Thursday, March 13 – Sunday, March 30
le puits
Agnès GUILLAUME
Chapelle de l’Ancien Hôpital Général
Right alley
Opening hours :
Tuesday to Saturday, 1pm to 7pm
Sunday from 2pm to 6pm
Free access
This post is also available in: Français (French)
Chapelle de l’Ancien Hôpital Général
The work:
A place of mystery and legend, the well has always preserved what has been entrusted to it. What if buried memories were to emerge from this still water, like so many unpredictable reflections of our memory? Agnès Guillaume’s Le Puits reinvents this space as a threshold towards ourselves, an opening where our history resurfaces, fragmented, like constantly reconfiguring flashes.
At the bottom of this well, the water vibrates, becomes turbid and metamorphoses into images and sounds. Light waves meet fragments of bodies, a child’s feet move underwater, a face floats, fragile. The images and sounds pass by and merge into a series of sensitive reminiscences, imprecise snatches rising in waves only to disappear again, like the foam of an uncertain memory.
Leaning over the coping then becomes an intimate gesture of confrontation: the memory is not exposed, but hidden at the bottom, inviting each spectator to approach and let themselves drift to the whim of their own emotions.
The artist:
Agnès Guillaume was born in Leuven in 1962. She works between Brussels and Paris.
Trained as a musician, she turned to video art in 2010. Since then, her practice has expanded to include mixed media on paper embroidery and sculpture.
Mirrors of the intimate, Agnès Guillaume’s videos poetically reflect self-awareness, suggesting the coexistence of a multiple intimate reality which the viewer is led to re-recognize. They are often designed to be exhibited as sculptures. In opposition to any certainty or and single-mindedness, they invite an open, critical and personal gaze.
Prints on paper taken from certain videos and reworked in mixed media, more than a trace of the video, durably materialize the sensation that never ceases to fade in the moving image.
Agnès Guillaume also makes embroideries based on her own drawings. Small, intimate formats, as well as a major series of large male nudes.
Her work is enjoying growing international success and is included in public and private collections.
Artist PORTRAIT:
MORE INFORMATIONS...
Interview by Fanny Bauguil (VIDEOFORMES relay teacher) and Manon Derobert (VIDEOFORMES communications manager)
- How would you describe this installation? What do we see? What do we hear? What’s going on?
Attracted by a strange soundtrack, you climb onto a platform, approach a well, lean over the coping and watch the images scroll across a screen at the bottom of the well. These are images of stagnant water, waves, foam and flashes that are not always identifiable.
- What’s it all about?
It doesn’t speak. As everyone wants, it bewitches, it evokes, it innervates memories.
- Is this the first time this installation has been presented to the public? Can you tell us a little about the creative process that led to this result?
This is the first time the Well has been presented to the public. The inspiration for the first images came to me in the summer of ’24, and I immediately filmed what I could – I happened to be at the seaside. I started editing at the end of September, mixing recently filmed sequences with water shots filmed over the years and a few open-access shots. Color-grading and soundtracking followed, and everything was finished by the end of November, along with the installation (well and stage).
- What artists (from all disciplines) or art forms in general inspire your work, and what references, if any, do you draw on for this installation?
I look at a lot of things in all kinds of media. They get mixed up in my memory and then feed my projects without me trying to link them to any particular reference. I don’t do it voluntarily, but I know that the references are there for those who are looking for them.
- What problems, constraints and challenges did you encounter in the development of this project?
The biggest constraint in this project was the few usable images I had of the little girl. The video was built from these few images.
- Can you give us one or more Internet links where we can see your work?
agnesguillaume.com #agnesguillaume
- Can you give us a few keywords that might describe your installation?
water, waves, little girl, memories, monster, black, bend over…
- A few words about your artistic career? At what point in your life did you become interested in digital art? Can you make a living from your art?
I’m a musician by training (opera singing), and I’ve also acted and written. I started doing video in 2010, without any idea of where I was going, and I’ve been at it ever since, expanding my artistic practice to include embroidery. I can’t make a living from it, but depending on the year, I sometimes earn more than my production costs.