VIDEOS

Exhibition video / artist talk : 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ybqinXIbu5YAgD3q7gPirAdgL3GCxOi0/view?usp=drivesdk

I want to die out of the sea

Installation video 

4min32, sand, water

A perfect landscape broken by a wave, a vibration brought by a leak.

A brief but inconsistent refuge on an island too small. 

A moment of respite that comes to trouble. 

A truce, as one would come to cling to a buoy in the sea, a pause to be able to subsist. 

This suspended time is reflected by a calm and undisturbed stretch of water, as the lake would be without this escape.

A mise en abîme that keeps the spectator witnessing this moment at a distance. 

It’s a video by Héloïse Roueau which is part of the collaborative exquisite corpse video project ECVP Vol.7 created and coordinated by Kika Nicolela. 

This project will be shown at the beginning of 2020 and is named « The Artist Agitator ».

 Essentially focused on video performance, the work of Héloïse Roueau reactivates the founding myths of our civilizations (Ophélie, Perséphone ...) to question the news, and recently personalizes his pantheon (Magdala, Gaia ...). In intimacy with the natural environment, which becomes her stage, she implements actions that intensify her presence, often experienced in the mode of resistance. The experience of her body is here thought through the prism of her own femininity, staged in her rituals as so many manifestations of archaisms that persevere through the ages. Floated, buried underground, baptized or placed at the foot of the wall, Héloïse Roueau occupies an interstice where she places humanity in front of its limits, where life's impulse and death drive are indifferent.   In Magdala, Héloïse Roueau performs a ritual ablution compulsive which progresses to exhaustion. Plunged into a wash basin that serves as a basin, she washes more and more aggressively then plunges completely, and repeats this gesture that is racing. As it strains, the algae on the surface show black water, while its panting, near asphyxiation, almost apnea, installs a sense of urgency. Like a counter-baptism, this moment of crisis, between repetition and excitement, refers to a purification that does not succeed, as if it sought to wash something indelible. Allegory of the contradiction between the benevolence generally attributed to the feminine and the violence of the Earth, Gaïamet stages this ambivalence through an impossible gesture. Like a new retribution to Sisyphus, she seeks here to push a cliff or perhaps try to merge into a despair act as vain as poetic. The artist faces here his own failure, but with an assumed failure, underlined by cries of effort and pain. On the ground, as collapsed as this crumbling mineral wall, the heroine finally goes to the evidence of her impotence. The same vanity is expressed in Jordane, in which Heloise Roueau tries without hope of success to swim against the current, a poetic gesture that expresses all the strength of a desperate struggle for existence.  

Text by Florian Gaité for the Forest exhibition at the Dole Museum of Fine Arts, 2019

Héloïse Roueau is the one who made the hail fall. She offers us videos around a mythical female character she embodies. She stages this woman in her relationship with nature, between battle and fusion. Perfectionist and without fear, the performative character of her videos is inseparable from her work. Her videos bear witness to moments of absolute communion.

Text by Camille Limbardet on Ophélie and Perséphone videos

I am interested in the female figure in her relationship to the place and to the other.

The question of waiting, of absence, marks my videos.

To evoke absence in a form of perpetuation.

In the idea of video-painting, of contemplation, the instants, the moments, if I may say, the events appear and look like those of the haikus.

The link to nature, and particularly to water, is present.
The idea of tension, suspension, reprieve, linked to lack is made sensitive.

The loss is transfigured in contemplation and the lack is transposed into the passage of time.

It's about feeling that absence and making absence a mandatory presence.

Absence, lack become substantials. 

A female figure oscillates between Eros and Thanatos, fluctuating between immersion and drowning.

In a fusion with the elements and their energies and in a performative relationship, I became interested in the relationship of the body to the environment. The link to nature, especially water, is present.   In the idea of video-painting, of contemplation, the moments appear and resemble those of the haikus.

 The notion of water is very present.

The existence of space and of the body are  linked to each other.

This existence of the one and the other is related in particular to the question of the light.

Light divides the body and space in an atmosphere of strangeness between dream and reality.

The body exists through space and space exists through the body.

The characters are inscribed between a solitude and a duality.

I was interested in the posture, the gestures, the relationship of the individual with a place.

In this warehouse, the characters are faced with objects, in memory of what we have done, what we keep and what we break away.

The narration is suspended. The spectator is witnessing all of this, seing the  idea of presence-absence emerge.

The expectation, the affect related to this memory and the shocks they induce are absorbed by this moving cover that hosts the video projection.

In these videos, it is a matter of questioning the relation of the figure to the place, to the space. 

Kant speaks of a sensitive space. Space would be a subjective condition of sensibility and would be dependent on human representation.

Space is related to its relation to the body. The body is a physical identity. By his posture he fills this space and interacts with it.

In this idea of bodies and decors, and without ever naming the narrative, find an interstice in which it is woven.

This interstice I wish to let him say of the human condition.

By the notion of human condition, therefore, I mean a concept that deals with emotions, the family, childhood, relationships to the world, others and spaces, aspirations, fragility, sensitivity, The nostalgia, the unspoken, the strangeness, the memory.

The interstice is the place that reveals the human. It is between dream, fantasy and reality.

He speaks of nostalgia, melancholy, meditation, resistance, assimilation, waiting, time.

Here, it is in an almost inexpressible way that things are expressed.

It is about presenting a state, an atmosphere.

This atmosphere is meant to be between dream and reality, in a certain melancholy and contemplation.

The notion of lack, of substantial absence, of waiting, becomes sensible and finds a material in these images.