De bile et de lumiére
Of Bile & Light
exhibition at La Générale en Manufacture. October 2013
I set off for the Congo DRC like someone answering a silent call. I knew intuitively that this country, this zone at the heart of the world other treasures than the minerals that curse it. I was on a quest of what Joseph Conrad had approached without yet being able to define what it was precisely. I wanted to go where society as I knew it ended. What happens in a mine miles underground miles of forest ? I met priests, shopkeepers, priests, merchants, farmers, civil servants, military, swindlers, humanitarians... and it was only at the end of a 7-month journey that I met the miners of Mine 17 around Mongwalu in Ituri. These men and women, who are at the very heart yet so far removed from the economic and geopolitical conflicts of the contemporary world geopolitical conflicts of today’s world. Yet what brought me there was not to report on suffering and injustice as a journalist or humanitarian a journalist or humanitarian would have done. I wanted to talk about it in a different way, and somewhere, to confront a melancholy and a romanticism and romanticism with the real weight of these personal feelings.
On my return to France, I felt the need for a renewed and more tangible relationship with images. That’s when I discovered the pleasure of cutting with a surgical knife past images made by others, for other reasons. The practice of collage emerged as an answer to questions about absence, emptiness and hollow resurrection. When an
when an idea becomes an obsession, when it keeps coming back without
it becomes autonomous, turning on itself like a drill, a Vortex of a drill, an infinite tendril that begins to dig into the very matter of melancholy.
The installation “Of Bile & Light”, in conjunction with the “Barbarie” exhibition at exhibition at La Générale en Manufacture, features a monochrome dialogue of photographs, collages and ready-mades, summarizes a year’s Work year’s work around a series of experiments. The exhibition articulates a myth of artistic creation. A romantic vision of the artist as a miner who wanders and inhabits the tunnels hollowed out by a void left behind, to extract and bring back strange artifacts, strange objects like so many extensions of perception to be shared.
The space is divided into two parts: a studio section featuring two series of collages two series of collages and research work, and an installation section where a large print, as if to set the scene, evokes Joseph Conrad’s work Joseph Conrad’s “In the Heart of Darkness”. On the adjacent wall, a shelf a photograph of a man in a marble quarry. Next to it, a mysterious object. In the center, a showcase, like a cabinet of curiosities presents a collage of images, objects and ready-mades in an attempt to answer the question “How can an image be cured ?”
