06 Nov 2008

LAURA ERBER at Novembro Arte Contemporânea

I invite you, I convoke you, I give you a name,
any one: mists, legs, a wolf of mercury,
vegetation that grows on certain gestures,
a tiger sleeping behind the word.

GHÉRASIM LUCA

Every year the river Seine receives about 180 human bodies in the Paris region. Many of them return to the surface, some alive, others not. And those who do not return get mixed up with the objects dumped in the river every day and rot together, depending on the rhythm of each material. The river collects whatever is discarded, everything from refrigerators to voodoo statuettes. Bodies without a name, objects without an owner, dejects, refuse.

In her second individual exhibit at Novembro Arte Contemporânea, artist LAURA ERBER presents a multimedia installation (3 video projections and 6 televisions) and a set of objects that question the death impulse in its ambivalent and oblique manifestations. A man waiting on the river banks, a girl fishing for heads of hair on the river's edge, a woman sleeping among the fish. The images were shot in Paris in 2007 during a period of residence at Le Recollets with a scholarship from the City of Paris.

The works start with two suicides, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the 20th century: the Unknown of the Seine and the poet Ghérasim Luca. In 1901, the Paris Morgue received the body of a young woman that came to be referred to as 'Unknown Girl of the Seine', a myth created around the death of a girl with a disturbing expression of ecstasy on her face. Her strange smile made such an impression on the doctor at the morgue that he had a mold of her face made in plaster. Replicas of the mask of the 'Unknown Girl' were common objects in French households up to the 50s and 60s, and intrigued many writers and artists. The French writer Maurice Blanchot, who had a replica of the mask on his desk, told how Giacometti was always looking for a young woman capable of the same courage, the same quest for ecstasy in meeting death.

Suicide creates a profaning intimacy with death, an intimacy that abolishes the limit that keeps life and death apart. Moviemaker Stan Brakhage liked recalling that the paintings discovered in caves show that primitive man understood better the fact that the object of fear ought to be materialized. The whole history of erotic magic can be read as the history of possessing fear by apprehending it. In Ghérasim Luca's books L'inventeur de l'amour (The inventor of love) and La mort morte (Death dead), both written in 1945, suicide annihilates the fear of death through erotic possession. On the 3rd of March 1994, Luca's body arrived at the Morgue after being fished out of the Seine by the River Patrol.

Erber creates images that are accomplices in intimacy with death. An intimacy that is seen in the objects turned up in the daily work of the river divers, in the fantasies of a possible Lady Lazarus re-enacting her own death as children do in certain games. In these videos the river Seine is shown as a thickness that is at the same time scenic, plastic and symbolic. Our look now retreats, now lets itself be captured by the charms and creative power of horror.

A Bela Diacronia 1 and 2, the objects exhibited togheather with the videos – a fish tail that ends up as a rabbit's head, a fish dressed up as a bird trying out its wings – reaffirm the idea that meeting death does not function as a symbolic closing, but rather as an index of change, a dynamic principle that offers another display of the signs freed by death. This is the idea that permeates the whole exhibit like a tremor that upsets and alters the forms of life and makes bodies appear that no longer fit within their physical limits and so come undone, inventing for themselves a way out, another plasticity. The multiple video projection emphasizes the aleatory and its capability to create unforeseen combinations that need not make sense in the way of classical montage. In different visual layers, different textures and material forms, other pacts also arise between fiction, document and performance.

BIOGRAPHY

Laura Erber was born in 1979 in Rio de Janeiro. Her artistic practice concerns both images (film, drawing, video installations) and text, especially poetry. Her work is driven by a constant need to liberate signs and renegotiate verbal and visual space. Her work has been presented in several international cinema and video festivals and museums throughout the world (including Jeu de Paume, The European House of Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Le Plateau, IASPIS, The Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil). She has held solo exhibits at the Miró Foundation (Spain/2002), International Art Center at Vassivière Island CIAP (France/2005). She was an artist in residence at Le Fresnoy Contemporary Art Center (France) and at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany). In 2007, together with performer Marcela Levi, she received the Batiscafo /Triangle Arts grant (Cuba). She was resident writer at the Pen Center in Antwerp and has published Insones (7 Letras, 2002), Körper und tage (Merz-Solitude, 2006), Os corpos e os dias/Bodies and days (Editora de Cultura, 2008) and Vazados & Molambos (Editora da Casa, 2008). She collaborated with Italian writer Federico Nicolao in the book Celia Misteriosa (Illusion d'optique & Villa Medici, 2007) and with artist Laercio Redondo in the video project The glass house (1999-2008). Webpage: http://lauraerber.googlepages.com/