de sombra is situated in continuity with this practice, even though the artist is exploring new territory and new dimensions, no longer questioning the meaning of objects but rather that of the gallery. Inspired by the residency project at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, which offered him the chance to work in the gallery for several months, Monroy decided to broaden the in situ experience, concentrating on the specificities of the artist-run centre placed at his disposal, that is to say, its equipment, space and staff. In fact, the great strength of his mise en abyme is found in this closeness of the work to real elements, creating an actual blurring between the exhibition space and the work, just like between the time of its installation and that of its presentation.

crédit photo: Miguel Monroy

But beyond the confusion that surrounds the parameters of place and time, the vertigo felt in front of Box de sombra is constructed through the repetition of actions, making the work reel toward the exhilaration of infinity. In fact, the rhythm of the projection loop produces the impression of suspended time, as if the work is never finished being installed. However, as Monroy’s sensitivity suggests to us, this kind of system often has imperfections. The artist made a brilliant demonstration when he changed some pesos into dollars then did the operation in reverse, again and again. Following the principle of equivalence of worth, the transactions should have continued indefinitely but very soon, nothing was left. What about Box de sombra then? The repetition of this same gesture––that of installing the work––does this not reveal the actual nature of the exhibited work? If the mise en abyme makes us see the genesis of the work, it also reminds us that this in situ work, woven into the actual place where it is exhibited, cannot be distances forever from the moment when it will be dismantled. There seems to be something predetermined for this work, but also, perhaps, for viewers that wander among the four walls of the gallery.

Box de sombra. Boxe de l’ombre³. Shadowboxing. Like boxers who train alone, imagining the reaction of their opponent with their own shadow, the visitor to Monroy’s work is confronted with a kind of void. Despite all the people, the shadows and projections that come and go, solitude seems to reign in the bare gallery space. In questioning this place of encounter between visitors and works, is Monroy making reference to a battle in which the outcome is already determined?

Dubois, Christine. 2006, «L’image «abymée»». in Images Re-vues, No. 2, Document 8, p. 2. Website [online]: http://imagesrevues.revues.org/304 (consulted on November 28, 2012).
Schmickl, Silke. 2005, Les Museum Photographs de Thomas Struth: Une mise en abyme. Paris: Maison des sicences de l’homme editions, 2005. 77 p.
The expression “boxe de l’ombre” is a reference to shadowboxing, a training exercise used in combat sports.

Deslocamento

On the occasion of her residency at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, the Brazilian artist Karina Montenegro exhibited the results of her two months of in situ work. This project was made possible through an exchange program between the Museum of Image and Sound of São Paulo in Brazil and LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, Avatar and La Bande Video in Quebec City. These few weeks spent faraway from her country and her familiar reference points enabled the artist to leave a trace of this in her artwork. In the installation titled Deslocamento – O Jardim de minha casa, translated literally as “Displacement – The Garden at My House,” the artist proposes a poetic view of her move to an unknown place, inspired by her personal and professional experience.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

This work fits in perfectly with the artist’s way of working, as she is interested in the links between art and technology and new medias. This artist, who is both a programmer and researcher in art, design and audiovisual and digital medias, uses these complementary competences, stemming from her studies in science and in arts, to show the intersection of art and the digital.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Her interest in the influence of new technologies on our perception of time and space is moreover very current. Considering the constant progress of our means of communication, Karina Montenegro is asking questions about the vast possibilities of these contemporary communication techniques. According to the artist, contemporary society is deeply affected by the various means of communication and the constantly evolving technologies, which influence the way we perceive the world. She believes that the development of most communication techniques come from a basic human need to preserve history and memory.

She maintains that technology opens new perspectives and gives us numerous possibilities concerning time and space. Today, as a result of technology, one can be “elsewhere” without having to move and can have access to information from other times and from everywhere in the world with just one click.

