LAC LECLERC, PARC NATIONAL DU MONT ORFORD, 3 MARCH 2019
The reefs fade and reappear in bursts. Ouessant vanishes into the mist.
An environment most conducive to continuing research on evanescence. During the residency at the Créac’h semaphore in June 2018, I conducted a series of performative excursions along the coastline, searching for ephemeral landscapes and engaging with the people inhabiting them. I undertook long, meandering walks through these mists and fogs, which favored disorientation and intuitive wandering.
From the semaphore, I gathered a collection of video sequences from pathways and experiences carried out on the island and elsewhere between January and July 2018. These sequences capture ripples and swells intermingling, where fogs and horizons blend into one another through a slow “dissolution of images.” These video projects, titled Le Souffle and La Dilution, will be incorporated in 2019 into a corpus of works combining installations, sculptures, photographs, performances, in-situ/in-socius interventions, geopoetic maps, and archives presented across various Atlantic coastal sites and beyond as part of the Îles Jardins Îles Paradis project.
Maumusson
The video installation Maumusson poetically addresses the shifting forces and murky zones that define the relationship between sea and land, as well as between humans and their environment. This video optic reveals, on one hand, an animated cartography derived from scientific studies on the perpetual movements of underwater sediments, and on the other, a video sequence captured during a human operation to backfill a beach on an island. The work evokes this perpetual and fragile motion of the sea gaining on the land and the land gaining on the sea.
(Sound composition by Pierre-Luc Sénécal)
Evanescence – Le Souffle
The video Evanescence – Le Souffle explores the theme of dilution. Visual sequences intertwine and slowly merge through a “dissolution of images,” drawing us into a kind of visual flow that gradually gains momentum, from one tributary to the next.
Patrick Beaulieu
Patrick Beaulieu is a transdisciplinary artist. Intrinsically tied to the question of mobility, his projects explore relationships with territories, addressing the boundaries between geographic and social spaces, as well as those between reality and fiction, in an empirical manner. Fascinated by travel and its narratives, he focuses on elusive phenomena that surround us (migratory, meteorological, spiritual…) and the forces that act within them.
For over a decade, his work has been shaped through performative excursions across North America, Europe, and Asia, during which he tracks the signs of a hidden geography where political divisions dissolve under the light of poetic revelations. Collaborating with writers, geographers, and philosophers, he completed in 2013 the trilogy of transboundary odysseys VVV. This trilogy consisted of: following, by land, the aerial trajectory of the annual monarch butterfly migration (Vecteur Monarque, 2007); pursuing the winds of America for 25 days in a sort of continental navigation (Ventury, 2010); and surrendering to destiny and chance along the paths of randomness (Vegas, 2012).
In the summer of 2014, he embarked on a slow 25-day continental drift by kayak, navigating the meanders that took him from the source of a river in southern Quebec to the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York (Méandre). Between the summers of 2017 and 2018, he undertook the performative excursion EL PERDIDO, a Pan-American journey in search of places that do not exist. Starting point: Lost City, Oklahoma.
As part of the Îles Jardins Îles Paradis project, which connects art, ecology, and the poetics of living, Patrick Beaulieu and Gilles Clément shared their perceptions of Île d’Aix and Île Madame through multi-site and off-the-beaten-path exhibitions during the summer and autumn of 2019.
Under the artistic direction of Dominique Truco, Îles Jardins Îles Paradis unfolded over two years in two stages: in 2018, welcoming artists to the territories; and in 2019, presenting the artists’ research and creations through exhibitions across various sites along the Charente coastline.
