Mark Geffriaud / Carole Douillard
In 1298, Marco Polo – by then in a prison cell in Genoa – wrote the book of his Travels, a narrative of early exploration in a highly poetic style expressing his wonderment at the exotic marvels he encountered. From India to the Far East and from the Gobi desert to the untold riches of Kublai Khan’s summer palace, Polo recalls the various stages of his journey, combining a geographical account of his travels with often excessively sublime descriptions. Marco Polo invented a new literary genre that was part fact, part fiction: the travel narrative. The last in the present season of Partitions (performances) reconsiders the genre through the eyes of two guest artists, with Carole Douillard building on her artistic experiences in Algeria and Marc Geffriaud drawing on his time in South America.
Carole Douillard: «Opening images (Algerian Journal)»
As part of the “Dog Life” research project launched in Algeria in 2013 with the support of the CNAP’s funding programme for 2013-2015, Carole Douillard pits the commonly imagined version of a territory against its reality, against the vision of a body constructed on the shores of the Atlantic under orders to free itself, against the body to be hidden on the other side of the Mediterranean, against the vision of female bodies, against male bodies, against a life that could have been different. The artist’s travel journal embarks on a journey through a profusion of first impressions, laying out after the event the fragments of a journey past, a narrative that we tell ourselves and recount to others.
Carole Douillard is a Franco-Algerian artist and performer born in Nantes to a French father and Algerian mother, whose nationality she took in 2012. She is a graduate of the Nantes School of Fine Arts. Her often minimalist projects present “forms” that are as much performance as sculpture, the principal medium being a human presence. Recent projects have taken place at the Frac Pays de la Loire, the Palais de Tokyo, the Mac/Val, the Maison populaire in Montreuil, the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, the Centre Pompidou, the Frac Alsace, the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, the Wiels in Brussels, the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, and the Ferme du Buisson and the Musée de la Danse in Rennes. She is one of the co-founders of the performance research platform think think think, together with Entre-deux (Marie-Laure Viale & Jacques Rivet), Oro/Loïc Touzé, Fabienne Compet, Isabelle Tellier, and Manon Rolland. Since 2015 she has been artist and researcher at the ACTE research unit at the CNRS and Université Paris 1 Panthéon La Sorbonne.
Mark Geffriaud, «Deux mille quinze»
Mark Geffriaud spent several months living with the Aymara people of the Lake Titicaca region on the border between Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, and Chile. According to the Aymaras’ unique understanding of time, the future is behind us and the past ahead, because “it is possible to study it. And if the future is uncertain, perhaps it is because it is hidden behind our backs”. This philosophy is not dissimilar to the reversal of the image on the human retina that is the current research focus of Mark Geffriaud, who is to edit and project the trailer for a forthcoming film – unless it is already on release.
Mark Geffriaud was born in Vitry-sur-Seine in 1977 and lives and works in Paris. He is a graduate of the Montpellier School of Fine Arts. Since 2007 Mark Geffriaud has been developing his artistic practice as a cameraless filmmaker, transposing the techniques of filming, editing, and projecting to the fields of installation, performance, and memory. He is currently at work on an eighty-day-long film to be shown at the Plateau Frac-Ile-France in Autumn 2016. His work has been exhibited widely, at the Centre Pompidou, the Jeu de Paume, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and at arts venues across Europe, including Walden Affairs in The Hague, The Gardens in Vilnius, De Apple in Amsterdam, the Prague National Gallery, Mamco in Geneva, the Frac Bretagne, the Frac Aquitaine, and the Frac Franche-Comté. Witte de With in Rotterdam will host a solo exhibition of his works in October 2016. Mark Geffriaud is represented by gb agency.