graphic design: Naïa Larregui
LA FRICHE, LE PORT, LA REUNION
JUN-AUG 2023
PROGRAMME SUITE CNAP 2023
CAROLINE REVEILLAUD À AT LA FRICHE, LA RÉUNION - ETIENNE HATT
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La Friche, located in the commune of Le Port in the north-west of Réunion, is hosting the Navigation sans instruments exhibition by Caroline Reveillaud
(June 2nd—July 28th, 2023).
Anyone lucky enough to be familiar with the work of Caroline Reveillaud, who was born in 1991 and graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016, will be surprised by her proposal for La Friche de La Réunion. Her most recent exhibitions revealed an artist interested in images and their technical and cultural conditions of appearance and perception. In 2022, at the Florence Loewy gallery in Paris, Sharp-Eyed staged reproductions of masterpieces from the history of painting in the form of a film and spatialised photographs enhanced with instruments of measurement. Two years earlier, at the Villa du Parc, a contemporary art centre in Annemasse, La tela, il legno, le pareti, i colori explored the landscape imagination born in the Renaissance. Like these two exhibitions, her new project is an installation. It combines still and moving images, volumes and objects. Developed on site during a two-month residency, it nevertheless shifts the focus in two ways. On the one hand, the image as a mediated and material representation gives way to the sensible image, a notion borrowed from the philosopher Emanuele Coccia’s Sensible Life (Payot et Rivages, 2010), which designates the different forms of sensibility produced by the relationships between living things, both human and non-human, and whose medium is the body. Additionally, the Eurocentrism of her previous work is erased to better embrace the Reunionese reality. Another reading accompanied this change, that of Immersion (La Découverte, 2023) by the anthropologist Hélène Artaud. Subtitled Rencontre des mondes atlantique et pacifique, it compares the Atlantic – Western – and Pacific perspectives on the ocean.
POETIC CARTOGRAPHY
Having arrived with the aim of drawing up a “poetic cartography” of the sensible images produced by living things in their relationships to each other and to their environment, understood as an ecological, historical and cultural reality, Caroline Reveillaud soon found the guiding principle for the experimental documentary at the heart of her project. Struck by the Western desire to “continentalise” Réunion by developing agriculture at the expense of fishing and by turning the slaves away from the sea and its potential horizon—to the extent that marronnage became established in the heights of the cirques—, she constructed her film like a topographical section of the volcanic island, leading from one shore to the other by way of the diversity of the spaces: plains, forests, cirques, etc. These landscape views alternate with sequences showing gestures “crossed by the island”: the weaving of tall grasses, the planting of endemic species, singing in Reunionese Creole, etc., and surfing. The soundtrack includes atmospheres captured in the landscapes, the words of the people she encountered and, as in her previous films, a text written by the artist focusing on what we see in the images, but also on what escapes them. In the exhibition at La Friche, this film, which lasts more than an hour, is presented alongside a shorter one. By combining two sequences shot in the Archives départementales de La Réunion and in a taxidermist’s workshop, the latter extracts itself from any relationship to living things and offers a counterpoint that explores the question of memory and preservation. The films are accompanied by a large table which is pierced in places to reveal objects that bear witness to the project. These creations rub shoulders with reproductions of old engravings and postcards from the Iconothèque historique de l’Océan indien. This time, unlike in her previous works, the artist is not guided by any form of appropriation. She has simply enlarged one of the reproductions and placed it on the table. The other two dozen retain their nature as documents, giving historical depth to the films and objects on display. Each subject has its own method and form.
Etienne Hatt
photo: Caroline Reveillaud