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Artists' Project Statement
L'association gingembre, a slow and playful collaboration
By Felicia Atkinson
"L'association gingembre" is dedicated to the development, research, production and diffusion of art hiding the beauty that one could discover and advocate, beauty that no one dares to reveal under no circumstances.
Elise and I met thee years ago at the experimental dance project BOCAL, founded by the contemporary choreographer Boris Chamatz, in which several young artists from a wide range of medium were involved: dance, design, sculpture, literature, and medicine. They all were searching ways to teach art and its performance potential. We staged performances on various national and foreign theaters, which were also trying to find alternate ways to traditional staging and transmission: it did not happen without a few bruises between the various egos of our fragile and diversified community.
At the end of this ephemera experiment, which lasted one whole year, each of us was left exhausted and troubled, having now to find its own way into the future alone. All these questions came up suddenly: do I want to continue collaborative work? Do I want to continue exploring dance, as it was my first shot at it? Did I learn anything that went beyond empirical aspect? Or should I "move on" as Jeanne d'Arc in the film of famous director Robert Bresson?
Well, as an answer to all these questions after the BOCAL project, Elise Ladoue and I decided to create "L'association gingembre." Elise, a dancer trained at the School of Dance of the Paris Opera wanted to question the techniques she had been taught and apply them at the Circus. As a multimedia student artist at Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris, I felt the urge to continue my work on performance outside of the stiff curriculum of the School. As we both are red haired and spicy as ginger, or gigembre in French, we gave our common project the funny name of "L'association gingembre."
Searching for a common theoretical foundation upon which we could build, we found the Japanese theory of Wabi-Sabi, a fertile philosophy on imperfections, on search for beauty in common things, unfinished, poor materials such as dirty a wall, a broken flower, or simple but dense gestures like preparing tea or walking. During our explorations of art, we found a movement in the musical domain that adheres to a similar philosophy. In music, it is called Lo-Fi, the opposite of Hi-Fi, i.e. the exact opposite of anything that is durable, of good quality, and in a way on which you can capitalize. Several American (Will Oldham, Bill Calahan or Lou Barlow) or French (Dominique A. in his album La Fossette) musicians have created wonderful music using they day-to-day environment such as their kitchen or a tiny portable voice recorder. They succeeded in creating a universal and deeply moving poetry without using powerful tools or instruments. That was our starting point.
We did not want to use a single media, such as dance, but to share our experiences. We had to work on our upcoming and unavoidable performance, but we bait a fence around it, containing all possible outcomes, faithful to our search for the hidden, the stealth and the imperfect.
While we filmed ourselves dancing came suddenly the idea of a film on us dancing. We edited it, added a peculiar music. Our first collaborative video work "Remedios the Beauty" appeared. However, we could also have ended up with some pictures, a different performance, a text. The idea is that an accident can be worked upon, looked at in a different background and become a real work of art by itself. It is the idea that Elise can draw and I can dance and that together we can dare a video work.
That is about how the exhibition "Lo-Lichen" at the Gallery Yukiko Kawase came to fruition.
We wanted to create an exhibition directly swelling from the space, the walls contaminated by the drawings, the wool, and the materials from a simple environment but also unclean and raw. It was not about representing the Lichen or illustrating it. As the American writer Percival Everett states, a metaphor cannot be reproduced. Such is Lo-Lichen. Lo-Lichen, and Lo-Fi are metaphors, images to understand our way of working. We stretch ourselves, we disappear, and we take risks. Taking risks today is not to do huge things but is, on the opposite, to dare the very tiny, the common, the unstackable, to dare the no flatterer, to dare what does not make the audience important. Just like when Dada or Fluxus introduced some mockery, or other distracting features in their simplicity, their momentarity, their subversion of the bourgeois representation that requires art to be permanent, solid, and worth its marked price.
"L'association gingembre," written without upper case, leans towards something more oriental, inspired by the Japanese Haiku poems.
The French pop singer Serge Gainsbourg once said that what he admired most in the Chinese painters was that it took them ages to contemplate a mountain and only one second to paint it. Others such as Michel Aumont, said that when man abandoned perspective in drawings, he stopped wanting to own the landscape in order to best be absorbed fit in it. This is what "land art" or "color field" actors did. This is what I feel today when I look at the tiny and frightening installations of Koo-Jeong-A or of Tatiana Trouve.
In this exhibition Lo-Lichen, we tied out absorption; we tried to erase the gap between figurative and abstract work in order to better question the representation and the expressible. We did not draw or knit anything else but a knitted colorful rope, which could be a water spring or anything else. We did our video "Soid" or "Thirst" in English in the shape of a dilutive surface, we let ourselves be deprived of the traditional representation of the bodies for the advantage to feel or for the blurred whisper.
We bear this ambiguity; we turn it into the object of our work. A transitional object that would be, as the psychoanalyst Winnicott wrote, the link between absence and presence, between real and fiction through the game.
To draw a line with a felt pen, knit a woolen stem, something between a bacteria and a creeper which could also be just what it is, a piece of wool or a piece of paper; which would depend on its usage like a word or a body part. Something mobile, playful and chargeable with eroticism. Create a slow space, where everything would move backwards, between gesture and the trace of this gesture.
March 2006, posted May 2006
Translation from French by Jean Plassard
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