Cartography of an action (phase 2)
Personal Spaces-Shared Spaces
Action to sow the wall @ Exposition invisible au camp de Rivesaltes, France, July 2019
a project initiated by Rafael Gray
photos: Rafael Gray
https://bouchermadeleine66.wixsite.com/expositioninvisible
Concept of the exhibition: A gathering of free poetic actions, in a former retention camp. By inhabiting a space to make poetry and claim a freedom to exist outside the defined circuits. By occupying a forbidden place, a territory made “invisible”, far from the eyes, to be discovered by exploration. A no man’s land of ruins, green in the open, out of the sight of the “Official” Memorial, isolated, as if in detention.
It is a question of confronting living and permanent poetic forces with everything that petrifies and encloses memory in an opaque and abstract space/time.
Concept of the action: Under a burning sun, I found a wall. Dressed in black, I covered my head with a piece of black felt. Gradually I cut small squares of the black felt, reducing it size more and more. With needles and sewing thread, I planted the black felt squares into the wall to sew the wall; to sew the memory. After a few weeks, I went back and all the black felt squares except for one, were blown away by the wind. At that exact same place, I wrote with black ink “Here I wanted to sew the wall”.
MartineViale 