The artist’s gaze is also critical about technological progress, because, according to her, this has made communication much more complex today. The speed with which the technologies are developing makes them difficult for the general public to assimilate. ¹

The Work
Right in the centre of the gallery, a shimmering frame is suspended and spontaneously attracts the visitor’s attention. Put into motion by a timer, it turns in the opposite direction to the hands of a clock, carrying out one movement per second. It takes 360 seconds for it to make a complete tour of the space. This minimalist installation is perfectly integrated into this part of the main gallery (see photograph).

The presence of the frame with a completely empty space surrounding it is a little intimidating at first. Visitors need to take a moment to become familiar with the work and to find their way in this strange unoccupied, empty space.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The immense geometric forms are not much easier to understand. They circulate slowly, moving alternately on the four gallery walls and the floor. They are generated by the reflection of the lighting elements on the shimmering frame. These clear trapezoidal forms turn at a frequency two times faster than the frame, which makes the visitors feel destabilized. The numerous shadows of the frame are fixed however, but turn at the same rhythm as the frame. The reflections and the shadows of the frame confront each other in the space, creating confusion and an interesting trompe l’œil effect.

A few gray lines placed on the walls create a geometric motif, breaking the monotony that monochrome walls usually have. For the artist, these geometric forms refer symbolically to her distant house and garden, her displacement.

The empty frame in the work is proposed as an abstraction of the window of her house in São Paulo. These two elements go beyond the simple representation of a home. They refer more broadly to the multiple ways of perceiving time and space. The work is not located in a precise time or space. Instead it evokes an abstract, dislocated time, a different time, another possibility of time.

The artist borrows the notion of heterotopia from philosopher Michel Foucault to present us with incompatible spaces and places that are juxtaposed.² Michel Foucault defines heterotopias as a physical localisation of utopia. In other words, they are actual spaces where the imagination exists.³ These are places of alter-reality, that are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental. These places are entirely different from all the places that they reflect. Foucault uses the idea of the mirror as a metaphor for the duality and contradiction, the existence and non-reality of utopian projects. A mirror is a metaphor for utopia, because the image that you see there is not real, but is also a heterotopia because it is a real object that projects the manner in which we are connected to our own image.

“The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a kind of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there.” ⁴

It is for these reasons that the frame, the work’s central component, is made of mirrors. For the artist, the shimmering frame represents the way that she perceives the world with its shadows and reflections. It is a metaphor of a flat world, in the sense that there is always the possibility of seeing beyond what one perceives. The mirror is linked to the representation of ourselves, the illusion of who we are.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

For Karina Montenegro, these utopias of time and space exist and are found within us. It is sufficient to look at things differently, to change one’s viewpoint to find them. The artist took advantage of her trip to Quebec and her stay away from her country of origin to change her point of view and her rhythm of life and to get closer to, as she calls it, the suspended time that she was seeking.

Deslocamento enables visitors to have both a spatial and visual experience, all while being a response to the artist’s existential questions. The work makes visitors confront their perception and their relationship with the space, both that which surrounds them and that which they inhabit. These two spaces, internal and external, real and imaginary, mental and physical, overlap each other.

Deslocamento – O Jardim de minha casa is the first stage of a project that will be continued in Brazil. The artist is thinking about recreating the installation with the same structure in São Paulo. The work then will become the abstract representation of Quebec City in Brazil and symbolically complete the artist’s movement.

Information from the artist in conversation with the author, November 12, 2012.
Foucault, Michel. 1984, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” In Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, No. 5, p. 46-49. Website [online]: http://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heterotopia.en.html (consulted on November 2, 2012).
Ibid.
Ibid.

Life, it’s never the same story: an interview with Marc Dulude

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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!

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.

Takao Minami: The Immaterial Route/Road

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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.

Thoughts on Pablo Rasgado’s Phantoms

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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.

Looking Hard at Nature

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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.

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.
Mèredieu, Florence de. 2008, Histoire matérielle et immatérielle de l’art contemporain et actuel. Paris: Larousse editions. p. 85.
Claudel, Paul. 1929, The Black Bird in the Rising Sun. Paris, Gallimard editions. p. 229.

