Catherine Radosa — Portfolio — Slash Paris

MONUMENT FOR WITCHES

Nomadic and contextual video projection in public space, on an architectural scale.
The first projection at the invitation of Luxfer Gallery, Česká Skalice, Czech Republic (04/30/2019), on the occasion of Walpurgis Night.
The piece will travel, like a nomadic monument, to appear in different places of the world, carrying a memory and a actuality of the witch figure.

If today it is claimed, not without defiance, by certain feminist activists, the figure of the witch remains contradictory, provocative, paradoxical. She is never innocent, carried by a story that is not a fairy tale. To be designated as a witch is always to be accused. And first of all, to be accused of being a woman. At best, under the burden of ordinary misogyny, of the banality of contempt for the feminine; but also in the criminal heritage, sometimes always active: for sometimes we still burn so-called witches in our days, as we
did on a collective scale in the not so distant centuries when beliefs were used as a pretext for male domination. From the large-scale feminicide that Europe has
been able to achieve to carnival performances, witch-hunting is never a game without consequences, nor are free the attributes of its representation.
By placing it in the public space, in the form of a projection on architecture, the Franco-Czech artist Catherine Radosa offers a multi-level reading of the figure of the witch with Monument for Witches, a work created at the invitation of the Luxfer Gallery at Česká Skalice. The projected video image is an ephemeral monument, a furtive apparition that slips into various parts of the city. It features a character whose clothing attributes, capes, dresses, serve as a support for images from all kinds of archives — 19th century engravings, contemporary press images, activists’ performances, but also elements (water, fire) and attributes — in a form of liberating choreography, sequences, moments when the staged body devotes itself to a playful, emancipating,ironic but very incarnate Sabbath.

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STREETS OF FREEDOM

Filming made during the creation residency in Nice, at the invitation of Éclat and Mathilde Roman (art critic and exhibition curator), as part of the biennial Movimenta.

Rues de la liberté crosses the city of Nice with a projected image of the « Rue de la Liberté » plaque between two topographic points linked by their name: rue de la Liberté (Jean-Medecin district) and the Liberty bridge (Ariane district). With the liking of the streets, the image is superimposed on the different realities and materials of the city, reveals them by light, crops them, glides from one surface to another, becomes a sort of guide of the look on the urban skin, its folds, its signs and signals, its scars, its areas of sensitivity.
By meeting with places, passers-by and young adults from the PJJ (Legal Protection of Youth) who participate in the project, the work questions the personal and collective representations of freedom and its fractures, its imaginations and its traces in the public space of the city, on the architectures, but also on the bodies, in memories.

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STREETS OF EQUALITY

On her bike, the artist leads a large flag bearing the image of a Parisian street sign: Street of equality. The image follows its course in Paris, solitary event or dreamed walk. The flag, anchored
in the reality of the city, leave passers perplex, interrogative, serious and amused to this moving and dynamic form of topographic and shared cultural identity.
The peace is presented as outdoors projection (Paris White ninght 2013) or in exhibition space (the bike with the flag are associated with the projection).

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COLUMN/REVOLUTION

Column/revolution pursue a work about monuments that involves the installation of still and moving images, text and voice to built a drift in space as in the public imagination. Form attached to the monument, the column is steeped in culture, with the authority of vertical. Minimalist sculpture contributed at the formal level in modern criticism of its ideological functions. Between architecture and sculpture, she enrolled as collective representation often confrontational and antagonistic, between rising and falling. Vendôme Column in Paris has not finished embody this versatility, physical as symbolic.
The three video sequences projected in space show three columns in perpetual motion between the vertical and the horizontal, in revolution: the Vendome column in May 16, 1871 (3D animation freely inspired from archival photographs and engravings of time), his doubles abandoned granite in Corsica at the place of extraction since 1839, and as it stands today in Paris. These clips are in a complex relationship, contradictory a priori, between fixity and motion. The body and the eyes experience a unique relationship to the scale, mobility, choice of point of views, to the time. The audio part of the installation is an editing of music and voices that make hear the context of the Commune of Paris, where the revolutionary spirit was based among others on artistic freedom. The texts interpreted by artists offer a personal and fragmented reading in a sound space shared with the rhythms of an original musical creation. The historic loop between three states of the monument is formed between documentation and fiction, memory and presence, a distance made of free movement of the visitor in the installation. C.R.

Music : Opac Helmet (Sylvain Azam)
Voices : Sarah Aguilar (The imaginary of the Commune from Kristin Ross, and quotations of Elisée Reclus, of Georges Jeanneret, of Elisabeth Dmitrieff, of the Manifesto of the Paris section of the International Association of Workers published in the Réveil, of Gustave Lefrançais, of Henri Bel- lenger, of the Manifesto of the Federation of Artists, Official Journal of the Commune, of Paul Lafargue, of William Morris, of Karl Marx, of André Léo and Benoît Malon, of Pierre Kropotkine) ;
Laura Brunellière (Correspondances, Gustave Courbet) ;
Judith Espinas (Federation of Artists of Paris, notice to artists, Eugène Pottier) ;
Tessa Volkine (Trial of Louise Michel)