Record of the Invisible

With works by: Ignasi Aballí, Ismaïl Bahri, Eva Barto, Edith Dekyndt, Lois Weinberger
Curator: Guillaume Désanges, in collaboration with Coline Davenne

The final part of the Généalogies fictives [Fictional Genealogies] cycle, Record of the Invisible / Chroniques de l’invisible, is an exhibition playing upon the relationships between visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance, “here” and “elsewhere”. The project began with a proposal to five artists to imagine artistic interventions for public or private spaces in and around Saint-Nazaire, outside of Le Grand Café. These deliberately unpublicised gestures were left “outside” and the exhibition at Le Grand Café retains just their traces or their deformed echoes. Together they make up an autonomous exhibition that is formally and sensually independent from the original protocol. The project works with the town’s history and geography, like the two precedent stages in the cycle, but this time in a ghostly register of rumour, the clandestine and the figuration of an elsewhere.

The strategy behind the exhibition Record of the Invisible / Chroniques de l’invisible certainly brings about a particular experience for the public, but also for the artists and the curator. It is an exhibition that considers the works of art as witnesses to an absence of which the trace, mediating and interceding, finally turns out to be more important than the original object. That is everything that this two-pronged curatorial experiment is about: how to materialise a series of faraway gestures in an artistic way, that’s to say through form rather than story. From the beginning of this project, it hasn’t been about documenting but about “making an exhibition”. To achieve this, the artists have created forms especially or brought in recomposed existing works as a kind of rebus. In every case, these uncertain, symbolic, poetic or metaphorical translations are expected to stand alone and escape from their substitute status to create a new form.

Following on from the precedent exhibition in the cycle[i] where the proposal was to “short circuit” the curation, that is to say by presenting works and documents from local history, the basis of working on this exhibition is the town of Saint-Nazaire and its immediate surroundings. Indeed, the first part of the process involved asking the artists to choose locations for interventions by criss-crossing the town and its surroundings and being wide open to possible topographies: public or private space, in town, in the countryside, on the coast, in the sea, accessible or not. The method, in which the artists have actively participated, has therefore been that of a field study drawing on storytelling and local research. As the title of the exhibition suggests, it is a matter of primarily concentrating on the blind spots, the hidden corners, of local history and geography.

In keeping with the spirit of the cycle, the genealogy first revealed by this project is therefore that of a territory. A site is always a complex geopolitical entity, impregnated and haunted by layers of interlocking realities, its apparently stable surface masking seething underground stories: natural and cultural, human and non-human, individual and collective. From an oak forest trapped in peat for 5000 years to the mysterious formation of a mangrove in the remains of a worldly metallurgy factory. From the philanthropic theories of 19th century factory owners to the global future of the Atlantic shipyards. From megalithic tombs built 6000 years ago to the estuary’s last inhabited lighthouses. All we have of these facts, interlinked in the topography of the sites as well as in their spirit, are their echoes, the sparse snippets that have served as material for the artists. The subsequent genealogy also brought to light here is of a blurred line between the real and fiction, between history and art, between the work outside and its story within. Incomplete genealogies, uncertain, always partially invented or fantasised. This is why the artists were not selected from among researchers or documentalists. They were chosen for their ability to reroute a given situation rather than faithfully report it. It should be clear that here we are choosing abstraction and poetry over information. It is also why all the factual sources in the exhibition have been brought together in no particular order in one room of stories, a kind of narrative antechamber to the exhibition, and deliberately disconnected from the artistic forms. It is a way to create a genealogy from one space to another, from a story to a form, from the oral to the visual, by consciously preserving a distance between the subject and the object of the exhibition, The most important part of this record of the invisible is played out in these spatial and temporal gaps, and it is exactly there that the passionately fictional character of these genealogies is to be found.

[i] The exhibition Contre-Vents, Solidarités ouvrières, étudiantes et paysannes dans l’Ouest de la France : une généalogie, May 26-September 29, 2019, Le Grand Café – contemporary art centre, Saint-Nazaire

Press contact: Hélène Annereau-Barnay annereaubarh@mairie-saintnazaire.fr