Une enquête sous le visibleLe Quotidien de l'Art, 12 mai 2021 Par Léa Bismuth Article rédigé dans le cadre du Prix Ekphrasis organisé conjointement par l'Adagp et Aica France |
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Isabelle Giovacchini est-elle photographe ? On peut être tenté de répondre par la négative. Il faudrait ajouter alors qu’elle pratique la photographie pour mieux réaliser des expérimentations techniques et des combinaisons de gestes poétiques, poussant en permanence le médium à ses limites. En mars 2021, ses recherches sur le Lac de Nemi intitulées L’Esprit du lieu l'ont menée à Milan. Jusqu'à juin, elle est maintenant accueillie en résidence de recherche et de post-production au Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France (CPIF, Pontault-Combault) pour le même projet. Cet été enfin, en résidant plusieurs semaines en Italie avec le soutien de l'Institut Français et de la Villa Médicis, elle assistera aux prochaines fouilles archéologiques du lac. Expérimenter c’est transgresser. C’est aussi révéler une visibilité non détectable à l’œil nu. L’opération technique qui s’engage en ce sens est un saut dans l’inconnu, aux frontières incertaines. De l’image-fixe aux images-mouvements, tout peut devenir à la fois matière à manipulation et objet de fascination. Parler d’obsession n’est pas excessif : il s’agit de débusquer les signes d’une enquête sans nom, à travers plusieurs parcours parallèles d’investigation, de l’archive à l’étude de terrain. Des indices ont été dissimulés et c’est à l’artiste de les retrouver, adoptant pour cela une méthode subversive, c’est-à-dire la recherche active de ce qu’il y a en-dessous, sous la surface et sous la peau du visible. L’ambition est celle de révéler ce qui gît par-delà les apparences. À la recherche de la lumière Une histoire me revient en mémoire : celle d’un enfant enfermé dans un placard par des parents punitifs : « cette forme de punition ne m’effraya plus quand je découvris une solution : cacher, dans un coin, une lampe de poche à lumière verte et rouge. Lorsqu’on m’enfermait, je cherchais ma lampe dans sa cachette et je dirigeais son faisceau de lumière contre le mur en imaginant que j’étais au cinéma (1)». J’ai longtemps pensé à cette scène, l’enfant déjouant la blessure par l’invention d’un monde d’ombre lumineuses et colorées. Le cinéma, en tant que rêve éveillé, est bien la chambre crépusculaire et secrète depuis laquelle naissent et s’épanouissent les images. Cette histoire d’enfance est celle d’Ingmar Bergman [1918-2007], devenu plus tard le cinéaste que l’on connait. Si elle est objet de réminiscence, c’est que le travail d’Isabelle Giovacchini est imprégné d’une quête d’émerveillement de même que d’éblouissement, pour faire parler l’invisible, révéler l’in-vu, et dialoguer avec un insaisissable toujours affleurant. La lanterne magique serait-elle échappée salvatrice et manière de conjurer le sort ? En voyant Ambre (2006), l’une des premières installations, consistant en l’agrandissement d’un morceau d’ambre dans un projecteur à diapositives, je pense en effet aux flammes dansant sur les parois des grottes de même qu’à l’invention du cinéma. Bergman n’est-il pas un lecteur de son compatriote suédois Auguste Strindberg [1849-1912], qui fut à la fois écrivain, dramaturge, mais aussi un grand expérimentateur photographique ? La découverte de Strindberg a été déterminante pour Isabelle Giovacchini qui puise chez lui un goût de l’expérience et de l’invisible, du lointain et de l’inconscient. Tout cela résonne dans La Sonate des spectres (2) qu’elle met en scène en excédant le lisible et le visible. Strindberg a très tôt tenté de photographier les étoiles sans appareil et a travaillé au sténopé. Frayant avec l’occultisme, il a aussi cherché à sonder les âmes par le portrait. Les tentatives de Strindberg pour photographier les nuages entrent bien entendu en écho avec la série Mehr Licht (nuages) (2012), des photogrammes latents de nuages aux teintes rosées, comme autant de formes laiteuses sur le point de disparaître. Strindberg, tout comme Giovacchini, opèrent ainsi par l’oxymore, entre « mysticisme rationnel » (3) et « naturalisme de l’invisible » (4). Ici, tout est sur le fil, sur le point de, à la lisière : Vanishing