#82

Pauline Bastard
Bonne journée
solo show
06/09/2024 - 25/10/2024
opening Sunday 08/09/2024, 3 pm - 7 pm

 

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       Pauline Bastard’s exhibition is the result of a four-year experience in the Emmaüs community in Grenoble. It features the movie Bonne journée, shot in the shop and its warehouse, with objects which the majority of appear in the movie: curtains, fabrics, tables, photographs, lightboxes, a catalogue. On display are a gigantic jumper and an equally oversized shirt, both of which leave much to be desired in terms of craftsmanship and cuts. Piled up on a table they are neatly folded. Most of the artworks were conceived in collaboration with Emmaüs’ community using items recovered from the shops. They are functional and neat, yet not less atypical and awkward in appearance.
  As we know, Emmaüs’ non-profit organization community of which the economic model relies on donations – salvaging, reconditioning and then reselling second-hand goods -, aims to hire socially disadvantaged people, some of whom are waiting to be granted legal status, and promotes the circular nature of a virtuous conjecture. It is therefore in one of these places where, over the years, she had the opportunity to meet companions that Pauline Bastard has filmed, adding a parallel circuit of unnecessary and offbeat value to this economic model. The idea that has gradually taken shape, is to promote the presence and activities, the materials, the accessories or clothing, through advertising, by asking fellow companions to create with the available resources, a catalogue, photos and videos. This idea especially allowed her to spend time with the employees differently, and to express it through the objects’ design.
      Yet, for more than half of the movie, the circumstances are left unexplained. Sorting, repairing, waiting, observing, handling, sleeping, cleaning, posing, taking pictures; standing against a shelf, sitting or lying down: the people we see act rather than talk. They also depict small combinations of objects against a background of colored fabric, based on similarities, complementarity, encounter or closeness. Pauline Bastard proceeds by juxtaposing series of short shots, alternating between scenes of objects, situations or actions, fairly silent scenes, during which the companions, barely moving within the space, re-enact the usual course of their day in a slightly different way. These scenes are rhythmically linked to other demonstrative shots of life and work in these communities. These groups of shots then merge into a continuity. Pauline Bastard also plays with reflections on windows or glasses, thus incorporating counter-shots into the frames. This part of the movie immediately seems like a utopia, where the world of objects and the relationships the companions have with each other and with things are ambiguous enough. It turns out that one sees things differently here without them being explained – allowing time for contemplation. It also turns out that the ‘characters’ perform roughly the same activities and gestures, but in situations where everything has been slightly shifted. Pauline Bastard’s method consists in moving things around a little, composing with presences and worlds without ever damaging them. She establishes a calm, trivial, and factual time where one begins by observing and listening, defining a reality where a different type of relationship with objects, spaces, and others is materialized. It is characterized by delicacy, attentiveness, and simplicity. It is also a silence punctuated by the sound of things, gestures and the few words that are spoken. It is this way of constructing and filming that explains how she can so lightly adopt advertising codes to objectify a new alignment between form and function, person and object. The advertising play allows her to present the objects for what they are, showcasing them by offering portraits in action of those who handle and maintain them. This inevitably also affects the workspaces in the way they are experienced and inhabited.
      In the last part of the film, the advertising objects made by the companions - framed fashion photographs of which they are also the models, light boxes, videos, a catalogue - are displayed in the shop amongst all the other objects. They showcase clothes, accessories and trinkets, factually illustrating their uses or demonstrating the proper functioning of the screens. It should be noted that these decorative works, contributing in their way to the commercialization system, occupy their place amidst a certain indifference from the customers: they are no more important than the other elements. The film itself also resembles these objects to some extent. What is poignant is that they are unpretentious, trivial, lacking in grand qualities, and honest: the time spent by those who handled them is evident in the very spots where this work happened. This time also has the additional property of being part of a game that shifts the usual course of activities, a theatre that bears witness to another way of experiencing and thinking about them.
      We know that Franz Kafka mixed up realities and temporalities in his stories. And in a famous passage from Franz Kafka’s Diaries, he writes: ‘In the fight between you and the world, you back up the world’. There is something that resonates with this formula in Pauline Bastard's work, insofar as her opposition to the world is affirmatively constructed in the way she seconds it.

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Alexandre Costanzo

 

PRESS RELEASE​