graphic design: Rudy De Souza
AU LIEU, PARIS, FRANCE
SEP 2023
CURATOR: NOELIA PORTELA / PERSONA CURADA
IN.PLANO SUPPORTED BY LA FONDATION DE FRANCE
HOW DO WE LEARN TO FIND EACH OTHER
- NOELIA PORTELA
[...] In Navigation sans Instruments by Caroline Reveillaud we find the artist’s latest research of an ongoing project, produced during her residency at La Reunion, this past spring. In the words of the artist “[...] Biomimético-Imago, is a longterm project around sensitive images, divided into several chapters that started between 2022 and 2023. The Biomimético-Imago project begins with work on bivalves, establishing that this animal crossed by all fields of human and social sciences constitutes itself a sensitive image, a potential image. I recently continued this research during my two-month residency in La Friche, Réunion, with the Cnap Suite Program through a new prism, that of an Island crossed by gestures and relationships between humans and non-humans, constituting the potential image of a critical zone, that is a layer of life composed of living beings interconnected to resources, to the environment.
The film Navigation sans instruments resulting from the research residency, is built on a topographical timeline: according to a geological section of the Island, crossing it from the sea to the sea passing through the land (plains , cirques, mountains, forests, rivers, savannah); These landscapes are punctuated by meetings of different inhabitants and their actions in relation to the island environment and lists of elements enumerating the geological and stratigraphic layers of the different places. Opening with a shorter conclusion which exposes other types of gestures, those belonging to the institution and which establish a memory, a social construction which obeys its own logics: with the classifications, restorations and conservations of the Archives Departmental, filming the observation, digitisation and sorting of newly arrived archives, the restoration of archives, consultation in the reading room; and taxidermy and the study of animal species from the Natural History Museum of Saint-Denis, filming an entomologist and a taxidermist laying eyes (glass beads) on a Mauritius Blackbird in a final paradoxical gesture (taxidermic paradigm) echoing the concept of Wilderness in a disastrous conservationist impulse, preserving what is doomed to disappear and completing the death of the animal.” [...]
photo: Caroline Reveillaud
with Tania GHEERBRANT, Isadora SOARES BELLETTI & Chloé QUENUM