On Beds, Bats, Plants, Time and Memory

In the living room, the stuffed toy-bat Monique is resting on the coffee table, timidly holding her pastel-coloured wings close to her body. The bat as life companion, as formulated by Piéron himself, has always been by his side. He continues to tell me about the days and nights spent in hospital as a child, where the nights were often sleepless due to his health issues and the medication. In these moments between wakefulness and sleep, within the hospital setting that contrasts so sharply with a regular child’s bedroom at home, his imagination would run wild.

The colourful-companion-cum-materialised-imaginary-friend is named after the French author, philosopher and feminist theorist Monique Wittig (1935-2003), who attempted to dismember the body through words, to open up new space for corporeal possibilities.¹ As such, Wittig creates the possibility of more layered existences of bodies in society, specifically female bodies in a patriarchal system, and this has been an ongoing source of inspiration for Piéron. However, another connection between Piéron and Wittig’s work crosses my mind. Her 1964 book The Opoponax is about children undergoing typical childhood experiences like a first school day or first romance.² In this breakthrough novel Wittig addresses the protagonist with “you,” which gives the novel a direct tone, as if talking to and about a past self that is connected to a larger whole. Together with its fragmented anachronistic story line, the writing style stresses the non-linearity of memory—how memories of the past still influence the present and how new memories may also influence other, older memories. The significant amount of time Piéron spent in hospitals has had a lasting effect on his perception of life. Memories of these childhood experiences would re-emerge later in his life, and he went on to render them visible and palpable through his extensive body of work.

On the table next to the toy-bat Monique lays a French translation of The Little Vampire Takes a Trip, a book from Angela Sommer-Bodenburg’s famous series first published in Germany in 1982. The series revolves around a friendship between the nocturnal vampire child Rüdiger and a young diurnal human named Anton. Piéron identifies with the living conditions of the little vampire, drawing similarities with his own childhood experience of living in a parallel temporality of hospitals away from the family home, often lying awake or half asleep at night while many other children sleep, dream, think, or hallucinate as the mind does when it is in a liminal state. Since vampires are often considered analogous with bats, it seems only natural that his life companion Monique should take the form of the nocturnal flying animal.  

Now that I have been introduced to Monique, Piéron and I continue our conversation. As we look through his portfolio again, I realise that there are more bats to be found within his installations. They animate the works like spirit animals, as they hover over a space, like in maybepole (2022), or gather together as a group of friends, like in Peluche Psychopompe (2022). The maybepole work is a reference to the maypole, a tall-erected pole found in many Germanic-European cultures. Although it is widely used, its origins remain unknown. Erected in May or June if not permanently installed, the pole is activated to celebrate the return of summer and the growth of new vegetation.³ It symbolises the transition into a new, blossoming phase. Hesitation is introduced by the artist in the title of his work, reflecting the uncertainty one continues to live with after being diagnosed with a long-term illness. The work was presented as part of Piéron’s exhibition Illness Shower (Galerie Sultana, Arles, 2022), the title of which is a word play on the term baby shower. Instead of celebrating the expected birth of a child, Piéron places the focus on welcoming a new illness, and a transition to a new state, in which something, the illness, will grow and flourish. The approach might come across as macabre, but, as Piéron explains, it is merely a personal coping mechanism stemming from his experiences of dealing with illness and life within a sphere connected to, but placed outside of, society.

Through the work’s hanging bunting, both the maybepole and Le Lit share a celestial focus. The pole of the first piece lacks the part that usually grounds it, namely the pole itself, and has a focus point above the standing visitor’s head. The installation makes the visitor’s gaze follow the ascending lines of the bunting to eventually reach a centred ring where the pastel-coloured bat is suspended. In the latter work, the visitor—although not allowed to actually crawl in—is invited to imagine themselves lying in the bed, looking up at the inside of the tent and at the four posters with its vertical and horizontal decoration. Following this line of thinking, both works have a tilted perspective to connect the space from the predominantly horizontal line of sight with the space that is above, where the ceiling and sky are, where we imagine dreams take place, and where heaven is supposed to be. Living with severe illnesses and a deteriorating body, Piéron has spent a considerable amount of time lying down to rest and recover, with his gaze focused on, for example, the inside of the tent and the ceiling. As a person for whom the vulnerability of the body is not unknown, this shift in perspective indicates that he is not only concerned with what is grounded around us, tangible and fathomable, but also that which is rather up in the air, intangible and more difficult to grasp, like thoughts, dreams, death and heaven. 