Points, Quid sit lumen, Leçon de ténèbres, les titres des œuvres sont les chapitres d’un conte se construisant pas à pas, au point d’intersection de l’illusion et de la réalité. Du Mercantour à Nemi, obsédante Méditerranée Depuis 2013, Isabelle Giovacchini a intégré à sa démarche une dimension géographique. Quand fond la neige (2013-2017) est une promenade à travers les lacs du Parc national du Mercantour, situé dans le Sud-Est de la France. Elle prend pour sujet principal la surface des lacs de la région, dont les noms et les légendes qu’ils colportent convoquent immédiatement un imaginaire puissant : le Lac Noir, les Lacs du Diable… À les voir sur des sites touristiques, ces lacs fleurent bon la randonnée en montagne. C’est précisément là que le détournement intervient : après avoir récupéré des prises de vue dans la photothèque du Parc national, l’artiste efface les lacs de la surface de l’image à l’aide de ferrocyanure de potassium. Par manipulation, elle obtient aussi des images agrandies, en noir et blanc, et révélant leur matière. Les lacs ne sont plus que des béances d’un blanc immaculé, comme le point focal d’une absence, en plein cœur du paysage désormais lunaire. Les pentes montagneuses et rugueuses se finissent en cratères et se détachent d’un ciel chargé en grain. Peu de temps après avoir réalisé cette série, et poursuivant son exploration de l'arrière-pays niçois, l’artiste-marcheuse réalise une performance invisible en dispersant dans le paysage des moulages de petits fossiles en forme d’étoiles jadis présents dans la région : Atlas des étoiles (2018) est un geste conceptuel d’offrande. C’est en suivant la piste des lacs — et dans un périmètre qui reste manifestement méditerranéen en appelant aussi aux origines de l’artiste — que nous nous retrouvons à Nemi, en Italie, aux abords d’un lac volcanique situé non loin de Rome. Nemi, ce lieu éminemment chargé, est depuis l’Antiquité le sanctuaire de la déesse Diane. Sous le règne de Caligula, le site accueille de gigantesques navires, tous coulés et disparus dans les profondeurs du lac à la mort de l’empereur. En 1929, suite à une vidange du lac, les navires mythiques sont retrouvés, et des fouilles archéologiques commencent sous la houlette de Mussolini. Lors d’un temps de résidence à la Villa Médicis en 2020, Isabelle Giovacchini a pu explorer le lac et commencer à dresser un inventaire, encore aujourd’hui loin d’être terminé (5), à partir des archives de ces fouilles lacustres, conservées au Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci de Milan, et mises à disposition de l’artiste dans le cadre de ce travail. Celui-ci, intitulé pour le moment L'Esprit du lieu, se matérialise déjà sous la forme d’œuvres-fragments d’un récit en construction : mentionnons Le Miroir de Diane (2020), ready-made d’une carte postale argentique du lac de Nemi ; ou encore Longue vue, l’assemblage de deux cartes postales représentant le lac aux alentours de 1930. Études d’un culte (une série de dix photographies, 2020), tourne littéralement autour d’une statue votive, pour mieux en percer le secret. Habitées de la présence de reflets à la surface de l’image, les huit dernières images de la série sont néanmoins rougeoyantes : cette couleur est obtenue par l’apposition du doigt de la main sur le flash au moment de la prise de vue, ce qui donne chair à l’image, l’incarne, tout en lui conférant une dimension sacrificielle. Une histoire labyrinthique reste donc à écrire, mêlant prélèvements réels et sources kaléidoscopiques. Et nous aurons saisi que cette méthode d’enquête à l’affût du sensible ouvrira sans doute sur une possible fiction. Léa Bismuth Née en 1983, Léa Bismuth est autrice, critique d’art, commissaire d’exposition. Son écriture se déploie du texte monographique au récit littéraire. Elle est spécialiste de la pensée de Georges Bataille, à qui elle a consacré le cycle curatorial La Traversée des Inquiétudes (Labanque, Béthune, de 2016 à 2019) et le livre La Besogne des Images (Editions Filigranes, 2019). Elle a imaginé des expositions pour le Musée Delacroix, le BAL, les Rencontres d’Arles, le Drawing Lab, l’URDLA, les Tanneries, ou les Nouvelles Vagues du Palais de Tokyo. (1) Ingmar Bergman, Laterna Magica, Folio Gallimard, 1987, p. 20.