(Im)material Exchanges

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According to Peter Zumthor, the materiality of architectural space should be defined by the sum of the perceived space not the materials or objects in isolation. This also should exist in the collective effect of the visual and acoustic qualities of the built materials under certain conditions of situation and time.¹ Viewed in this way, the notion of materiality that plays a part in a given gallery space and that makes the visual and sound parameters interact is the occasion for revisiting Le long de la 20 en passant par la 15 an exhibition of Jonathan Villeneuve’s works presented at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE from March 17 to April 17, 2011. Although the artist’s two electromechanical installations are a physical construction of various material and technological components, they also propose the elaboration of a system of interaction and interrelation: the materials become the players in a network of exchange and dialogue among the works’ various parts, between the installations and the viewer’s experience. These interactive properties develop with the movement that animates the machines, creating vibrations and undulations: they provide the material with the potential for expression, a poetic dimension.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Through the various exchanges, a dialogue is carried out between materiality and immateriality. We understand immateriality here as the continuation of materiality, as Florence de Mèredieu states, citing Ezio Manzini, “The new matter from which to draw inspiration no longer has the physicality of tangible material; it is presented instead as a combination of possibilities and performances, as the possible that emerges from the producible in a technical system capable of carrying out still more subtle manipulations.”² Villeneuve’s installations propose a passage between these two states due to the notion of fragment and trace that they generate; and also, because immateriality is viewed as a material component of the works, which generates a sound environment.

Opening in the Materiality: Architecture as Fragment, Trace and Memory

Villeneuve’s works are structures in which the framework is exposed: the cogs that form its core are shown to the viewer and thus, the distinction between the inside and outside of the work is blurred. In other words, the frame that structures the installation becomes the work itself.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Villeneuve’s redefinition of the frame’s boundaries is revealed in Faire la vague (2009), one of the two structures in the exhibition that is both skeletal and colossal, constructed of solid material, in this case wood. This piece play on the boundaries of the support and act on the viewer’s perception, presenting a series of juxtaposed planks that move. Hence, the infrangible vision that this imposing wall could have generated is replaced with an image of instability, indeed material vulnerability, by cutting the material into beams that suggest a steady oscillation. Here, the architectural composition creates a fragility that is accentuated by this movement of the material. Both stable in its framework and instable in its movement, the work creates a paradox. The breaking up of this seemingly monumental structure displays, in fact, an animated materiality in which the whole gives way to fragmentation. The interstices make up the work: the openings, fractures or fissures form the core of the structure.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

This architecture that seems to deconstruct gives way at first to a visual opening, as part of the physical and then psychological space of the gallery, filtering into the mental representations of the viewers who can place themselves either in front of Faire la vague (2009), catching sight through its rifts of Mouvement de masse (2010), the second structure in the exhibition, or else to move inside this second installation composed of grasses so that one can discover the frame. One way or the other, the viewer has a simultaneous encounter with the two electromechanical displays that both carry out continual movement. While Faire la vague uses natural wood elements to distort the initial appearance, integrating them into an elaborate composition, Mouvement de masse artificially confines fragments from nature, regularly aligned plant stems and through a mechanical process simulates the wind’s movement. Plants and wood are in dialogue then to produce both the work and its structure. Following this idea of voluntarily showing the armature, the electromechanical installations present the raw materials transformed without ornaments or artifice. The use of this material within the gallery lets one see a sociological dimension in the works, demonstrating the submission of nature that is now manipulated, mechanised, even artificially reconstructed in the gallery space. It is controlled and given regular movement, as we have seen, but it is alienating as well, recalling manufactured or mechanized work.

Villeneuve’s structures evoke the urban and rural environment, presenting fragments of organic and utilitarian elements, as if they had become a trace of nature, an exterior place transposed into the limited space of the gallery. The exhibition title, Le long de la 20 en passant par la 15, indicates the artist’s wish of bringing the works together, recalling the various natural components that border highways. These works seem like evidence of a past linked to a personal or collective history. The reminiscence and memory of similar temporal and spatial moments are recreated then in the memory of the visitor who has had the experience and can imagine them again through this setting, this time in a fictional way, through the constructions that act as a deconstructed narrative display.

