Mémoire double — CAC Brétigny — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 12 → 27, 2018

A research-exhibition by Angélique Buisson with the War Veterans Association of Brétigny-sur-Orge, the 2nd regiment of the voluntary military service, and the Municipal Department of Youth of Brétigny-sur-Orge. 

“Mémoire double” (Double Memory) comes in the wake of Angélique Buisson’s one-year residency at CAC Brétigny. The project stems from her meeting and discussing with several groups, including the members of the French veterans’ Association des Anciens Combattants (ULAAVCG); young people who are part of the volunteer army, the 2nd regiment of the Service Militaire Volontaire; and the teenagers who spend time at the youth group Service Jeunesse of Brétigny-sur-Orge. The project was born of a collective desire to construct and transmit a memory of conflicts from archives, documents and the stories collected from war veterans and young peopling living in the area and their caretakers.

Throughout 2017 the artist’s residency gave rise to a series of meetings and workshops, whose main thread involved talking about war in its past incarnations and present reality in the stories and imagery it continues to generate.

The project’s participants went together to visit individuals, institutions and sites that preserve and perpetuate at different levels the memory of conflicts, from the Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense (ECPAD, or Defense Communications and Audiovisual Production Establishment), to a war-crafts collector, war veterans and French resistors of the region, to war memorials and battle sites. In each case they came closer to the creation of memories and images, right up to the drones that are a significant source of such imagery and recollections today. The technology question, which runs just beneath the surface of the whole project, touches on both the history of Brétigny, a former flight testing center that has now evolved into cluster drones, and the questioning of the future of images which figures throughout Buisson’s work.

Bringing together objects, narratives and images in installations, films and other artistic displays, Buisson attempts, in discussing with participants, to fashion a living archive. She seeks to show the incarnation of history and its ghostly memories, blind spots, and assumptions, which makes possible a rewriting of the endless exchanges between history and its narratives.

This show then explores the connections that unites image and historical event, tackling more generally the question of the politics of memory. Envisioned as a particular moment in a piece of on-going research¹, “Mémoire double”–which is made up of both workshops and visits–works like an observational laboratory, a historiographic inquiry, and a reflexive process in progress. The process of thinking about memory will continue then for the length of this show, which will be enriched and transformed by the events taking place during it. Scheduled for the day the exhibition actually closes, the show opening will embody one possible conclusion.

This project benefited from the support of SDAT (Service du Développement et de l’Action Territoriale) from Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication—Drac Île-de-France, as a “Culture and social link” project.

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¹ The second show in the 2017-2018 exhibition cycle called Altérisme, “Mémoire double” reflects the time CAC Brétigny devotes to research each year in partnership with research and educational institutions locally, nationally and internationally.