One person

I have two words for you.

« Over the hours, days, weeks, seasons, you let go of everything, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with almost, at times, a sort of intoxication, that you are free, that nothing weighs you down, pleases you, or displeases you. You find, in this life without wear and without another thrill. May those suspended moments brought to you by cards or certain noises, certain shows that you give yourself, an almost perfect, fascinating happiness, sometimes swollen with new emotions. You know total rest, you are, at all times, spared, protected. You live in a blessed parenthesis, in a void full of promises and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist: continuation of hours, continuation of days, the passage of the seasons, the passage of time, you survive, without joy and without sadness, without future and without past, like that, simply, obviously, like a drop of water that pearls at the tap of a water station on a landing, like six socks soaked in a basin of pink plastic, like a fly or like an oyster, like a cow, like a snail, like a child or like an old man, like a rat. » 

Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort, 1967

Support Act : La clé de champs is the title of an exhibition consisting in an installation of numerous works on the walls of the space, coloured lights placed discreetely in the ceiling and a performance. It has been inaugurated just before the pandemic. 

The space, if not the scene, is defined by the mixed colored zones in the ceiling, by several metallic bars screwed in the walls, and by plates of glass, painted and covered by silkscreen prints. These plates are gathered in small groups, forming some compositions with photographs and drawings, suggesting silent stories. There are also prints on paper: some brief texts oveprinted on existing printed material, often political leaflets, creating caustic encounters between different registers of language : proverbs, poems, and propaganda. The metallic bars are usually hidden within the walls of buildings, to structure and support them. But here they look like urban relics, amplifying an atmosphere of cold urbanity.

Every work functions with layers, plays on conceptual or physical depths. It combines ideas, images, emotions in a theatrical way. The early experience in the world of comics could be traced in these works, in the way narration is engaged, though experimentaly. Many works contain characters, looking like puppets stucked in labyrinthic cities, so huge that they look like David against Goliath. It is the world-city, squeezing weak forms of life, with its inhumane dimension, its dry materials (glass, metal, concrete), the divisions it creates, its digital and abstract conception. Human being seems to err, to wander with no purposes in a city that he paradoxically conceived himself. Other characters are lost in solitary situations, silences, blindness, difficulties to communicate with others.

During the performance, made during the opening, someone wears a mask from Pierrot, a mischievous and sad character of the Commedia dell’arte. This person is seated in the center of the room, he doesn’t speak, and stares at his computer, apparently excluded from every conversations around. But, actually, one could see that he is writing on his computer, in real time, several types of contents in different languages : pieces of conversations that he hears, answers that he gives to visitors trying to enter in contact with him, personnal monologs. These words are projected in real time on top of one of the wall of the exhibition, as an additional layer, over the works. The artist is both present and absent; he seems to mimick the different personnalities of his charachters appearing in the silkscreen compositions. He is a figure both identified and anonymous, solitary and collective, operating almost like a prism, or a wizard, or a jester, trying to engage a form of catharsis, in the middle of a confused mob.

The performance organised at the MAMAC, Museum of Modern and Contemporary art from Nice, by Claire Migraine and her association Thankyouforcoming, concludes a week of residence in the area, with meetings of the different persons active in the field of visual arts. It developps itself in three phases. The first is a presentation, half humoristic, half serious of the “theory of Asterix and Obelix”, a reference to the famous comic book created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo where stereotypes about cultural imaginaries are approached. It is an attempt to sketch the collective imaginaries of given regions, where many artists seem to work often in a similar direction. The second phase is a projection of prepared groups of images showing works created by artists coming from a common area: here, Belgium, France, and the Nice region. In the last phase maps of the collective imaginaries are spread on the floor with stamped words describing the collective imaginaries in question, and coloured ropes to represent loose frontiers. Everything happening in the middle of the museum rooms, full of artworks and imaginaries, echoing the maps on the floors. 

Photographs : Alexandre Ansel, Claire Migraine

Crexida is an association mostly active in the fields of theatre and dance. It is located in a domain on the hills above Bologna. At the end of a 10 days residency, an exhibition is imagined out of some elements found in the backstage area. Scenic structures and accessories are mixed with works on glass and paper brought from Belgium, to create an exhibition/play.

For just one day, an exhibition is mounted by the flemish curator Els Wuyts, in her space in Oostende, Salon Blanc. Three works gathered around their interest about the splitted, reconfigured, multiplied image...