Bettina Blanc-Penther
Too much tenderness - Film - 24min - 2017
presented as part of the exhibition panorama 19
Film
Two soldiers without a war: absence has dug a hole.
Here we knew each other but didn’t recognize each other anymore
Now words are empty and language impossible.
So that’s why the characters won’t speak.
One skirts around absence without ever being able to draw it into language.
It must be prevented from entering us.
You and me in a house, far away from it all,
far from the noises of the city that haunt us like a melody going round in our heads.
There’s also a boy who thinks he’s a ghost.
All I know here is you and the joy of being together.
The house is sheltered by the shade of the trees.
We’ve leaned against their bark and now our T-shirts are stained with sugar.
You often used to ask me, why have we come here?
It is because we had to get far away from all you know, so the trees would be strangers to you,
so you wouldn’t recognize the fruits, the flowers,
the words on the biscuit packets.
But what happened?
Tons of things, tons of stories unafraid to be called reality.
Often we walk side by side, between us there is no room to think that the sky is begrimed or that summer is ending.
And then there’s that little picture in a pocket, streaked with white where the photograph had been folded, and another in a box, which one day went missing because we were foolhardy enough to think we’d like to forget it forever.
Bettina Blanc-Penther
Born in Cannes in 1991, Bettina Blanc-Penther lives and works in Paris.
After studying Modern literature at the Sorbonne, she graduated from the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, Paris, in 2015, with a thesis on the writer’s body (Le Corps de l’écrivain) analysing writing as a transition between memory and creation.
Parallel to her project for Le Fresnoy, she performed in Footballeuses, a project by choreographer Mickaël Phelippeau.