Acoustic (Im)materiality: Sound as Interactive Material

While the spatial configuration of the moving installations presents a critical dimension, the work takes all its meaning from the sound aspect the machines produce, which add to the spatio-temporal reality the viewer experiences. Villeneuve had already experimented with notions of light and sound in the electromechanical installation Trace (2007) in which the light source acted as an intrinsic element of the work, supported by a rhythmical sound frame. He expanded this sound dimension in Faire la vague, which gives the viewer more than just an auditory setting, adding the creaking noise of the cogs and the interstices that, as explained previously, participate in deconstructing and fragmenting the built structure. In fact the materials knock together and produce a regular rhythmical background sound. Mouvement de masse creates similar sounds that immerse the viewer and detach the work from any mimetic sound references to the initial grass environment, asserting more the mechanized transformation that has occurred.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The importance given to sound attests to its legitimacy as a material, as a “plastic ingredient,” and diverts any possibility of relegating it to an accompanying tool, subjected to visual constructions.³ The sound substance perceived as autonomous material, the result of the moving mobiles, enables both simultaneity and a succession of various acoustic elements that are organized or at least, are blended together. In this way, a temporal dimension is inserted within the installation work and is part of the work’s sound structure. From this perspective, “the sound is to time what movement is to space, a principle of organization and of disorganization,” according to Florence de Mèredieu.⁴

These sound environments that mechanical sounds produce are capable, here again, of activating the viewer’s mnemonic faculties, which may associate these noises with recognized sonorities and visual images. Combined with moving material that recalls urban or rural settings, the installations increase the dramatization and illustrate a more deconstructed narrative. The viewer’s phenomenological experience, in short, is that of an immersive environment that succeeds wholly by emphasizing the sound material that the mechanical installation produces, favouring continual movement over the motionless object.

Passages

Jonathan Villeneuve’s architectural installations create an “impression of immateriality” that the viewer experiences: viewed as a counterpoint to the physical elements, the underlying parameters such as time, sound and movement, when combined, seem to construct the very finality of this mobile spectacle.⁵ This vision can be supported by Bergson’s thesis according to which the formal composition constructed in its static state becomes passage. In other words, in the perception of reality, according to Bergson, the legitimacy of form is denied its actual immobility for mobility: “There is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition.”⁶ In this idea of instantaneity and mobility at the very core of exchanges, the boundaries between materiality and immateriality create ambiguity, they seem to become porous, indeed hybrids; the tangible and intangible elements merge to give the viewer’s experience its full potential.

Zumthor, Peter. 2006, “Atmospheres: Architectural Environments: Surrounding Objects” in Dagmar Reinhardt and Joanne Jakovitch, “Trivet Fields: The Materiality of Interaction in Architectural Space”, Leonardo, Vol. 42, No. 3, p. 217.
Manzini, Enzio. 1989, La Matière de l’invention. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou editions, p. 52 quoted in Mèredieu, Florence de. 2008, L’Histoire matérielle et immatérielle de l’art. Paris: Larousse editions, p. 483.
Mèredieu, Florence de. 2008, L’Histoire matérielle et immatérielle de l’art. Paris: Larousse editions, p. 548.
Ibid., p. 542.
Souriau explains that a material work may “try to give the impression of immateriality”. Souriau, Étienne. 1990, Vocabulaire d’esthétique. Paris: Presses Université de France, p. 910.
Bergson, Henri. 1929, L’Évolution créatrice. Paris: Alcan editions, p. 334.

