Compagnonnage Horizones #3 Espèces d'espaces, espèces de paysages

Meeting with Eva Nielsen, Romain Noël and Fanny Taillandier, moderated by Marianne Derrien, accompanied by a reading of texts by the authors

For the 23rd Pernod-Ricard Foundation Award, Eva Nielsen, accompanied by Marianne Derrien, curator, art critic and author of several texts on the artist, meets with Fanny Taillandier, writer, and Romain Noël, author and researcher.

Eva Nielsen explores the border between painting and photography, creating a permeability between these two mediums through the use of silkscreen. She elaborates her works by superimposing pictorial layers recalling the constitution by sedimentation of the urban landscape. In her paintings, concrete architectures, blinds, collective furniture become frames structuring our relationship to everyday space while seeming to belong to an uncertain era. Their treatment tips these modernist urban visions into a dreamlike strangeness, a sort of transfigured everyday life. Faced with her paintings, an uncertainty appears about the nature of what we are looking at. For Eva Nielsen, the question of the landscape and the representation of a peripheral space, which could be called suburban, is central.

This meeting between practitioners from different but complementary disciplines is above all a sharing of reflections on the representation of landscape in the fields of literature, painting, poetry, political science or science fiction. Choosing architecture and land-use planning, places of constant struggle between the center and the periphery of cities, as a subject, as a literary space, is to be, at the same time, at a meeting point and a point of tension of the landscape, it is to de-stratify the real from its idealistic illusions in order to show social as well as aesthetic realities. It is to consider, with the philosopher Jacques Rancière, that if « a landscape is the reflection of a social and political order. A social and political order can [then] be described as a landscape ».

Between fiction, imaginary and critical theory, how to tell and take care of the spaces where we live? How to express with finesse and simplicity this fluidity between intellectual conceptualization and physical experiences of spaces? How to give an account of an urban experience, always on the edge of a dynamic relationship between past, present and future, between aesthetics of the ruin and visionary will, between hypermodernity, heritage fetishism and urban ecology? Here are some thoughts for this meeting entitled « Species of spaces, species of landscapes: writing, painting, experiencing places ».

Biographies

Born in 1986, Fanny Taillandier grew up in the Parisian suburbs. She is a member of the collective La Preuve par 7, an experimental approach to urban planning and architecture initiated by Patrick Bouchain. In 2019-2020, she is a resident at the Villa Medici. She has published four fictions: Les Confessions du monstre (2013), Les États et empires du lotissement Grand Siècle (2016), Par les écrans du monde (2018) and Farouches (2021). She also creates site-specific light and text installations in dialogue with architecture and landscape. In May 2022, Delta, a documentary on the Rhone delta and its development, was published.

Romain Noël is a researcher and poet. His transdisciplinary research focuses on the formal life of affects at a time of extinction, anti-humanist ecologies and the links between apocalypse and melancholy. His first book, Errare, was published in 2013 by Fata Morgana. With Marielle Macé, he co-edited the special issue of the journal Critique entitled « Vivre dans un monde abîmé. » In addition to critical texts on contemporary art, he has published « Apocalypse BDSM » (Klima Magazine, lundimatin), « Why potions at the time of Extinction » (Frûctose) or Mycélium, petit conte post-apocalyptique (Le murmure éditeur), which he co-wrote with Youri Johnson.

Image: Eva Nielsen, Scope, 2021, detail; Acrylic, ink and organza, 130 x 180 cm