Dear Chloé,

I see two questions which seem central to your work. You have a very photographic approach of framing the image. By this I mean the framing brings the attention to all which is excluded from the picture, all what remains outside of the frame. Usually the film process gives the impression – through movement and editing – you experience all the space you’re looking at. In your “photographic” way of framing, the viewer has the impression he or she is looking at a little part of space which remains unknown. In your installations this is accentuated by the presence of the volumes. They not only repeat some elements of the videos, they also give me the impression I am in my space and not in the space of the image.
That’s why I referred to the discussion of Michael Fried against Robert Morris at the end of the sixties (Art and Objecthood, published in 1967). In this book Fried criticizes the “theatricality” of Minimalist art. The more interesting part of this reflection is in the opposite term “absorption” he introduces in his 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot.

The question of “absorption” in Diderot’s terms, is an interesting starting point to understand several aspects of your work. Not only in the opposition between minimal elements (and your interest in the setting of an exposition in general) and the filmed spaces and bodies, but also in the non-acting condition of the bodies you are filming. We talked about the biopolitical condition of the bodies (a term of Foucault): The body does not act and behave to its own will or desire, it can also act in response to a larger, not situated will or desire. Like a puppet driven by small cables, the body acts following a social will, doing what is required, without having any possibility, as an individual, to question itself about the way and reason of its acting. The bodies in your work often seem to be driven by a biopolitical will.

It’s interesting to look from this approach at the more intimate and personal aspects of your work and your interest in the photographs of your father, the body of your mother and more generally their relation to private space. It seems to me, you look at this context with a certain distance. At the same time you are involved in a shared memory, which makes you a driven body yourself through the family inheritance. This relation can be seen as split, like your video installations, in a given objecthood (the real space of the exhibition, but also the real space of family life) and absorption (the externality which dominates the way you frame spaces and bodies). The way you capture these atmospheres of familiar life conditions becomes a complex space of distance and presence.

Best,
Bernhard