Christian Boltanski
Les archives du cœur
Marie Cool Fabio Balducci
Untitled (2004-2008)
September 14th – October 5th 2008
10 bd de la bastille
75012 Paris, france
Christian Boltanski, Les archives du cœur
In September 2008, la maison rouge invites Christian Boltanski to create an exhibition around his 2005 installation, Le Cœur.
A question – Qui êtes-vous? (Who are you?) (2008) – leaps out at visitors as they approach the exhibition where, inside a pitch-black room, they come face to face with Le Coeur (The Heart): a light bulb that flicks on and off to the sound of the artist’s heartbeat, filling the space with a perpetual movement between life and death. It is completed by a video work -Entre-temps (Between Times) (2003) – that shows fade-overs of the artist’s face from childhood to the age of 60.
For the 37th Festival d’Automne à Paris, Christian Boltanski wished to take Le Coeur a stage further and compile what he calls “les archives du coeur” (archives from the heart).
The artist continues his investigation of “small memories”, as he likes to remind us, by inviting each of the exhibition’s visitors to record their own heartbeat in a specially-installed booth. In doing so they contribute to “Christian Boltanski, les archives du coeur.” Visitors can, if they wish, buy a recording of their heartbeat on an analogue disc.
This archiving, initiated by la maison rouge, will take place simultaneously at the Christian Boltanski exhibition at Magasin 3 in Stockholm.
The artist wishes to go on collecting these recordings alongside other projects that will be put to him over the next few years, thereby adding to the archives ad infinitum will be preserved in a sound library installed permanently on the island of Ejima in the Sea of Japan. “There was an island in the Sea of Japan, where all the men’s hearts were gathered: here is a legend.”(Christian Boltanski)
Exhibition organised in partnership with the Festival d’Automne à Paris.
Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, Untitled (2004-2008)
For three weeks, during the foundation’s usual opening times, artists Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci will take over part of the exhibition space at la maison rouge for continuous periods of 9 or 11 hours, with movements and actions, repeated over and over by Marie Cool, or with a projection of videos showing actions that are not performed live.
Far from being a physical performance, Marie Cool’s actions are an exploration of extreme simplicity, duration and the elongation of time.
“Cool and Balducci’s work inheres not in the world of signs, codes or concept, but in the shocking elementariness of matter. As such, their actions are articulated not in the register of the image or representation, but rather as expressions (…) Slipping deliberately through the interstices produced by the historical division of intellectual and affective cognition, the actions are neither descriptive nor demonstrative; they engage, quite simply, with the ‘nothing that is’ (Giorgio Colli).”
excerpt from Amanda Crawley Jackson’s text for the exhibition Marie Cool Fabio Balducci at the Site Gallery (Sheffield, England) 2008.
