Edith Dekyndt, Düsseldorf, Hambourg, Venezia
Edith Dekyndt’s work is founded on the fundamental ambiguity of living. Her recent exhibitions, in Paris and Hamburg, embrace the ambiences and unobjectifiable experience of affects.
FLORENCE MEYSSONNIER: Your work does not show an explicitly claimed ecological positioning, but it has nevertheless been imbued with this dimension since its inception. This dimension is above all that of an “attachment” to the living, to the form of life that is part of an atmospheric ontology: an ambiguity that goes beyond the contours of form or interpretation. In this sense, your work seems to be truly steeped in the atmosphere of contexts of invitation, and more particularly in the resources that others offer you. Let’s go back to your recent projects in order to consider the modus operandi underlying your practice, which is fundamentally an ethos – not an ethos or principle being applied “to” something, but rather a disposition, both a way of being and of living “with,” which requalifies our value mechanisms in relationships that are always complex and uncertain.
EDITH DEKYNDT: My pieces are always about a state, a tone, or an atmosphere. As such, the value distinction between what “works” and what doesn’t remains rather vague. Art, like any other socially constituted sphere, generates forms of immunity in order to exist, but its envelopes are porous. When the exhibition at the VNH Gallery in Paris was put in place, I was absorbed by my reading about American civilization, which has always fascinated me: this land of conquest, invested with romantic and spiritual aspirations, as well as the more utilitarian ones of the marketplace. The stories of the pioneers bear witness to a construction of the self in these complex relationships. Like a song you can’t get out of your head, there are certain things that just inhabit you. The lasso had been there for years, like this American civilization, its genesis, its relationship to the environment, its conflictual nature, made up of a movement of domination and emancipation. The lasso takes charge of all this complexity. Then came the moment when I was invited to Paris. It triggered this return to American soil. My readings were not enough. I felt the need to go there, to be permeated with this atmosphere that combines human habits and customs with a plant and animal ecosystem. I stayed at a ranch. Back in Paris, the lasso piece became the central work of the exhibition. It quickly became tinged with the warm tones – both violent and sensual – of this relationship. In contact with the city of Hamburg, my exhibition for the Kunsthaus immediately became tinted white, black and blue. These three colors are the dominant tones of romanticism and of the icy landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, one of whose major pieces, Das Eismeer [1823–1824], is displayed in the city. But they are also related to the obvious presence of water and of the cold, and to other less obvious, more repressed, associations. I discovered the Billstraße district, near the port, where a lot of objects that Europe no longer wants are stored. They are waiting to be shipped, especially to the African continent, from which the majority of the people who work in the district also come. This area is almost entirely ignored by the rest of the city, which has a particularly prosperous history, linked to its central position in European economic activity. I decided to bring this universe back into the Kunsthaus, which is part of a very different world.
These entanglements seem particularly palpable at VNH or the Kunsthaus. The elements are intertwined with each other. The exhibition is also a landscape that somatizes interplays of affects. In Paris and Hamburg, you worked with salvaged objects (window displays, carpets, leather skins, fridges, etc.) that have been impacted by the energy of a lasso or by the movements of a parkour collective, but which have also been modified with many other alterations due to interleaving, pressure, decomposition. Again, in these exhibitions, the pieces take “charge” of the circulations that exceed the limits of their “locality.”
Any gesture, object, or material indeed takes charge of the movements of affects. The exhibitions are production sites among others; they take care of their dynamics and highlight an intensity in existing. They are also eminently atmospheric, at once the content and the forms of lived experience. Shop-window displays or jars are of this order: they preserve and transport. Carpets are zones of transient occupation. It is primarily through the properties of objects, materials or gestures that something transits and occurs. My recent projects are almost entirely made from secondhand objects or materials. The idea of resources takes on all its meaning for me in this form of appropriation restoring a value that is beyond our assignations of mere usage. Appropriation does not necessarily lead for me to a relationship of domination, but requires much more letting go so that something may occur.
It seems to me that everything is related to the reflexive aspect of these dynamics. In this both fragile and confident dimension of the “self” – especially in the sense that the philosopher Paul Ricoeur gives to this term – or the autonomy of a “do it yourself” ethos, to which you seem committed, the repetition of a gesture (your own in your various series, that of marathon dancers, or practitioners of the lasso or parkour, to name just a few) meets the desire to exist by incorporating a context that exceeds all intentions. They all express a variety of forms of persisting in “their” being, like zones that both traverse and are traversed. The repeated gesture, that is more present in your work in recent years, seems to affirm the “performative” dimension as that of the persistence of being, which can generate situations that go beyond any mere scenario.