However, the visitor cannot open the door. The impenetrability of the work forces the viewer to slow down and interrupts the flow of them—fully—seeing the artwork. Such an interruption relates to a level of slowness in certain artworks that can have an impact on the viewer, as argued by Mieke Bal.⁶  As a cultural and literary theorist and video artist, she has written extensively about alternative temporalities and the political power of time in art. According to Bal, political artworks require “durational looking,” and it is through this that their political potential emerges, because these kinds of pieces tend to move the visitor.⁷ Art becomes an interruption of routine, because it speaks to the senses. In the case of Le Rayon, one hears indistinct sounds, sees light changing and human shadows passing by, and feels the impossibility of accessing the space behind it. All this makes the interruption sense-able and allows the onlooker to feel in their bodies the disrupted flow of their visit to the exhibition.⁸ Thus, through a visceral artistic encounter, the political potential, or more specifically the awareness of politics, starts to emerge. The experience of Le Rayon is however not only relevant to those who have been severely ill. Everybody has been in a room at some point in their life where one would hear things happening outside, or off-screen, and simultaneously realise one could not participate because of being confined to the room.

In this way, Piéron speaks to the viewer’s individual memory. According to Bal, time is the motor of memory and memory is typically understood as a cultural, individual and social phenomenon. Indeed, all memories have an individual, social and cultural element, because the subjects that remember—i.e. any human being—are also participants in these three domains.⁹ Bal also references the historian Harry Harootunian’s Marxist conception of time by saying that the past is “depositing in every present its residual traces that embodied untimely temporalities”.¹⁰ With Le Rayon, Piéron renders these three layers palpable by tapping into a visitor's personal memory, which is also a social memory as it took hold in a confined space, with other people being in close proximity yet out of reach.

Traces of the past are present throughout Piéron’s works with fabric. The aforementioned pastel-coloured fabric used to make the stuffed bats is upcycled hospital fabric including bed sheets. After being thoroughly cleaned, the fabric is resold at the large French DIY chain store Leroy Merlin. Nevertheless, traces of bodily fluids may remain visible on the pieces of fabric. Piéron has used this material to create several works that often pay tribute to the ill and hospitalised, like in maybepole or Matelas de plage series (2022), the latter consisting of four patchwork mattresses hung from the wall as a soft monument for the bedridden. Besides being the default colours of such hospital sheets, the pastel shades also have less heroic connotations for Piéron, because of their in-between position in colour schemes.¹¹ Taking all this into consideration, the artist’s use of this material as a base for multiple works gives the previous users an immediate yet spectral presence within the exhibition spaces. He commemorates and celebrates those who have found themselves in peripheral hospital settings, which exist in continuous parallel to the public sphere.

In L’écritoire (writing table) (2023), a sense of potential danger, self-determination and apprehension permeates. On an old writing table, spray-painted with pastel-colours, Piéron pots a selection of plants and places horticultural lamps above them. The plants are accompanied by the bat Monique, who sits quietly with her wings closed on the edge of the table and appears calm and grounded. Next to the writing table, a sign warns the viewer that the combination of plants is poisonous. Disconcerting as it may seem, the work can be interpreted as a hint at the possibility of using the plants—and perhaps other substances not on display—to intoxicate oneself or others in the exhibition space. However, as Piéron explained to me, the work is a symbolic act to sow death and take care of it, as a way to keep it at bay. In the same vein as the SPK, he shows the agency one has—whether a patient or not—and brings us into proximity with suicide and death in order to dissolve their entrenched separation from life.

Thus, Piéron’s main artistic focus is not death or ways of ending life, but rather life in all its endless forms. For The Great Piece of Turf – After Albrecht Dürer (2020–ongoing), Piéron was inspired by the eponymous watercolour of Albrecht Dürer from 1503. The artwork’s perspective is ground level and creates a frontal view of various types of grasses and other meadow plants. It represents the vegetation as being equal to other, taller living entities, for example a human or a tree, and depicts the small plants as if they are too attempting to reach the sky. Through this perspective of the vegetation, a celestial focus is again apparent in Piéron's work.  

For Piéron, plants combine growth and perpetual resistance, vigour and slowness. He draws inspiration from Francis Ponge's conception of grass as expressing the most elementary form of universal resurrection.¹⁵ For his project, the artist sourced the seeds of the vegetation depicted in the watercolour and recreated the ensemble in different arrangements. In 2020, he created the first iteration on his balcony. Another was created as part of an exhibition at Le Mat in Ancenis (2021) where he also gave a workshop on Jarman’s garden after which the participants received capsules filled with seeds from the plants found at Prospect Cottage.¹⁶ Although still premature during my visit, the last iteration has been flourishing in the garden in Lens. One does not normally get to see a plant growing and changing, one sees it has grown and changed. Through this slowness, on the one hand, the existence of alternative temporalities becomes visible. Yet, on the other, the work reveals processes of both cultivation and natural transformation that exemplify the notion of transcorporeality and the reciprocal relationship between natural and human-made existences.