Pauline Curnier Jardin - La Femme aux mille tours

Pauline Curnier Jardin is a storyteller, her projects most often take the form of installations, combining video, sculpture, performance, and painting. Like Ulysses’ use of metis [cunning], Pauline Curnier Jardin slips into other people’s skins in order to present metamorphoses and constitute grotesque worlds that always wind up resembling ours a little. An interview with an artist with a thousand tricks up her sleeve who likes to “sow discord within archetypes”.

Marie Bechetoille —» In your installations and films, a set of multi-faceted grotesque characters are brought together. How do they appear and who are they really?

Pauline Curnier Jardin —» When you’re looking for gold: you dig, you put sand in the sieve, and everything that’s filtered falls into the pan. All you have left are the smallest grains. Then you spin it, the grains disappear and the heaviest stuff like gold stays at the bottom of the pan. It’s a very long procedure. In the beginning, when I’m writing a film, I’m swamped in historical research, and gradually, characters emerge. They endorse a certain number of concepts and ideas that are essential to me for discussing my concerns. My first film was a performed film, a form of expanded cinema and that was Ah! Jeanne (2006- 2008), an essay on the figure of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc interested me because she contains a lot of historical, political and pictorial issues. I said to myself: “I’m going to paint the portrait of a character who it is impossible to summarise, since she evokes too many things, but who is also an over-represented subject.” By choosing subjects who are “too many things” then filtering them, what matters to me the most becomes a character. For instance, in Cœurs de Silex (2012), the character who is summed up in the credits as “The Witch” is not only this shamanic character that makes connections between nature and humans. She is also “the contemporary bitch” who takes over construction sites on vast plots of land. In a world described in the film as post- or pre-apocalyptic, where there is nothing left to eat, she has this brilliant idea to sell land by the kilo, the only alternative the residents have to feed themselves. She is also the mother of a hybrid child that she is purported to have conceived with both “the Occupier” and “the Ally”. I like to play with archetypes, because they contain their own popular knowledge, to which I add my research and fantasies. Other characters in Cœurs de Silex take on several roles. “The German” is “the Occupier”, he represents the enemy who occupies the land, but who, in my story, after years of occupation, becomes the “integrated-immigrant” who does not understand that people don’t accept him like “everyone else”, beyond his culture. “The Ally” is an American who cries for the people that he symbolically killed in Noisy-Le-Sec. This alludes to a commando of allied forces that, in 1942, while trying to rid the city of the Nazi enemy, heavily bombed and literally destroyed the place. He performs rituals and lays his hands on any kind of concrete debris lying around, because he would like to revive the ruins, reincarnate them. The actor, Eric Abrougoua, knows the American and Ivorian realities, he also cites a history of wars in which black people become cannon fodder. He combines everything. I use confusion because I want to sow discord within archetypes. This obsession with archetypes shows my Pop side!

M.B. —» As archetypes, your characters each present concepts, a word that originally signifies “to contain, hold together”. They bring together human and non-human, figuration and abstraction, and history on a large and small scale.

P.C.J. —» Yes, I don’t really distinguish between human and non-human. I refuse the notion of “cliques” and I absolutely defend polytheism. I think that monotheism is one of the most dangerous of human inventions. Thinking about humanity as a multitude is in my view the only way of not hating each other and of living together. Once you think of individuals, objects, and nature, in a “mono” way, it’s dangerous. You have to embrace everything. This is the idea with soup: you don’t really see what’s in it and the flavour comes from all of it… I don’t like it when things are too clear.

M.B. —» What do you think about science-fiction stories that show the world through the prism of narrative distance?

P.C.J. —» I still haven’t managed to become interested in science-fiction, because I feel as though there’s always a question of a dominant power that governs everything in a supernatural world. But the idea that a single mind dominates everything is the very thing I’m fighting against. I focus more on things that exist than on things that don’t exist. I don’t believe in the supernatural, since I refuse the idea of the natural. I look at bodies and movements, desires. I believe in physical strength and I know that there are places and people that overwhelm me. Some sites are charged with human stories as much as with telluric, biological, or geological stories. They give me an impetus; these are the stories that give me the desire to create. In Sicily, there is an active volcano, I can feel it and say that it’s the voyage of Ulysses, the kingdom of the Cyclops and of Demeter, the goddess of the earth, and that Africans, Normans, and Byzantines all passed through there, and still pass through there. You feel forces there that make you think differently.

M.B. —» I had invited you to join the collective exhibition “Les Innommables grotesques”¹ because for me your work provokes, just as myths do, an experience of vertigo, by presenting a deformed image of the contemporary world.

P.C.J. —» There’s another word that I’m starting to use, inseparable from the grotesque, and that is satire. It took me a long time to use it and to think that this genre defines my work. For me, the grotesque is basically a scientific adjective that enables the question of good or bad taste, beautiful or ugly, to be connected from a historical point of view. But if we talk about ugliness while blaspheming the beautiful, who are we addressing? And who is speaking? Things that are only beautiful are profoundly dull and dangerous because they exclude the rest. Beauty profoundly excludes ugliness and you could say that ugliness excludes beauty, but that doesn’t really matter given that power will always align itself on the side of beauty... But it is false from a strictly aesthetic point of view, because if you take the current figures of power, we can’t say that they are the guarantors of beauty (laughs)! Yet money circulates on the side of what is called “beautiful”...

M.B. —» Your work is political in the broad sense, since it evokes a critique of power, which runs alongside it, and presents the stories of various communities. In Hearts of Flint, we really feel your political view of a place and a context through the script, music, costumes, and editing...

P.C.J. —» It’s a matter of being political in the sense of being queer... Of allowing room for otherness. This leaves a massive range of possibilities so that you don’t categorise yourself within one form. I wrote and directed Cœurs de Silex just before the presidential elections, at a time when I was returning to France after spending four years abroad. I found myself in residency in the suburb of Noisy-le-Sec. At the time, Sarkozy spoke of “cleaning up scum with a high-pressure hose”. One day, I discovered in the city library that there was a “Banlieue” section. Later, the students of the professional high school in which I was working explained to me that the “film de banlieue” [film on the projects or the suburbs] was a film genre for them, a kind of contemporary blaxploitation... that talks about the lives of the second and third generations of immigrants. However, Cœurs de Silex brings together several styles, it’s not a “film de banlieue”. When I think back, I tell myself that I would like to use the same creative process again, that is, an improvisation with the place and climate. Plus, I was talking about something I know well: France.