Préface 32

Michel Certeau’s concept of the “the practice of space” find its relevance in LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE’s 2007-2008 season. It is indeed question of constructive moves and perceptual reversals, in a space that was successively broken, ritualized, fleeing, naturalized and updated during the five residencies that followed one another, each requiring a different posture on the part of the viewers who “practice” the space through the artworks.

Fnoune Taha throws a philosophical light on Virginia Medeiros’ approach. The Brazilian artist’s artwork À contre-sens covers the transgression of gender and social class. Videos shot in an underprivileged area of Salvador, show the diverted paths of two marginal, Simone and Preta.

Jean-Pierre Guay chronicles Gabriela Garcia-Luna’s last voyage, Universos relativos, true rite of passage in three steps by which the Mexican artist approaches the death of his father. It is a matter of suspending time to reach somewhere else by crossing the present reality.

With Possible Worlds, a sort of construction site, artist Erik Olofsen seeks to deconstruct our perception of space. Annie Hudon Laroche underlines how the artist realizes constantly ‘fleeting’ spaces, between fiction and reality, through ‘’ mises en abyme’’, duplication and juxtapositions.

In Ivana Adaime Makac’s Le banquet, plant sculptures under glass domes are animated by the chirping of crickets: six enclosed spaces doubling back on the slow pace of small worlds, combining life and death, summoning, “the delicious or the abject’’. In his text, Denis Lessard recalls the relation between insects and creation.

Sébastien Hudon covers Exils intérieurs from Belgium artist Els Vanden Meersch. In the exhibition room in a sort of black bunker, photographs of empty interiors both strange and familiar, instill an unstoppable anguish: their icy austerity evokes the barren rigidity of totalitarianism.