The Test of Things

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What another has seen fit to throw away, you must examine, dissect, and bring back to life. A piece of string, a bottle cap, an undamaged board from a bashed-in crate––none of these things should be neglected.
– Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things¹

Object hunting: this is the task that awaits the Anna Blume character when she crosses the threshold In the Country of Last Things. As Paul Auster depicts it, objects occupy a central place in the world that is ending because they are very rare and consequently so precious that it becomes hazardous to throw anything away. Scavenging becomes a way of life and although Anna Blume could choose to keep the objects and pieces of things that she finds, she sells them instead to the city’s Resurrection Agents who convert them into new goods and sell them on the open market. If all kinds of things and all sorts of motives exists for collecting objects, if their gathering is at times carried out as a survival instinct or if it then becomes a form of expression, in any case, it indicates a state of being completely alert to the world just as it tells of a certain relationship to it.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

For Le poids des objets the project that Raphaëlle de Groot began in 2009, she gave herself the task of collecting objects that people no longer want and that are found at the back of drawers and at the bottom of cupboards for want of being disposed of. These objects then come from the private space and enter the world of the artist who makes a collection of them so that they can resurface in her work. Far from being a passive activity, the collection for Raphaëlle de Groot becomes a genuine performative act. This is because through her artistic practice, she “redefines” the accumulated objects and gives them a new context for existing. The collection becomes an entity in which things can happen, and is a place for actions and interactivity: ideas of the past, present and what is to come emerge freely through images and performances.

Her collection is made up of a group of objects all more unusual the one from the next, as much for their origin as their history: handles, cabinets, cookie jars, tea pots, straw baskets, storage bags, record player, telephone, wooden shoe, plastic flowers are now her property. Each of the specimens carries its past with it. In fact she collects what people give her and does not screen her collection because the beautiful and the ordinary – if no longer of use – find their way to the artist.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

But for Raphaëlle de Groot, thing are not “exempt from the task of being useful,” to repeat the words of Walter Benjamin² for whom the collection became a permanent fixture that accompanied him wherever he went.³ With an intention other than that sought by the philosopher, the artist also makes her collection occupy all kinds of places and spaces when she transports them on her journeys and to her residencies. Her collection is permanently moving and no place contains it nor retains it. She literally puts it on and wears it, her body becoming the support and the vehicle. It is enough to look at the photograph 1273 petites choses inutiles to see the extent of it: the artist’s face literally disappears under the mass of tied up objects. The collection becomes image, so to speak. Just like in the video Porter in which de Groot, dressed up in her objects, walks around in nature, stopping to eat and rest and then moving again, continuing on her way always all loaded up. The artist continues to put herself physically to the test with the accumulated material – that becomes a language – and she seems this time to want to experience the very notion of collection through her wanderings, revealing how much this becomes an extension of herself. One should always collection oneself Jean Baudrillard already affirmed in his seminal work.⁴ The collector then should be his own collection and should change with it. But the version that Raphaëlle de Groot proposes shows instead how the collection adapts to her practice and closely fits her wanderings throughout the world. Notably when she passes through security systems when she is travelling, checking in at an airport with a suitcase containing 70 objects that have no apparent use, and to then have them wrapped up in cellophane tape for her return. This is what she placed in the centre of the gallery at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE in the winter of 2011, the bundle of objects presented as proof with its YUL ticket intact.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The artist thus directs our attention to the complex system of transactions with which she surrounds her collection. A new stage in her investigation however has taken form during her residency: that of research and indexing. A list on the wall gives an account of the comparison exercise that she began with the Museum of Civilisation’s collection. Here she draws a parallel between the objects that have been passed on to her – that are now her responsibility – with those that have been placed in the institution’s storage and that attest to the “daily life” of the Quebec people. She now is busy creating comparisons, detecting resemblances and identifying common denominators. A legend at the bottom of the list expresses her thoughts through coloured highlighting and reveals numerous similarities. The interest in each of her objects is communicated here through their association, as if the artist is endeavouring to reveal them to us differently. She emphasizes the uniqueness of each of her “specimens” and goes back to their distinctive features to study the details. Because the objects that she keeps “code” a human experience, she is now the guardian of this incredible ensemble that is lodged there. The storage space is now her new workspace.

