LAURE PROVOUST

SHE’S PERHAPS THE MOST BRITISH OF FRENCH ARTISTS – OR THE MOST FRENCH OF BRITISH ARTISTS. EITHER WAY, THE FRENCH- BORN, LONDON- BASED TURNER PRIZE WINNER WILL BE REPRESENTING FRANCE THIS YEAR AT THE VENICE BIENNALE, UNDER THE CURATORSHIP OF MARTHA KIRSZENBAUM.

As I write this, I try to remember the first time I met Laure Provoust, but I can’t. When I called her to discuss her project for the French Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, I was so happy to hear her voice – soft, low, calming, and authoritative, it instantly soothes me. I could listen to her for hours. Laure and I worked together on a magically absurd project – for the 2016 festival Art Night with London’s ICA – in Admiralty Arch, a monument commissioned by

Edward VII in memory of his mother Queen Victoria. For a reason unknown to us, the leaseholder, a developer who is transforming the arch into a luxury hotel, gave us permission to work in it. Laure wanted to put on a fictional afternoon tea with the queen, touring festival goers through the entire building – down to the basement past the secret underground tunnel to Winston Churchill’s war cabinet, up to the attic windows that look towards Buckingham Palace – in an Alice in Wonderland-style adventure performance.

But sadly it was not to be; the developer confined us to two ground-floor rooms, where we installed Laure’s 2013 work After After – a “film” created from an installation of objects, light, sound and text. This became part of a fictional tour animated by actors guiding the audience through an imaginary museum, also inhabited by two characters – Betty and Gregor – from Laure’s earlier film The Wanderer (2012), of which After After is a prologue. These works were inspired by artist Rory Macbeth’s text The Wanderer by Franz Kafka (2010), which he wrote by “translating” Kafka’s The Metamorphosis without a working knowledge of German, a dictionary or the internet. Macbeth narrates the haphazard story of Gregor, a man on a journey during the war, in which Betty – a new character – appears as his fallen heroine. In Laure’s The Wanderer, language is used as both an affective tool and as a structural framework, interspersed with a fast-paced, rhythmic, strobe-like, disorienting editing style – Prouvost’s ongoing investigation of translation and misinterpretation lies at the core of this. As Gregor, trapped in his cluttered brain, has flashbacks of Betty, and Betty, intoxicated and on the verge of a breakdown, calls out for him repeatedly, frightened and confused, each longs and searches for the other that they cannot find. In Admiralty

Arch, Betty and Gregor sat in a tiny room that we fashioned into a karaoke bar serving squid-ink vodka shots, next to a dead squid in a tank. Needless to say Betty, Gregor, and much of the audience were drunk by the end of the night.

To develop her project for the French Pavilion, Laure took a road trip from Croix, where she was born, to Venice, and made a film along the way – Deep Blue Sea Surrouding You/vois ce bleu profond te fondre. She collected 12 people of different ages and backgrounds, each of whom had a special talent – e.g. magic, dance, music – to create a sort of travelling circus, and also co-wrote a multi-lingual script. The idea of taking a journey, of searching for something or someone, and of mixing reality with fiction, have evolved in Laure’s previous work: Betty and Gregor were drunk and lost in the aforementioned Wanderer; there are real-life protagonists in her 2016 video Lick in the Past, part of her installation A Way to Leak, Lick, Leek for Fahrenheit FLAX in L.A.; or Laure’s fictional grandma searching for her fictional granddad – a conceptual artist and friend of Kurt Schwitters’, who had disappeared down a tunnel he dug from his French living room to Africa – in her Turner Prizewinning installation and video Wantee (2013).

Laure describes her vision of this journey as “a trip to our unconscious. With the help of our brains in our tentacles, we dig tunnels to the past and the future towards Venice. Let’s follow the light.” Deep Blue Sea will consider the formation of identity, from the concept of a national identity, to a place of no identity – where language, and its appropriation and misappropriation, lead to disconnection and misunderstanding. Laure was equally inspired by Venice, a group of watery islands that are gradually sinking into the

ocean. Laure envisions the exhibition as the body of an octopus, a metaphor for the origins of the planet, immersing viewers in the stomach of an unknown creature in order to find out who we are. The sea, of course, is a quintessential metaphor for the unconscious, one of the few places on Earth that remains truly uncharted. The question of identity – how it is formed, both consciously and unconsciously, how it is expressed, how it is viewed by others, what it means to be another, or the other – is also fundamental to Deep Blue Sea, which quite pointedly asks, “What does it mean to represent a nation?”

Raymond Queneau’s 1947 novel Excercices de style recounts the simple tale of a man taking a bus journey 99 times, and each time the story is told in a different style. Most of us take the same journeys very regularly – to work, to school, to university, to the shops. We walk down the same roads, take the same trains, go to the same grocery store, and repeat the same things over and over again. The overall experience might appear the same on the surface, but the minutiae of what is seen and felt are entirely different every time. Laure has described the impetus to make Deep Blue Sea as a wish to try and understand ourselves better. Yet will we understand ourselves better by remaining in familiar territory or by travelling somewhere else? Will we escape ourselves through travel, or will we arrive only to realize that we’re the product of where we came from? Although she often uses everyday behaviours and objects, Laure’s work has a fairy-tale quality: the stories are often fantastical in nature, as if the protagonists are seeking a treasure at the end of the rainbow, the mirage across the desert, a cottage made of candy – some kind of radical transformation at their journey’s conclusion.

When I was 21, I ran away to Indonesia with a man I’d known just a week. One day, we decided to climb Mount Marapi at night, to reach the peak at sunrise. As we struggled through the rainforest, up sharp inclines laced with bulbous tree roots and slimy, muddy slopes, behind a fast-moving guide, the change in altitude made breathing near impossible. At one point, exhausted and in pain, I collapsed to the ground. As my tears mingled with rain, sweat and mud, I looked up to see my friend’s big brown eyes staring sadly down at me. As he asked, “Do you want to turn back?”, an image of bright, searing orange light revealing the vast Sumatran landscape below flashed through my mind, and I steeled myself to go on. As we climbed ever higher, heavy cloud soon engulfed us. Slowly the mountainside blurred into a fog so thick we could hardly see each other. Six hours after we began our ascent, we found ourselves in a grey horizon-less non-place.

Like me, and like many people, Laure is searching for something. But, like me, and like many people, she doesn’t quite know what it is, which makes it impossible to actually find. Each time she discovers or learns something new, she quickly realizes that she’s misunderstood it – that its surface, image, letters or sound are not what they initially appear. And each time she realizes this, she pushes through the image to find what’s behind it, rearranges the letters to see what they reveal, and whispers the words out loud to hear their secrets. Laure described her idea for Deep Blue Sea Surrounding You/vois ce bleu profond te fondre as being entirely about the journey that took place to make it – one which, like my volcano ascent, has no climax, nor tangible ending, but is ultimately about the experience of being with other people along the way.