"IT FLOWS THROUGH LIFE LIKE WATER3 by Stéphane Ibars

On Thursday, November 23, 2023, at 7:30 p.m. and 9:15 p.m., Alix Boillot presents Grace, a performance inspired by her first months of research in Rome and created for the Villa Medici’s Nuit Blanche. The musician Valentina D’Angelo waits in the middle of the crowd surrounding the famous fountain in the Piazzale. She is wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. Her brown hair is loose. In her right hand she holds a pair of drumsticks. She approaches and sits on the edge of the fountain to take off her shoes, then steps into water that has remained strangely still since the beginning of the evening. Bathed in the nighttime glow, she slowly circles the basin four times, as if to acclimate herself to the autumnal temperature and initiate a movement that will continue throughout the performance. She finally sits on a stool whose seat skims the surface of the water, looks around her to envision the elements of a phantom instrument whose presence only she perceives, plunges her hands into the liquid with determination and plays. For 6 minutes, the drumsticks strike the water’s surface and her feet bounce off the ground to interpret every note of the score for “Grace,” the iconic song composed by Jeff Buckley in 1994 and released on the eponymous album, the only official work published during the artist’s lifetime. At first methodical, the musician’s playing becomes carried away by the rhythm of the orchestrated tumult of the water’s movements, initiating a shamanic trance that is as poetic as it is exhilarating. After finishing her performance with bare hands, Valentina D’Angelo lets an ecstatic smile spread across her exhausted face and leaves the fountain, whose waters are still rippling from her movements, spilling out for a moment toward the audience.

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Grace is one of the essential elements of the formal research undertaken by Alix Boillot since her residency at the French Academy in Rome. The performance is at the heart of a cycle of reflections and works that, for several years now, have been dedicated to the relationships we maintain with the sacred. Sculptures, installations, scenographies, performances, and publications appear in her work as the tangible results of the artist’s excavations into the depths of our individual and collective rites and the places that host their manifestation. She unearths the tangible traces of our attachment to that which, beyond its material value, invites devotion. These “things that make the heart beat,” to borrow the words of Sei Shōnagon, which undeniably captivate and transform crowds.

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In Rome, it is through the issue of water that his research takes shape. In this legendary city born of the Tiber—where the dizzying number of fountains and underground channels tell the story of how skillful water management enabled people to build a city whose influence on the political and artistic course of the world remains considerable: the artist has found an invaluable playground.

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In the particularly heightened attention she pays to this fundamental natural element—an accomplice in the evolution of human life since the dawn of time—she reveals the singularity of a body of work in constant evolution, marked by incessant back-and-forth movements between myths and concrete reality, where works are invented according to the situation in a perfect balance between resolution and dissolution. The water in question here is that which overflows any desire for rationalization. That which eludes chemists and engineers to find its way back to the poets. “It speaks of the origin of the world, not as an object among others, but as an opportunity for humanity to open itself to its world. The unique texture of water, in its plasticity and fluidity, becomes for humanity a way to attune its awakening to the world.”
 

Alix Boillot plays with the malleability of a shifting element whose state transforms with changes in the climate across space and time—a day, a week, a season, a lake, a river, a fountain, a snow-capped mountain, the sea—and the ways we use it. In Grace, the artist evokes turmoil and heroism through the trance of a musician who has become a hydra. One is reminded of the Trevi Fountain, where the sculpture of the god Oceanus and his team of horses and other tritons blend into an uninterrupted flow of water.
 

Elsewhere, in Abruzzo, the artist climbs the mountain to Campo Imperatore, at a time when snow covers the landscape. From there, one overlooks the snow-capped peaks of the Apennines, behind which appear, in the blue of the horizon, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. There she carves in the snow Adieu Beauté, the base of an ancient column with an ephemeral existence. According to the artist: “In his treatise on architecture, De architectura, Vitruvius sets forth the principle of the superimposition of the three classical orders: firmitas, utilitas, venustas—strong (or enduring), useful, and beautiful. This snow column, ephemeral and fragile, aspires only to beauty.”
 

The installation of this sculpture is reminiscent of Ad Vitam, created in 2021. A plaster mold broken into four pieces is displayed in an exhibition space. The various versions of the ceramic cup it once contained remain hidden. They were placed by the artist, in the presence of a witness, in a river, a lake, a sea, an ocean. Slightly underfired, the object carries within it its own system of decay, a process that will accelerate upon contact with the erosive power of water, which here becomes the work’s container.

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In the ritual repetition of these stagings of the ephemeral and disappearance, the artist accentuates with stunning poetry the sacred nature of the relationship we forge with her works and the elements that constitute their essence. What unfolds here is a kind of strange sedimentation, where the fragility of these gestures and these fleeting presences takes concrete form through repetition; in the memory of our bodies and our affected minds, or in the concrete reality of objects emerging from all these chambers of transformation.

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In 2023, Alix Boillot became even more deeply involved in this process of sedimentation. With the help of Brother Renaud, a Dominican priest she had met in Rome, she was granted permission to collect the coins tossed into the Trevi Fountain throughout Holy Week. The coins are then melted down in France to be incorporated into a sculpture in the form of a collective ex-voto born from the fusion of these scattered wishes, retrieved directly from the waters of the Holy City. The form is inspired by grotesque paintings, whose hybrid appearance captures that moment when beings and elements intertwine to invent mutating decorative forms that dissolve the boundaries between dream and reality. It also borrows their verticality, the skillful blend of rigor and inconsistency. Here again, a shifting world order is invented in which forms rise up and then disperse to reinvent themselves elsewhere - Ashes to ashes.

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It seems we will soon have to look elsewhere again, toward tears, that other state of water which our bodies, caught up in the tumult of the world, allow to escape—ephemeral traces of our shared emotions. For as part of the Lyon Biennale, the artist is embarking on a series of investigations into lacrimatoria, small glass vessels found near the deceased, whose sodium content suggests they hold the tears of grieving loved ones.
 

Throughout the artist’s work, water overflows, escapes, and flows to connect people to one another and to the world. One is reminded of certain images of tears: those by Meret Oppenheim on Man Ray’s photograph, those in the photographs of Sam Taylor-Wood’s Crying Men series, those of Sarah Bernhardt, eyes raised to the sky, weeping, photographed by W & D Downey in 1893, or the tears embroidered by Francesco Vezzoli on portraits of Roman emperors or famous Italian actresses. We are reminded of images of Anna Magnani in the final scene of Pasolini’s Mamma Roma or the faces of those mourners who, across the world, embrace the sorrow born of individual and collective tragedies.
 

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