Thus, Raphaëlle de Groot’s uses neither showcases nor display cabinets to exhibit her collection-work. Her presentation instead is repeated in each case, this being a matter of photographs, performances, videos, lists, bundles and collector cards. Through her research, she has shared the same burden as that of all museums: the possibility of understanding reality through preservation. No load seems too heavy for the artist who, relentlessly, composes with the proliferation of things and following the example of Anna Blume, becomes a ragpicker of leftovers and recyclable items.

Auster, Paul. 1988, In the Country of Last Things. New York: Penguin Books, p. 36.
Benjamin, Walter and Peter Demetz. “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century” 1978, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 348 p.
For this see Jennifer Allen’s forward to Je déballe ma bibliothèque, Paris, Payot & Rivages, 2000, p. 7-31. The author tells of Walter Benjamin’s years in exile when he was obliged to leave Germany in 1933 because of the Nazi Regime. She relates how difficult the decision was for him to leave behind a part of his collection of books that his friends would endeavour to save from destruction.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1996, The System of Objects. London, New York: Verso editions, 205 p.

A question of climate

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Is it the case that people, places and things are only what we think of them? How can we put ourselves in the shoes of the Other? The artist Luis Armando García is interested in the role that tourism and criminality – as reductive as they are antithetical – have played in shaping the image of Mexico. In Viento del Norte, he sought to present another reality of his native country – far from stereotypes – that of ecology. However, it is not easy to abstract the violence that bears down so heavily on everyday life in the country. This violence poisons the climate, and is carried by the winds of the North. And so it was that, irrepressibly, dramatically, Viento del Norte changed shaped over time, and became Linea de Fuego.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

García’s extended residency at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE enabled him to explore his social, professional and personal identity from a range of viewpoints. It enabled him to understand, in new ways, the places from which people speak, and to reflect on the subjects of which people speak, and how they do so. As an interrogation on the nature of identity, appearances and communication, the substantial body of work that the artist produced during his stay expressed perfectly the fact that places, things and people are, to a significant extent, what we think of them, and what we make of them.

Viento del Norte was both a poetic and meditative installation that centered on the correspondence between the rigorous desert climate of the Zacatecas and that of the Quebec winter. Drought, as much as intense cold, influence social behavior and mood. Despite environmental differences, and differences in modes of adaptation linked to geography, in both cases tension plays a role in creating a form of anticipation and a particular means of naming meteorological phenomena such as rain and snow. A metaphor takes shape around this observation: that of the possibility to feel empathy for the Other based on one’s own experiences. This metaphor was translated with both sensitivity and efficiency in Viento del Norte by means of juxtaposing contrasts, albeit involving similar forms. Many visitors were amazed at how a Mexican, from a desert region, with no knowledge of snow, so clearly expressed the reality of the North, and furthermore with objects inspired by, or modeled after, forms used in arid areas to gather rainwater.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Such was García’s exploration. Beyond forms of prejudice that categorize people and destroy communication by affirming the differences between people and things, García seeks out that which is common. He identifies similarities, and based on these he extrapolates and constructs bridges that cross the divide between appearances and differences. This is no simple strategy, and it is one that has a precise effect. It endorses the artist’s discourse on the circulation and perception of identities, given that these are the very objects that he takes and re-stages in his creative process. The porous rocks that are used to filter and purify the all-too-rare water in the desert have featured in a previous group exhibition in 2002 in the town of Zacatecas. Once relocated to Quebec, they are replicated and molded, literally, on the local context. These water receptacles, chalk-white in color, cone-like in shape, whether in liquid or solid form, perfectly evoked both heat-waves and waves of cold. And so, that which travels, he who travels, is transformed, penetrating the universe of the Other, by means of his own experience. Given that we know both the heat and the cold, we can imagine the torrid and the polar. However, for those who have difficulty with one or the other, it becomes arduous to imagine living in such states on a daily basis. And for those who have never experienced frost, it is difficult to imagine that it can cause burns just as painful as those produced by fire.

