Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann — À propos — Slash Paris

The work of Laetitia Badaut-Haussmann is plural and fragmented. Sculpture, video, text, photo, are all means used — among so many possible others — to achieve a story, always registering in a context larger than history. In this way, the artist has exhibited a plaster sculpture of Bernardino Verro, socialist trade unionist in Sicily, that has been systematically destroyed by the mafia (Bernardino Verro, 2008). This work poses the question of exhibition in the “sacred” art space; as opposed to the impossibility of its existence in a public space. With Cosmic Heirloom (2009), she reproduces, identically, a meteorite found by her great grandfather, mixing family legend and the conquest of space. The intimate mixes with the public in a movement which joins the macrocosm with the microcosm.

The artist juggles with temporalities, adding the new chapter to a story started by others in the past. It’s the case with an interview of Jean-Luc Godard (with Samuel Blumenfeld, Christian Fevret & Serge Kaganski in 1993) in which the filmmaker says: “I love tennis. I could watch 12 year old kid hitting against a wall for two hours.” This image drove the artist to create the short film (Tiebreaker, 6’30”, 2010), in which a young boy continuously hits a ball against a wall, a work of beauty that is strange in its simplicity. Her long term goal is to elaborate, in her own words, a “cartography of the visible,” through the intermediary of “micro-stories which open new perspectives into the real.”

Questioning the potential of fiction, in the audo-visual as much as the literary domain, Laetitia Badaut-Haussmann intimately blends fragments of various real stories. With Phi Kappa Sigma (2010), photographs of a fraternity building on an American campus, mounted on a skull, the artist asks questions about excess and transmission. Chronology is important, and functions as a guiding principle, with return journeys through time between the works themselves, through a filter of the everyday.

Each of Laetitia Badaut-Haussmann’s works appears as a new indication of the ghostly presence, in negative. P.151b (2006) is the occasion to add a letter between two characters in the Bret Easton Ellis story “Letters from L.A.” Twenty years later. Every artistic gesture is unique and creates a constellation of “chameleon” works, allowing the artist to never be found exactly where she is expected, and to transmit her vital breath to moments that are, by their nature, banal.