Faye Mullen
Par la suite, je ne pensais à ça qu’avec moi-même - Installation - 2015
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 17
A wall is at once a form of division and symbol of protection, of delineation, separation and stoppage. Here, it undergoes a deep shift. The installation Par la suite, je ne pensais à ça qu’avec moi-même (Later, that’s all I and me could think of) deploys a crude structure that both houses the exhibition and destabilises it via the set-up of a moving wall. Inside it, two voices accompany the movement and reveal the intimate relation of separated sisters who are materially manifested by this wall which divides. Recorded during a performance in which the artist experienced the duration of confinement, the dialogue, in its form, invokes melodics more than semantics, offering silences, syllables, and overlappings defined by an aural spatialisation. This dialogue, oscillating between two monologues murmured by the same voice, is formed less by a desire for mise-en-scène than for mise-en-abyme. These two voices are borne by mimetism and by a heightened consciousness of representation in which failure seems to deepen over time. Depending on the temporality, the illusion of the work is deconstructed and reconstructed slowly in accordance with these voices which are permeable to the set-up of which they are a part. By pointing up the fact that they are only “sound images,” they highlight the innate flaw in representation. Disoriented in a physical space of variable depth, it gradually becomes clear to us that the art object is never fixed. This mental space makes visible an internal struggle towards grieving: cross the wall, find the other. The sororal space weaves a language that brings to light these two sisters where the visible is derisory. The floating words do not take a concrete form, there is only their endlessly disappearing trace. They announce tangible forgetting where a compression takes the form of an eclipse.
