Hélène Thiennot

 

 

At the exhibition the artist will present three works realised during her residency in Gdansk: “Absences”, “Mnemosyne” and “Paysages-poussière”.

The artist about her works:

 

Absences

The photographic installation ‘Absences’ is the product of my wanderings and reflections around the city of Gdansk. A city with tormented and fragmented history which played a decisive role in the fall of the Iron Curtain thanks to "Solidarity" movement. With an intensive and  traumatising memory, the city fascinated me with its architecture and the way it continues to evolve nowadays: ruins side by side with ultra-modern buildings or even fake historic buildings getting lost amongst old churches. I see Gdansk as a body that heals through its constructions, reconstructions and deconstructions.

I think stones are, in a way, alive. I imagine them as small cells which build up the body of the city where buildings become organs. They are silent witnesses to the bruises of history by bearing its after-effects. In my work, I have collected fragments of red bricks  – the typical construction material which can be found in almost every district of the city. I have also done photographic work by searching for dormant places, abandoned in most cases, left here in the landscape like ghosts. Both emptied of their senses but still present, these places seem frozen in a space and a time. They are proof of past events. This state remains however temporary, as each space must find a specific purpose in a modern city, be replaced or renovated. These small hints will disappear, erasing part of the collective memory, identical to a loss of memory that everyone can feel at its scale.

Therefore, the piece is constructed from two dialogical elements: the former – organised, consists of classic photographs with missing pieces; and the latter – disorganised, presents these missing and lost fragments printed on bricks with the use of photosensitive solution. The solution reacts to its foundation. The more damaged the stone is, the more damaged the image will be. The more porus the stone is, the more the image is absorbed by the latter, becoming only a latent spectrum, almost invisible to the eye. The memory is weak, it gets erased or retains only parts. But forgetting is also a risk, the risk that tragic situations repeate as if history was only a cycle.

 

Mnémosyne

Mnemosyne – the Greek goddess of memory, inspired the art historian Aby Warburg to the practice that resulted in his famous work Mnemosyne Atlas. His method sought to produce quasi-physical comparisons of juxtaposed images from various horizons, ranging from classical Renaissance through Hopi Indians to the advertising of his time.

This series is inspired by these collections of fragments. It is in perpetual expansion, corresponding to my photographic practice which, over time, is enriched. In a way, it is an image of my own memory: memories sometimes absent, disordered, forgotten, latent. The viewer has to bend down to read these tiny photographs and try to link them like a large mosaic of half-opened windows on the intimacy of my memories. Here, I work on the Polish part of the project.

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