Isolated in a hangar, Lola runs through her memories. Settings light up, characters appear. Lola navigates from one scene to another.
Juliette Dominati works on memories, on what remains and what escapes, on details, nothings. Both painter and director, she is interested in the construction of environments that are complete, autonomous, enveloping. Her installations are like three-dimensional collages, made of painted found objects. Her work is made up of tricks, materials that are often poor, discards, discoveries. She collects stories, images, abandoned materials, wood, cloth, furniture; she records narratives, archives moments, which she glues, tapes, replays. These fragments are delicately assembled, in a troubling equilibrium, only just standing, always about to collapse. And yet they “hold” spaces, construct worlds that seem to be waiting for viewers and characters to enter them, to approach and to settle. These stagings cultivate a private aura, a mysterious quietude, and an “unease” characteristic of dreams. To approach them is to experience a collapse, palimpsests, fractured memories that are at once confused and joyous.
Born in Paris in 1990, Juliette Dominati is a filmmaker and artist. Her work is regularly exhibited in France and abroad (Argentina, United States, China, Iceland, United Kingdom) and will feature at the forthcoming Salon de Montrouge, as well as in her next solo show in London.
CursusEXPOSITIONS PERSONNELLES
2019 « The Stolen Stone Project » with Toti Ripper, Seyðisfjörður, ICE
All I want is more more more, PADA Studios, Lisbonne, PT
2018 Catastrophe!, Château de Sacy, Sacy-le-Petit, FR
2017 La chambre d'à côté, Galerie Duboys, Paris 20e, FR
EXPOSITIONS - RESIDENCES
2020 65ème Salon de Montrouge, Montrouge, FR
2019 Novembre à Vitry, Galerie Jean Collet, Vitry-sur-Seine, FR
EXH 01, Floorr Magazine online exhibition, UK
Rude Assembly Part 4, Oxford St, Sydney, AU
« The Stolen Stone Project », Artagon Live, Cité Internationale des Arts, FR
Carry on combines, Galerie MR80, Paris 4e, FR
Heima, Art Residency Program, Seyðisfjörður, ICE
PADA Studios Residency, Awarded 2019, Lisbon, PT
Micro, AIR Gallery, The Warehouse, Altrincham, UK
Radical Residency III, Unit 1 Gallery, Awarded 2019, London, UK
2018 Salad Day, YoungSpace Winter Show, https://yngspc.com, USA
Résidence d’artistes de Sacy, Château de Sacy, Sacy-le-Petit, FR
The London List, The Curators, by Benjamin Weaver, New York City, USA
Bibelot, Summer Show, Wendy Galerie, Paris 7e, FR
PLEAT Gallery, Exhibitionism, curator Bethanie Irons, Galerie en ligne, USA
El Mismo Perro, Bolivar Club, Buenos Aires, ARG
2017 Novembre à Vitry, Galerie Jean Collet, Vitry-sur-Seine, FR
YIA – Young International Art Fair #11, Le Carreau du Temple, Paris 3e, FR
Artagon III, Les Petites Serres, Paris 5e, FR
Houses ans Trees, Luren Gallery, Suzhou, Chine, CHN
2016 Exposition de groupe, Galerie Duboys, Paris 3e, FR
Artagon II, Passage de Retz, Paris 3e, FR
Mille Feuillets VI, Ygrec, Paris 13e, FR
2015 Tours de Babel changées en ponts, Galerie Chenaux, Paris 3e, FR
ECRITURE - MISE EN SCENE
2020 The Stolen Stone Project, , Seyðisfjörður, ICE
The Show doit continuer, film, Buenos Aires, ARG
2018 El mundo es un escenario, court-métrage, Buenos Aires, ARG
2017 Pot-pourri, ENSAPC, Cergy, France, FR
2016 Les Oiseaux, Festival, Les Traversées du Marais, Parcours Musical, FR
2015 En petits morceaux, Le Kiosque électronique, Théâtre des Amandiers, Nanterre, FR - Kogan Gallery, Paris 3e, FR- La Générale, Paris 11e, FR
Les Enchaînés, Le Salon H, Paris 6e, FR
COMMISSARIAT
2018 Insignificante y Perecido, Club Bolivar, San Telmo, Buenos Aires, ARG
2016 Placards, ENSAPC, Cergy, FR
PUBLICATIONS
2019 Floorr Magazine, interview par Nathalie Gonzalez, UK
FOA, interview parJustin Archer, USA
2018 Pince-mi et peins-moi par Joris Thomas, Château de Sacy, FR
FORMATION
2016-présent Licence philosophie, Sorbonne Paris IV, Paris, FR
2012-2017 DNEP, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Paris-Cergy, Cergy, FR
Production : Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains
Sometimes, whatever the damage, a body never dies.
It responds to what wounds it, endangers it, with an increased presence. In fact, does not its disappearance actually make it more alive? From the moment it ceas- es to be, we never stop looking for it. The body moves before and after death. There is no body without this, which is what dreams tell us. The more it is threatened with forgetting, the more we draw from the forces of dream a vitality that metamorphoses and reinstates it.
