Guillaume Barth
Voyage vers Hyperborée - Installation - 2020
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 22
Installation
The fascination with the North is evident in the mythologies that suffuse most civilisations.
For Plato, the North was the land of elevated souls, but also of strength and light.
In a kind of ritual, the god Apollo travelled regularly to this realm of Hyperborea in a chariot drawn by swans in order to regenerate his prophetic powers.
The northernmost point is at the limit of the horizon, where land and sky meet in harmony to form this mythical paradise.
“Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans – we know well enough how remote our place is. ‘Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans’: even Pindar, in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death – our life, our happiness… We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1888.
The holy geography and the evocative power of the cardinal point that is the North Pole, the Hyperborean myth, nourish this artistic project which sets out to give formal expression to an imaginary exploration of this space.
As a result of the upheavals brought about by our civilisation, might this space which seems so distant from our own become more familiar?
Voyage vers Hyperborée relates a will to transcendence in a world that has turned away from any primordial essence.
Guillaume Barth
“My ideas are constructed out of different places and have original forms that seem to set them apart from each other, but looking more closely, their invisible elements come together in one ensemble.”
Guillaume Barth was born in Colmar in 1985. He lives and works in Sélestat. Having graduated from the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg (Art major) in 2012, he is now continuing his researches at Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains. The video Le Deuxième Monde Elina (2015) will be shown in spring 2021 juxtaposed with a famous Aztec sculpture, in collaboration with the Musée du Quai-Branly and the Fondation François Schneider. The installation L’Œil de Simorgh has been acquired by the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg and is on show as of June 2021. The trees of Baumschule 2016 will be planted with children in the forest of Sélestat – the artist’s home town – in November 2021. They constitute the idea behind Nouvelle Forêt.
Production
Partner
Acknowledgments
The crew over the Atlantic:
- Isabelle Stachtchenko, lighting camerawoman
- Marianne Polska, assistant camerawoman
- Hugo Coderre, steadicam operator
- Joël Poisson, grip
- Lucile Mercier for help with grading
- Yasmine Amor for her commitment and her kindness without which the shoot in Quebec would not have been possible.
A big thanks to Diane and Bertrand for their precious help on the shoot. Thanks also to Mélissa, Julien, Maneck, Olivia and the big Lafrance family in Montreal.
Thanks to composer and old friend Thibault Bru, the team at Le Fresnoy and Valérie Jouve.