The same can be said of violence. For those who have no real experience of such things, it is difficult to imagine the effect that it has on people. Imagining violence as a part of daily life is horrible for anyone who has experienced, even once, any kind of traumatic event. When the reality of the Other is too distant from one’s own, so there are obstacles to empathy, to the process of “approximation”, which gives way instead to indifference or contempt.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

As a Mexican citizen, representing his country, Luis Armando García is situated at the point of convergence between attitudes that he indicates he often encounters amongst strangers. These fluctuate between a conventional exoticism, the denial of responsibility (faced with the humanitarian catastrophe and distress of the Other) and moral judgement. He finds that younger people are often more open to, and moved by, the political content of his work, perhaps because they are in a process of self-discovery, they are more open to the reality of others. The artist’s experience of the gaze and the perception of viewers is noticeable, and his concern regarding the judgement of the Other often surfaces. He mentioned on numerous occasions his pleasure at walking the streets of Quebec City, without the fear of being attacked, and without the burden of the perpetual tension that is, he explains, palpable throughout Mexico. When fellow Mexican performers arrived in the town and asked whether he had any recommendations of places to go, he suggested that they, “walk around the city and savor this unusual feeling of ease.” He insists that Mexicans are no more violent than the Quebecois. Rather, violence has taken hold insidiously over the years in the country, in connection with crime, and often linked with corruption. What can be done, faced with the spread of criminality, which now operates openly, including in his home town? Barricading oneself in, becoming a prisoner of one’s own fear, is hardly a solution. In succumbing too much to the mindset of protection, there is a loss of belief in the possibility of change. And so taking a position and acting has become a necessity for García, and this is a choice that he makes both in his personal and professional life.

This is why the white and fresh energy of Viento del Norte gave way to the heavy and threatening atmosphere of Linea de Fuego. Whilst the concept of the first installation was clear to the artist prior to coming to Quebec, the second installation, whilst present, lay more dormant as a concept within him. Linea de Fuego was grounded in the deterioration of the situation currently in Mexico and the grief of the recent death of a friend, a victim of assassination. Following the first few weeks of his residency, and the completion of Viento del Norte, García was faced with the proposition of unsettling things and stating, clearly and with urgency, that reality is something other than what lays before us; that life is more than appearances, and that just as poetry can be violent so violence can give rise to poetry. Moreover, poetry can be laden with tension.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The second work staged by Garcia dealt less with violence than its consequences, those of feeling trapped and powerless faced with the unknown. A number of elements, as coherent as they were troubling given their unfamiliarity, coalesced to create a no man’s land, where it seemed that anything could happen, for better or for worse. A sinister bunch of chains stood out immediately on entering the space. These were suspended from the ceiling and anchored to the floor, a hanging form that moved almost imperceptibly with the action of a motor. Visible through these iron tentacles, a web of electrical wires clung to the wall, with small bulbs hanging from their ends, like the synapses of the nervous system. Projectiles hung in front of them, in mid-air, like lead lines, sounding out obscure regions of the human. A lugubrious noise brought shudders: water in a pool bubbled as, on the surface, archival footage depicted the words of a hostage, who was soon to be assasinated. It is clear, without explaining each element, what the overall effect of the works suggested and demonstrated.

Beyond this, a noticeable feature of the work, for those who had witnessed Viento del Norte, was Garcia’s reuse of all the elements of the previous work. In a manner of speaking, the artist had dislocated, dismembered, kidnapped so to speak, the constituent parts, the witnesses of his first work, torturing and disposing of them in a completely different fashion to say something entirely new. A number of works, presented as paintings, bore the traces of their previous incarnation: plaster marks, rust stains that, along with the spectacular cone-like forms that now dripped rust-colored water along their once-immaculate form, spoke of bloodstains.

On a final note, it was astonishing to observe that fragments of fractured concrete paving stones in the space were hanging by a bare thread, which seemed mockingly, to symbolize the fight against the chaos all around. Yet, one must intervene, act and gather together the pieces of that which is broken. Such a gesture is not naive. It does not pretend to repair. It is a form of testimony. It is a matter of taking position and, faced with the undeniable difference of the Other, not succumbing to cynical fascination, to comfortable indifference, or to moral condemnation. This is important, because in the end people are to a significant extent what we think and what we make of them.