LABANQUE BÉTHUNE
7 SEPTEMBER 2018 – 18 FEBRUARY 2018
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Charlotte Charbonnel, Clement Cogitore, Marguerite Duras, Marco Godinho, Oda Yellow, Atsunobu Kohira, Pierre Molinier, Romina De Novellis, Frédéric D. Oberland Rodriguez Giles, Anne Laure Sacriste, Markus Schinwald, Pia Rondé, Fabien Saleil, Gilles Stassart, Claire Tabouret, Sabrina Vitali, Daisuke Yokota, Jerome Zonder, Zorro.
I call experience a journey at the end of man’s possible.
Georges Bataille
Intériorités is the second highlight of the trilogy La Traversée des inquiétudes. This exhibition follows Dépenses, the inaugural exhibition of the cycle and presented in Labanque from October 2016 to February 2017. It is a question of unveiling the fruit of a curatorial research that has no model: it is a research that advances in forging its method, and whose arrangements are constantly recomposed and refined by the gesture and the forms to which we arrive (these forms of dialogue between artists, works, spaces and texts).
Here we have had for a red thread a re-reading of L’Intérieur Intérieur (1943), a book that is undoubtedly one of the most dangerous of Georges Bataille. Written during the Second World War, it is for his author to construct a philosophy of “non-knowledge”, relating “the narrative of despair”, that of a “naked experience, free of attachments, even of origin, to any confession whatsoever “and” a questioning (in the test), in the fever and in the anguish, of what a man knows of being “. This book escapes, as much from the philosophical essay as from the fragmented poem or diary. Bataille describes it – in fits and starts, illuminations, flashes of lucidity, wanderings, silences and confessions – the night and the intensity he passes through.
No answer, then. But a labyrinth that we replay in the exhibition: from the caves of Lascaux to the most luminous obscurities; of the wandering in the subterranean depths, or in the ruins of Pompeii, towards an ascent on the crater of a volcano; of the entrenchment in a secret chamber until the desired opening on the shared world.
So, traveling through the exhibition will be in itself an inner experience for the free visitor of his itinerary, embarked on a “journey at the end of the possible” and a poetic exploration. Bataille tells us that truth is not in speech or in demonstration, but rather that it is what would be exercised, not afterwards, through the unknown. This is why the visitor’s body is called to be engaged, walking or snorkeling, senses alerted, perhaps accepting to be surprised and lose its bearings.
BELOW THE VOLCANO
We hypothesize that the internal movement of inner experience is ascensional, that it is a question of traversing from the primitive night, towards an overcoming that Bataille would call “sacred immanent.” If the exhibition has a telluric dimension, it is echoing the experience that Georges Bataille was able to live in 1937, during his ascent of Mount Etna. The work of Marco Godinho, reinterpreting this initiatory journey on the slopes of the mythical volcano, echoes directly there; as well as that of Charlotte Charbonnel, inspired by vulcanology and mineralogy by bringing into play the Elements and the materials; while Romina De Novellis seizes another volcano by its performance in the ruins of Pompeii, from sunset to dawn, facing Vesuvius. Artists felt the need to involve their bodies, as if they could not do otherwise. In this perspective, the performative dimension of Sabrina Vitali’s work delimits a ritual space, while that of Atsunobu Kohira engages the energy issue of sleep and dance. The exhibition concludes with the vertigo of a reversal, from the depths to the summit, from the summit to the depths.
Lea Bismuth
