Eveillée is presented as a situation of enunciation, in front of which we remain suspended between forms, images, sounds or impalpable situations. A mixture of elegance and unease can seize us, as each of us passes through a spectrum of sensations, from nightmare to dream.
Dreamlike and political, this exhibition can have a very concrete, direct echo on the public, but it can also be adorned with all possible undertones, expressing the richness of the artist’s pieces, serving sometimes as transmitter, sometimes as receiver, always as links between ourselves.
Mélanie Matranga speaks of her environment, transforming it into a burning testimony to a society that hesitates, suffers and questions itself. People, (People, 2022), live together, love each other, confide in each other, get angry. This is reflected in the attention paid to clothing: the uniformity of the actors’ costumes (Pharmakon, 2022), a simple white shirt; the fragile, light, symbolic lamps (Fortune light, 2015); the old T-shirts filled with suspended moments; the woven material is always charged, for the artist, with a visible and particular emotion.
There’s an elevation of voices here, a polyphony that transforms the viewer’s immersion into a more political situation, beyond the construction of cinematic forms and images. Language and vivid writing are at play in each of the pieces, whether video-based, sculptural or immersive, creating a blurred universe verging on disappearance (Nervous, 2023).
The Art Center’s space is thus altered in its perception: light and darkness, impassable thresholds (Salve, 2023), displaced partitions and doors (Éveillée and Endormie, 2023), the installations are full of skewed points of view, just as in the artist’s films, in which the camera always seems to infiltrate the intimacy of the characters without ever announcing itself.
Éveillée can be understood as an experience in which we immerse ourselves completely, our bodies mobilized in a space that becomes one, a maze of rooms between which an awakened thought is organized.
You enter the house, and on the left, you can plunge. First into the uncomfortable and dark cotton, then into the waves of a wild coast.
However, the surrounding sounds reveal a great calm. Perhaps it is white noise. Voices, from which rebellion is never far away. The violence within us is tinged with love, tinged with desire, frustration, possibilities. You can open one eye and quickly close it, out of modesty.
Ahead, there are doors. What does the back of the threshold hold? The halo that perspires and emerges doesn’t tell us much. We can lend an ear and close it again, out of modesty.
Maybe you’re in a movie, maybe you’re in a half-sleep, in that suspended moment just before the alarm rings. Perhaps it is also the day that reveals the strange sensation of these inner changes that make everything seem different.
