ART
Yona Friedman et Jean-Baptiste Decavèle |
Written 30 January |
Saturday 14 March, 11:00Galerie Anne Barrault, 75003 [map]
Born in Grenoble in 1961,
Jean-Baptiste Decavèle works with representations of memory and effacement, presence and absence through video and photography.
Yona Friedman is one of the most interesting and important theorists and utopians of architecture of our time. Balkis island is a fictional island born from the friendship between Friedman and Decavèle. The island came to mind when an unexpected collaboration arose from coincidental everyday circumstances— the death of Friedman’s beloved dog Balkis and at the same time the rediscovery of Jean-Baptise’s images brought back from successive trips on the traces of the great explorers from the north west passage between Greenland and the Bering Strait.
The necessity to remember and the need to commemorate have always been crystallized in the photographic image. Now, ten years after his last trip and looking again at his photos and videos Decavèle was struck by the impression of void and distance emanating from the absence of historic reference that brings sense to these places. This absence is not simply due to the position of the photographer, or a purported objectivity, or to forgetting, this absence comes from the strange neutrality of these landscapes. Considering his documents as incomplete or unsatisfying traces, Decavèle wondered whether, how and for whom one might reinvest the spaces and times of these contested places, these collective and individual memory sites.
In homage to the departed dog, Decavèle named this collection of documents Balkis- Island and offered it to Friedman. In return, Friedman began to envisage Balkis-Island as a possible ‘Spatial City’, as a prolongation of one of his key architectural constructs. By placing his drawings on transparencies on top of Decavèle’s original images, Friedman transformed private and somewhat closed representations into potential social spaces, periodically inhabited, where architectural configurations nestle into glaciers and rest on the tundra. The very existence of Balkis-Island is structured by this constant back and forth movement between visual representation, spatial conceptualization, and commemorative inscription.
Presented at the galerie anne barrault for the first time, Friedman and Decavèle’s series of forty nine collaborative works, as well as a selection of unmodified landscape photographs, and two videos of Balkis-Island crossings, are the initial record of a site in formation, evolving as it drifts, here and there, and lands temporarily at various ports of call.
