Elsewhere duo exhibition with Elise Leboutte,
Cycle One+ One+, CCN/Centre culturel de Namur, Belgium, 2023.
“Elsewhere: shall we understand this as ‘far from here’? ‘Beyond appearances’? ‘Out of time’? It is rather the name of an asymptotical place, an Orient of sorts, glimpsed through the works of Elise Leboutte and Lucile Bertrand.
“This name appears in the folds of one of Lucile Bertrand's thin curtains, One Day, with its serpentine lines evoking ancient, abolished, or displaced frontiers, which vanish into amnesia. The artist evokes the ravages of boundaries in a powerfully melancholic film, amnesia. Frontiers have always been the beds for rivers of blood. An installation bears witness to this fact: Beyrouth, which the artist never visited but where she still takes us, just like her fragile and delicately assembled Archipels. The same principle of delicacy that Roland Barthes observed throughout Japan and recounted in Empire of Signs is found in the musical scores imagined by Lucile Bertrand to register the songs of endangered birds. The result is not unlike Paul Klee's Twittering Machine, which fascinated Pierre Boulez.”
Yves Depelsenaire, curator of the exhibition,
excerpt from the edition published along the exhibition
For this exhibition, echoing Elise Leboutte's paintings, which evoke the fleeting, elusive shadows and light that pass over the walls, I created this installation of six openwork linen panels, One Day, a reminder of how fragmented and unstable our memory is. It is represented by an illegible calligraphy that preserves only traces of events, big or small, happy or painful, and more or less vivid imprints, be they kiss-red or blood-red. This set of panels can evoke a life's journey or a simple trip, two memories that confront each other or the narrative of a memory that fails to take shape. Yet one day, something happened; another day, later; it was here, or there... One day, something happened.
One Day, 2023.
Six openwork linen panels.
300 × 150 cm (118.11 × 59.05 in) each.
amnesia, 2014-2018.
Video. Picture Format 16:9. Audio Stereo.
Total time 52 minutes. English subtitles. See details.
Beyrouth, 2000.
Plaster, pigments.
Each cube: 23 cm (9 in) per side. See details.
Archipels (Archipelagos), 2015.
Groups of 3 to 5 islands.
Jesmonite, metal.
110 to 120 × 13 to 37 cm (43.31 to 47.24 in × 5.12 to 14.56 in). See details.
Chanter comme des oiseaux (Singing like Birds), 2020.
7 music scores drawn on printed paper + 7 music stands.
29.7 × 42 cm (11.7 × 16.5 in) each and various sizes. See details.
Sacs (Bags), 2015.
Blown glass, pigments.
Various sizes. See details.
What Happened, 2019.
Photographic pigment prints on mat paper.
28 × 34 cm each. See details.
Gradiva, 1997.
Wood, wire mesh, paper, sand, pigments.
2 pieces mounted on the floor.
30 × 240 cm (1 × 8 ft) and 30 × 120 cm (1 × 4 ft). See details.
CCN/Centre Culturel de Namur. View from the entrance of the exhibition space.
Score on music stand of Chanter comme des oiseaux.
On the wall, Elise Leboutte's paintings.
On the wall, Elise Leboutte's paintings.
Series of Sacs (glass bags) on a wide and low pedestal.
Sacs (glass bags) on pedestal.
On the floor, Gradiva.
In front of the window, series What Happened.
Color closeness between glass bags, Sacs, and one of Elise Leboutte's painting.
Gradiva. A series of feet disintegrate as they step over sand — or soil.
What remains of the passing of a life, or even of a civilization, on the timeline?
What Happened, series of six photographs with texts, which question the meaning of what one sees.
Left wall, two of Elise Leboutte' paintings.
The long exhibition space is bisected by the installation One Day, six sheets of fine openwork linen that nevertheless give a glimpse of the rear space.
One Day is set up in a way that invites visitors to cross this visual boundary.
On the linen panels appears an indefinite timeline — ONE DAY, LATER, SOME TIME LATER, MUCH LATER, EVEN LATER, ONE DAY —,
the certainty of a past event — something happened, it happened — and the difficulty to locate it — here, somewhere, elsewhere.
Behind One Day is a series of plaster cubes, Beyrouth, emblematic of a country that has buried part of its violent history and suffered successive destructions and reconstructions.
Beyrouth is made up of twelve cubes, enough to evoke an architectural model of a bombed-out city.
In the background, two music stands of Chanter comme des oiseaux.
The Beyrouth cubes feature damaged surfaces, as if bombed or riddled with bullets, revealing red matter, like raw flesh.
Music stand of Chanter comme des oiseaux in front of one of Elise Leboutte's paintings.
Some of the depicted birdsongs have become inaudible (or almost) as some of the species who sang them have disappeared or are on the brink of extinction.
Back to One Day, and Beyrouth, like an architectural model on a trestle table.
Still behind One Day, at the right of the space, the Archipels, a series of islands on tripods.
The Archipels evoke the necessity as well as the fragility of relationships, be they personal or political.
Back to the front space through One Day.
The music scores of Chanter comme des oiseaux have been scattered across the space, just as the depicted songs belong to species from all over the world.
Back to the front space.