Uncoupdedés.net — L’Espace de l’Art Concret — Event — Slash Paris

Past: February 16, 2013 → February 14, 2014

L’Espace de l’Art Concret plays correspondence with Emmanuelle Pagano

Night-light

Inaugurated in 1990, the Espace de l’Art Concret is located in the commune of Mouans-Sartoux. It has three main areas of activity: conserving the Albers-Honegger Collection, programming temporary exhibitions in the Galerie du Château and in the Collection, and educational work. Also a residence, for three months the EAC welcomed novelist Emmanuelle Pagano, who wrote a text echoing a selection of works. This text offers a fictional vision of the collection as part of a stated commitment to openness and dialogue between different artistic fields and the public.

“I’ve never been to space. But I’ve always dreamed of doing so. My dreams haven’t stopped looking at the sky. Sometimes I watch my childhood night-light shining aloft, Venus, and I think of my little sister of a few minutes. Between Venus and us, between Venus and my past, I’ve placed a lamp, another lamp, in Earth’s orbit. My illuminated adult light. Keeping watch over our sleep. It’s turning somewhere in the night; not to see in the full darkness, but to enlighten us, enlighten our knowledge. To know. Floating up high to examine the sun, it blinks as though a reminder, so that I don’t drift too far from my childhood dreams.

I am a glass blower, like my father, like my grandfather, my great grandfather. I love working with glass, it becomes full of life under heat. From this magic material it’s possible to make so many things, endlessly fashion it, give it any shape. One only has to stop it from yielding to gravity, Earth’s crushing call. In our family we have been defying gravity for several generations. We gather a precisely measured drop of glass at the end of a hollow stem that we call the Cane, and while withdrawing the Cane, we remain rotating our arms in order to negate the effect of weight, contradict it, prove the Earth wrong. In so doing the glass is prevented from stretching. Roundness is a grace. Our gestures are like those from an Indian pantomime, the small torsions of Bharata natyam, our fists dance so that the earth doesn’t beckon the glass to its feet. When younger I wanted to be completely free from it, from gravity, I wanted to become an astronaut. Become the glob of glass carried by my father’s airborne fist. But my parents had their feet on the ground. To be an astronaut you had to go into long-term education, to go into long-term education meant going far and far was too expensive for them. They wanted me to work at their sides and take on the business, this small artisanal business where my father fashioned glass with wonderful movements, where my mother was the secretary-accountant, and which was their pride and joy. My pride though is my lamp up high, on board the international space station. (…)"

— Emmanuelle Pagano

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