(2) La Sonate des spectres est à l’origine une pièce de théâtre d’August Strindberg (1907). Elle sera notamment reprise et mise en scène par Bergman en 1973 et 2000. Isabelle Giovacchini réalise une vidéo éponyme en 2010, à partir d’un montage vidéo de la pièce de Strindberg, transposée en caractères de sténographie. (3) Lire à ce propos Strindberg : La tête de mort (Acherontia Atropos) - Essai de mysticisme rationnel, in Inferno, 1897, L'Imaginaire Gallimard, 1996, p. 62. (4) Clément Chéroux, L’expérience photographique d’Auguste Strindberg, Actes Sud, 1994, p. 77. (5) Précisons que cette recherche, initiée par l’artiste en 2019, avec le soutien de la Villa Médicis, de l’École Française de Rome, des Amis du NMWA de Washington, de l'Institut Français et du Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, est actuellement en cours et sans cesse repoussée en raison de la crise sanitaire : elle devrait mener à un livre et à une exposition. |
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An Inquiry beneath the Visible
Traduction : Joséphine Michel
Is Isabelle Giovacchini a photographer? One might be tempted to preclude this. But then one should add that she practices photography to better carry out technical experiments and combinations of poetic gestures, constantly pushing the medium to its limits. In March 2021, her research on Lake Nemi entitled L'Esprit du lieu (Genius Loci) led her to Milan. She is in residence until June at the Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France (CPIF, Pontault-Combault) for research and post-production on the same project. Finally, this summer, while based for several weeks in Italy with the support of the French Institute and the Villa Medici, she will attend the next archaeological excavations of the lake.
Experimenting is transgressing. It also means revealing a visibility that is not detectable to the naked eye. The technical operation that engages in this sense is a leap into the unknown, with uncertain boundaries. From the still image to moving images, everything can become at the same time a subject for manipulation and an object of fascination. Speaking of obsession is not excessive: it is a question of unearthing the signs of an unnamed investigation, through several parallel paths of investigation, from the archive to the field study. Clues have been concealed and it is up to the artist to find them again, adopting a subversive method, that is to say, an active search for what is beneath, under the surface and under the skin of the visible. The ambition is to reveal what lies beyond appearances.
Searching for light
A story comes to mind: that of a child locked in a cupboard by punitive parents. “This form of punishment lost its terror when I found a solution. I hid a torch with a red and green light in a corner of the cupboard. When I was shut in, I hunted out my torch, directed the beam of light at the wall and pretended I was at the cinema.” I thought about this scene for a long time, the child thwarting the wound by inventing a world of bright and colourful shadows. Cinema, as a waking dream, is indeed the twilight and secret chamber from which images are born and flourish. This is the childhood story of Ingmar Bergman [1918-2007], who later became the filmmaker we know today. If it is an object of reminiscence, it is because Isabelle Giovacchini's work is imbued with a quest for wonder as well as dazzle, to make the invisible speak, to reveal the unseen, and to dialogue with an ever-flush elusiveness. Is the magic lantern a saving escape and a way to ward off fate? Seeing Ambre (Amber) (2006), one of the first installations, consisting of the enlargement of a piece of amber in a slide projector, I think indeed of the flames dancing on the walls of caves and the invention of cinema.