In the period we are currently living through, when the body is under interrogation, when we are told of its emptying, its vanishing, its dematerialisation, dreams and utopias are constantly reminding us that it remains and will long remain centre-stage.
Centre-stage, or rather, on one of the multiple stages where it goes from one to another. Never immobile, always calling for movement, a dance like a respiration jump-starting the beats of the heart.
By this impulsion it asserts itself at the centre but, strangely, this race, by its speed, erases it by its very manifestation, by the simple light that dazzles us. Through this situation, the body doubts itself. It appears, takes shape in space but the luminous intensity is not its ally. It calls it into question. It struggles against a shadow that threatens it and in which it cannot see itself. If it identifies primarily with the lines that delineate it, that enable it to exist, to say “I,” the world, which plays with luminous multitudes, troubles and defeats it. If it is the coming being, it is also the fugacious one. Initially a blot on the earth, it is liquified in a dilation or evaporates in an expansion whose confines are lost to us. Our body is dispersed, disseminated, and we would be naïve to believe in its physical or lexical definitions. For a while, it is obvious, but this obviousness gives way to the unknown, in which salvation is found in the hiding of appearances. It takes refuge in a “darkness” that invades space and covers, clothing itself in the shadows of the night until light, necessary to all life, revives the quest for an elusive being through the renascent image.
On this point, Junichiro Tanizaki asks us this question: “I wonder if my readers know the colour of that ‘darkness seen by candlelight’. It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.” Experiencing the works in Panorama 2 3 , I have that sensation of a composite territory of ashes turned by art into a suite of colours, refracted through water and light.
Responding to the world’s disintegration with a multicoloured explosion, traversing and speculating with what illuminates or erases it, from black to white, is not a matter of solitude. Feeling the variability of this to and fro, of this metaphor, implies otherness, invokes the other who invites change, the fusion of different substances.
This other is insistently present in this Panorama 23; it is the source and the flux of the current that runs between the works. To move through the paths of the exhibition is to plunge into a universe whose principle is crossover, mixture, a joining as of ocean currents, sea depths. The creatures assembled here question the body and language, they remind me of the introduction to Moby Dick in which Herman Melville defines his hero as swimming through libraries. Yes, they are divers who carry us into fluxes that are the nature of the world in which bodies bathe, to the point of becoming the flux itself, seeking to melt into the other’s body. They dream of a possible body in which fragmentation, breaking and division are erased by ebb and flow, the reflections of a wave, breathing rhythm into the world.
This rhythm engenders infinite series of shifts, projections, cross-fades where gender differences are abandoned, where different kingdoms couple to bring forth suspended bodies, real subjects, constantly agitated by the virtuality of mythologies or science fiction. They are blocks of stone as much as phantoms, swimmers as well as the drowned. They speak the truth while whispering that they are only actors and artifices. One of their states is like that of abandoned objects, of “leftovers” that become sacred, idealised spaces, haloed by enigmas that turn our perception into an initiatory quest.
Here, bodies can be subjected to reification only in the next moment to shatter it with the power of dream thinking. Here, the heroes are also sleepers, or those to whom sleep is a lesson. To sleep, nowadays, is heroic. Blessed are those who, in order to know the world, choose to be its active sleepers.
“To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream,” writes Shakespeare in the heart of Hamlet’s soliloquy, in words that reveal his secret. This trilogy, these three inseparable acts, form but one principle, a single state, a single thought trying to liberate itself and gain a chance of imagining a new world.
A world where we observe the work of abolishing the barrier between the human, the vegetable and the animal. Georges Bataille would be happy to see himself embodied in the presence and prowling of a black panther that is a vector of knowledge through its mysterious expenditure of energy, a dashing race.
This universe is shot through with transparency, in the manner of Sebastiano Mazzoni, Francis Picabia and François Rouan. The vegetal invades the architectural, then the animal, and merges, finally, into human anatomies irrigated by humours, liquids, the water that composes our tears, recalling our fluid, volatile nature, between memory and outpouring.
If part of life is contained in our bones, as imagined by Edgar Allan Poe and the artist Roy Adzak, these bones have no weight, do not immobilise, for they secrete dreams, as true players in the upheavals that determine us. Are they the most reliable identity of our body, as proposed by these works, one of which originates in the philosophical and poetic theme of change in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, while others present the “monstrous form” or the electric bodies of Lovecraft.
What is the reality of these bodies? That of a paradox in which the most physical, the most material is manifested by the most elusively virtual. That of Wim Wenders’ wings of desire, or that of T.S. Eliot trying to formulate his desire to embody writing in words not spoken, in silent speech. One of the artists in Panorama notes: “I would like to be able to say, to seek for silence in speech.” Writing can be a house that leaves its foundations and turns into a boat in order to follow its paths towards the sea, along the river, towards the figures of dream. A house? A boat? Singular anima? I remember, today, a question put by a Dervish dancer, constantly evoking the soul.
“But what is the soul?” I remember, even better, in Tourcoing in 2021, his answer: “Why, the body of course!”
Olivier Kaeppelin