Again, I do not feel comfortable with terminologies and categories. The performance of sweepers at the Wiels [art center in Belgium] or the Venice Biennale, of the women cleaning the statue of King Albert I in Nieuwpoort, do not focus a moment of intention and attention in the public sphere. It has value only for itself, in this “self,” this desire to be. Their properties impact and incorporate the environment, they fit in to it according to their modalities. It is very important to me that the people who take part in my work concentrate on the gesture, that they disregard the injunction of “results,” as I do myself. This concentrated gesture gives them a condition that distinguishes them and binds them to their environment as well as to us. Such actors evolve in this ambiguity of being “with” and “outside” of us. They are always “relative,” they take charge of their environment by coming into contact with it and are supported by it in return. All of them waver in a distant intimacy, which leaves us with the strange impression that they emerge out of depths of which we, too, are a part. The boundaries fade into an atmosphere in which the background and the form merge into a diffuse locality. Nothing ultimately exists outside of this ambiguity.
I also believe that this atmospheric dimension raises the complexity of the value that again depends on how one may “charge” something, or “take charge” of it. In this, your work is fundamentally alive because it is animated by the conviction that every object, every element, is always much more than itself, embroiled in the complexity of the living that escapes articulation or representation. If you are accustomed to saying that your production is not that of an imagination, it is because, in my opinion, it allows this imagination of the living itself to act, and has the capacity to place us in an unpredictable, always non-optimal fabulation, which is essentially ambiguous and ethereal.
There is indeed no plan, no intention, just as there is no imagination in my work. It is only these “charges,” alterations in reiterations, that circulate, which, rather than destructions, further activate the movement of an eternal birth. Both the object and the environment exist only in the properties that incorporate and distinguish them, in order to maintain them in that impermanent state. These objects, considered as unworkable, for some devalued, become for others a source of possibility. Their value thus becomes equivocal, relative to contexts and perspectives. Resituated back in the heart of the exhibition, they detach the self from this authoritarian declaration of ownership and corollary value systems. They engage us in the optimality of value by way of its opposite, namely the precariousness or emptiness of the puzzle that allows one to activate a completely different – non-distinctive, nonstatutory – relationship to the self.
And “non-statuary,” we could say. The piece made for Nieuwpoort concerning a statue is in this sense very telling. It transforms this equestrian statue, erected in memory of King Albert I, into the object of attention for a woman who stands at his level by means of a ramp and who, for hours, lightly touches the horse’s nose with a rag. We do not know if she is cleaning him or caring for him. And suddenly, on this windy coast, in this historical context, all certainties waver in favor of new states. The work still acts here as a revelation. In this “moment,” reality breaks out in the interweaving of perspectives.
Indeed, this piece establishes a moment of intimacy, and places us at the heart of what is given and taken in this interdependence of life. This monument of dominant masculinity, which remains of the order of the symbol or symptom of warlike memory, is here transformed into the gesture of a woman with regard to the animal, in the event that it produces. It makes sense in this conflict-ridden region, where women have taken on the responsibility of living. In this immense, windy, highly charged landscape, a link with the living seems to be established. The world does not become the same; it is fragile. New perspectives burst through. They upset the given order, moving the center of gravity of the monument towards the relation.
In this sense, we again see here, as in the rest of your work, that to appropriate is to give autonomy: granting existence to this “self” that needs to “pass through” something in order to exist more or differently.
This modality of passage is indeed essential in my approach. That of the gesture that cleans, erases, transmits, transforms, or the action of a material that leads or carries. It is by establishing zones of contact that what I would qualify as less apparition than appearance is born. By witnessing it, existences acquire a legitimacy that goes beyond our perspectives. This is perhaps what we might call an ecological condition: to exist in this experience of exile of oneself.
“The White, The Black, The Blue”, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf, until Oct 19. “They Shoot Horses”, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hambourg, until June 7 2020. “Winter Drums 06B”, in «Luogo e segni», Punta della dogana - Pinault collection, Venezia, until Dec 15.