Is Bergman not a reader of his Swedish compatriot Auguste Strindberg [1849-1912], who was a writer and playwright, but also a great photographic experimenter? Strindberg's discovery was decisive for Isabelle Giovacchini, who drew from him a taste for experience and the invisible, the distant and the unconscious. All this resonates in La Sonate des Spectres (The Sonata of the Spectres) which she stages by going beyond the legible and the visible. Strindberg tried very early on to photograph the stars without a camera and worked with pinhole cameras. Consorting with the occult, he also sought to probe souls through portraiture. Strindberg's attempts to photograph clouds are of course echoed in the series Mehr Licht (Nuages) (Mehr Licht (Clouds)) (2012), latent photograms of clouds with rosy hues, milky forms on the verge of disappearing. Strindberg, like Giovacchini, thus operates by oxymoron, between "rational mysticism" and "naturalism of the invisible". Here, everything is on the edge, on the point of, at the threshold: Vanishing Points, Quid sit lumen, Leçon de ténèbres (Lesson of Darkness), the titles of the works are the chapters of a tale that is built step by step, at the point of intersection of illusion and reality.
From Mercantour to Nemi, a haunting Mediterranean
Since 2013, Isabelle Giovacchini has integrated a geographical dimension into her approach. Quand fond la neige (When Melts the Snow) (2013-2017) is a walk through the lakes of the Mercantour National Park, located in the South-East of France. Its main subject is the surface area of the region's lakes, whose names and legends immediately conjure up a powerful imagination: the Black Lake, the Devil's Lakes... If you see them on tourist sites, these lakes are a delight to walk around in the mountains. This is precisely where the hijacking comes in: after retrieving shots from the National Park's photo library, the artist erases the lakes from the surface of the image using potassium ferrocyanide. By manipulation, she also obtains enlarged black and white images, revealing their material. The lakes are now nothing more than immaculate white gaps, like the focal point of an absence, in the heart of the by now lunar landscape. The rough, mountainous slopes end in craters and stand out against a grainy sky. Shortly after completing this series, and continuing her exploration of the hinterland of Nice, the artist-walker creates an invisible performance by scattering in the landscape casts of small star-shaped fossils once present in the region: Atlas des étoiles (Star Atlas) (2018) is a conceptual gesture of offering.
Following the trail of the lakes - and in a perimeter whose landscape remains clearly Mediterranean, also calling to the artist's origins - we find ourselves in Nemi, Italy, on the shores of a volcanic lake not far from Rome. Nemi, this eminently charged place, has been the sanctuary of the goddess Diana since ancient times. During the reign of Caligula, the site was home to gigantic ships, all of which sank and disappeared in the depths of the lake on the death of the emperor. In 1929, after the lake was emptied, the mythical ships were found, and archaeological excavations began under the leadership of Mussolini. During a period of residence at Villa Medici in 2020, Isabelle Giovacchini was able to explore the lake and begin to draw up an inventory, which is still far from complete, based on the archives of the lake excavations, kept at the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, and made available to the artist for this work. This work, provisionally entitled L’Esprit du lieu (Genius Loci), is already materialising in the form of work-fragments of a story under construction: we can mention Le Miroir de Diane (The Mirror of Diana) (2020), a ready-made silver postcard of Lake Nemi; or Longue vue (Distant View), the assembly of two postcards depicting the lake around 1930. Études d'un culte (Studies of a Cult) (a series of ten photographs, 2020), literally revolves around a votive statue, to better unravel its secret. Inhabited by the presence of reflections on the surface of the picture, the last eight images of the series are nevertheless glowing red: this colour is obtained by placing the finger of the hand on the flash at the time of shooting, which gives flesh to the image, embodies it, while imparting a sacrificial dimension. A labyrinthine story therefore remains to be written, mixing real samples and kaleidoscopic sources. And we will have grasped that this method of investigation on the lookout for the sensitive will undoubtedly open up a possible fiction.
Léa Bismuth
Born in 1983, Léa Bismuth is a writer, art critic and curator. She is a specialist in the thought of Georges Bataille, to whom she devoted a curatorial cycle, La Traversée des Inquiétudes (Labanque, Béthune, from 2016 to 2019) and the book La Besogne des Images (Editions Filigranes, 2019). She has conceived exhibitions for the Musée Delacroix, the BAL, the Rencontres d’Arles, the Drawing Lab, the URDLA, the Tanneries, or the Nouvelles Vagues of the Palais de Tokyo.
