For some years now, contemporary art has embraced a certain unruliness: it has broken free from institutional settings to explore other spaces. Art is now seeking out the spaces between, the interstices, in order to shatter the boundaries between fiction and reality, private and public, art object and viewer. The idea of place is being replaced by the notions of sensibility, curiosity and displacement, which could also be described as a place of passage, “territory without place.”[1] Drawing on both the legacy of the material world and the boundaries of its “imaginary territory,”[2] to quote Guy Sioui Durand, artists are diverting appearances by passing through and appropriating transitory places, ephemeral worlds that, in turn, become places of memory, whether individual or collective.

And if “territory is itself a place of passage,”[3] as Gilles Deleuze claims, then our current theme does not depart from past symposiums but, rather, continues in the same spirit. It goes beyond the definition of physical or geographic territory to explore a territoriality that is immaterial, individual and interior, along with the notion of non-place that characterizes the various driftings of art today. Thus, the distances that were long travelled by explorers, or the physical boundaries of the territories of North and South America, are transposed here into formal and ideological trajectories, and into individual paths that are sometimes winding, sometimes straight.

The title Places/Spaces evokes actual locations - physical territory (place) and the notion of geographic distance (space) - as well as imaginary sites, the (non) places/spaces of art and of the artists themselves, as expressed through their own singularity. I propose to explore this broader notion of territory by touching on two poles: meeting, as it ties in with displacement and movement, and memory, synonymous with trace, imprint, time. The selected artists have practices that relate either to the body, experience and the immaterial, or to the notion of an archaeology of the present, the everyday and a desire to physically expand private space. Some play with performance and sound, others focus on site-specific concerns and yet others approach everyday objects and the day-to-day in a sculptural fashion. Some create installations of imposing size, while the work of others lies in fine details and subtle gestures.

The Symposium theme revolves around contrasting poles, tensions and opposites (feminine/masculine, smooth/rough, miniature/massive, interior/exterior, material/immaterial). While the participating artists may not have experience outside of galleries, most of them are engaged in practices that investigate new technologies - which bear witness to their time and to a new artistic generation - making the challenge of creating a work in the forest that much more meaningful. In short, the guest artists’ processes suggest a certain vulnerability, a human frailty with respect to the environment and the world around us.

Chloë Charce
Curator