Experimenting is transgressing. It also means revealing a visibility that is not detectable to the naked eye. The technical operation that engages in this sense is a leap into the unknown, with uncertain boundaries. From the still image to moving images, everything can become at the same time a subject for manipulation and an object of fascination. Speaking of obsession is not excessive: it is a question of unearthing the signs of an unnamed investigation, through several parallel paths of investigation, from the archive to the field study. Clues have been concealed and it is up to the artist to find them again, adopting a subversive method, that is to say, an active search for what is beneath, under the surface and under the skin of the visible. The ambition is to reveal what lies beyond appearances.
Searching for light
A story comes to mind: that of a child locked in a cupboard by punitive parents. “This form of punishment lost its terror when I found a solution. I hid a torch with a red and green light in a corner of the cupboard. When I was shut in, I hunted out my torch, directed the beam of light at the wall and pretended I was at the cinema.” I thought about this scene for a long time, the child thwarting the wound by inventing a world of bright and colourful shadows. Cinema, as a waking dream, is indeed the twilight and secret chamber from which images are born and flourish. This is the childhood story of Ingmar Bergman [1918-2007], who later became the filmmaker we know today. If it is an object of reminiscence, it is because Isabelle Giovacchini's work is imbued with a quest for wonder as well as dazzle, to make the invisible speak, to reveal the unseen, and to dialogue with an ever-flush elusiveness. Is the magic lantern a saving escape and a way to ward off fate? Seeing Ambre (Amber) (2006), one of the first installations, consisting of the enlargement of a piece of amber in a slide projector, I think indeed of the flames dancing on the walls of caves and the invention of cinema.
Is Bergman not a reader of his Swedish compatriot Auguste Strindberg [1849-1912], who was a writer and playwright, but also a great photographic experimenter? Strindberg's discovery was decisive for Isabelle Giovacchini, who drew from him a taste for experience and the invisible, the distant and the unconscious. All this resonates in La Sonate des Spectres (The Sonata of the Spectres) which she stages by going beyond the legible and the visible. Strindberg tried very early on to photograph the stars without a camera and worked with pinhole cameras. Consorting with the occult, he also sought to probe souls through portraiture. Strindberg's attempts to photograph clouds are of course echoed in the series Mehr Licht (Nuages) (Mehr Licht (Clouds)) (2012), latent photograms of clouds with rosy hues, milky forms on the verge of disappearing. Strindberg, like Giovacchini, thus operates by oxymoron, between "rational mysticism" and "naturalism of the invisible". Here, everything is on the edge, on the point of, at the threshold: Vanishing Points, Quid sit lumen, Leçon de ténèbres (Lesson of Darkness), the titles of the works are the chapters of a tale that is built step by step, at the point of intersection of illusion and reality.
From Mercantour to Nemi, a haunting Mediterranean
Since 2013, Isabelle Giovacchini has integrated a geographical dimension into her approach. Quand fond la neige (When Melts the Snow) (2013-2017) is a walk through the lakes of the Mercantour National Park, located in the South-East of France. Its main subject is the surface area of the region's lakes, whose names and legends immediately conjure up a powerful imagination: the Black Lake, the Devil's Lakes... If you see them on tourist sites, these lakes are a delight to walk around in the mountains. This is precisely where the hijacking comes in: after retrieving shots from the National Park's photo library, the artist erases the lakes from the surface of the image using potassium ferrocyanide. By manipulation, she also obtains enlarged black and white images, revealing their material. The lakes are now nothing more than immaculate white gaps, like the focal point of an absence, in the heart of the by now lunar landscape. The rough, mountainous slopes end in craters and stand out against a grainy sky. Shortly after completing this series, and continuing her exploration of the hinterland of Nice, the artist-walker creates an invisible performance by scattering in the landscape casts of small star-shaped fossils once present in the region: Atlas des étoiles (Star Atlas) (2018) is a conceptual gesture of offering.
Following the trail of the lakes - and in a perimeter whose landscape remains clearly Mediterranean, also calling to the artist's origins - we find ourselves in Nemi, Italy, on the shores of a volcanic lake not far from Rome. Nemi, this eminently charged place, has been the sanctuary of the goddess Diana since ancient times. During the reign of Caligula, the site was home to gigantic ships, all of which sank and disappeared in the depths of the lake on the death of the emperor. In 1929, after the lake was emptied, the mythical ships were found, and archaeological excavations began under the leadership of Mussolini. During a period of residence at Villa Medici in 2020, Isabelle Giovacchini was able to explore the lake and begin to draw up an inventory, which is still far from complete, based on the archives of the lake excavations, kept at the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, and made available to the artist for this work. This work, provisionally entitled L’Esprit du lieu (Genius Loci), is already materialising in the form of work-fragments of a story under construction: we can mention Le Miroir de Diane (The Mirror of Diana) (2020), a ready-made silver postcard of Lake Nemi; or Longue vue (Distant View), the assembly of two postcards depicting the lake around 1930. Études d'un culte (Studies of a Cult) (a series of ten photographs, 2020), literally revolves around a votive statue, to better unravel its secret. Inhabited by the presence of reflections on the surface of the picture, the last eight images of the series are nevertheless glowing red: this colour is obtained by placing the finger of the hand on the flash at the time of shooting, which gives flesh to the image, embodies it, while imparting a sacrificial dimension. A labyrinthine story therefore remains to be written, mixing real samples and kaleidoscopic sources. And we will have grasped that this method of investigation on the lookout for the sensitive will undoubtedly open up a possible fiction.
Léa Bismuth
Born in 1983, Léa Bismuth is a writer, art critic and curator. She is a specialist in the thought of Georges Bataille, to whom she devoted a curatorial cycle, La Traversée des Inquiétudes (Labanque, Béthune, from 2016 to 2019) and the book La Besogne des Images (Editions Filigranes, 2019). She has conceived exhibitions for the Musée Delacroix, the BAL, the Rencontres d’Arles, the Drawing Lab, the URDLA, the Tanneries, or the Nouvelles Vagues of the Palais de Tokyo.
(1) Ingmar Bergman, 2007: The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, University of Chicago Press, p9.
(2) La Sonate des spectres was originally a play by August Strindberg (1907). It was notably taken up and directed by Bergman in 1973 and 2000. Isabelle Giovacchini made a video of the same name in 2010, based on a montage of Strindberg's play, transposed into shorthand characters.
(3) Cf August Strindberg, 1996: “La tête de mort (Acherontia Atropos) - Essai de mysticisme rationnel”, Inferno (1897), L’Imaginaire, Gallimard.
(4) Clément Chéroux, 1994: L’expérience photographique d’August Strindberg, Actes Sud, p77.
(5) It should be noted that this research, initiated by the artist in 2019, with the support of the Villa Medici, the French School of Rome, the Friends of the NMWA in Washington, the French Institute and the Centre Photographique d'Île-de-France, is currently underway but is constantly being postponed due to the health crisis: it should lead to a book and an exhibition.
(2) La Sonate des spectres was originally a play by August Strindberg (1907). It was notably taken up and directed by Bergman in 1973 and 2000. Isabelle Giovacchini made a video of the same name in 2010, based on a montage of Strindberg's play, transposed into shorthand characters.
(3) Cf August Strindberg, 1996: “La tête de mort (Acherontia Atropos) - Essai de mysticisme rationnel”, Inferno (1897), L’Imaginaire, Gallimard.
(4) Clément Chéroux, 1994: L’expérience photographique d’August Strindberg, Actes Sud, p77.
(5) It should be noted that this research, initiated by the artist in 2019, with the support of the Villa Medici, the French School of Rome, the Friends of the NMWA in Washington, the French Institute and the Centre Photographique d'Île-de-France, is currently underway but is constantly being postponed due to the health crisis: it should lead to a book and an exhibition.