Dialogue

Kristina Depaulis et Isabelle Rocton, summer 2011

translation / Cyril Dussuchaud

 

IR
You started your works with scale models. Your first sculptures already illustrated an interest for space. They came in the form of boxes containing a miniature place. Perforations allowed the light to circulate, the spectator to cast a look, and to create atmospheres according to the different lightings offered.
How did you get from these scale models to sculptures made to elive in f?

KD
I have always been fascinated by miniature spaces and more particularly architectural scale models in which the notions of objects and space continually cut across each other and mingle. The mental projection they suggest implies an intense frustration linked to the functional impossibility to have access inside.
To me, building spaces in boxes was like playing with the contrast between the cardboard box taken as a familiar, worthless object, and a space within. And when you had a look at this space, your whole body was swallowed, projected in a place and isolated.
Looking through these objects made you grope along in the place containing the experiment as the lightning inside depended completely on the movements. With these tools, I could work on something monumental in a 21x29.7cm box.
In this exploration of the space where the materials, the lights underwent changes through the keyhole, I found myself disconnected from the places, wandering c the spaces were floating. I started to include the notion of time and to deal with the question of the in situ: working in real sites, starting from the body experience in these spaces before reconstructing it from a distance.
Consequently, the objects took shape, questioning on the one hand movement and on the other hand, stillness. But the head was more and more solicited, the relation with the wall became unbearable and for ergonomic reasons, wearing a helmet turned out to be the solution.
Not only the space was carried without using the arms, but the body of the spectator became more implicated and the space of the experiment was explored in a blindly way. Little by little, the clothes appeared to be the following step. I liked the idea of an envelope, of a skin as a distance, a passage between two different experiences of the same space. Then I could completely consider the manipulating body in the shape of the object.

IR
The helmet is much present in your sculptures. It seems to have a vital function, to be absolutely necessary when it comes to understand your work.

KD
Indeed, the helmet is essential because it contributes to the metamorphosis and the spectator can become a espectactor f as he gets fit to set up the experience. When the head is fully integrated in the object, the rest of the body takes care of the exchange with the other who observes, as the face cannot be seen anymore: it is an unknown body which acts and then becomes a kind of mutant. I fm looking for this tumble in the strangeness. When the helmet confines you, it also asserts an experience that can only be unique and individual, giving a different substance to the experience. Even when the sight is maintained, the helmet is still an element of the passage, of the journey into the experience.

IR
What you suggest is in fact an experience, or to be more precise, possible experiences.
Let fs talk about the first experience, the one which consists in discovering the object itself. The object exists as it is. It is made of a specific material, it has a volume, a size and a definite color which is white – with a few exceptions, but we will come back to them later. Can you explain in detail the three specificities of your sculptures?

KD
The materials I use stem from the object itself. It ranges from saddlery to plastic cover for trucks and home textiles. I look for this familiar evocation of an armchair, of camping furniture, of a tablecloth mat, and I like when this evocation is instantly diverted by the shape and the function of the object. In the same spirit, I cultivate the contrast of a textile material which is not in store for clothes. During the making, the question of the manual creation attracts me and partakes of a research fitted to the body (the using/making body).
At the beginning, my own body is the scale (point of reference: I am my first human guinea-pig) and then, by extension, so that my sculptures can be experienced by a lot of people, I make several sizes or adaptable shapes according to the height and the stoutness of those who are going to use the objects. This element is quite a playful constraint that materializes right from the start. A work of art that could be manipulated by a little number of people would be of little interest. Besides, I carried the experience further, creating fifty made-to-measure clothes for the sculpture entitled: ethe incapacity of walking straight f. It wasn ft meant to limit the number of people – as the principle is to create as many clothes as there are individuals who want to do the experience) – but, on the contrary, I did that in order to achieve an appropriateness, inevitably utopian, between the using body and the used object.
The colour white has gradually become established in my work. I have always thought that colours were complex in their evocations, their symbolism c and the problem of the white page, upon which you fit in, has become obvious. It echoes memory and its loss and the idea that each imagination must have the possibility to be written in my objects. White is not neutral, it reveals shape, it irradiates or disappears according to the spaces in which it can be found. I think its disappearance in the white boxes is a real power. Ideally the experience of the objects, and thus their display, has to fit in the space. White also evokes hygiene, medicine, it is comforting and disheartening. Dirt also generates a big contradiction. Apparently, white cannot be handled as it gets quickly dirty, but that is precisely what makes it truly significant: it keeps the traces, the marks.

IR
The second experience consists in eliving in f the sculpture, in setting it in motion. Right from the start, do you orientate the user in a direction you anticipate? Do you control this experience?

KD
During the creation, I am my first human guinea-pig, and everything follows after this exploration: the shape, the display, the arrangement. I begin with a specific experience that I want to make use of. For instance, finding myself floating between the ceiling and the floor, or trying to fly by flapping our arms up and down instead of dashing forward in a horizontal position. So, in this orientation I can foresee what the handling of the object will contain, but the length of the experience escapes me. These are intersubjective data. The interest is all in the idea of building containers where each one of us brings who he is, his own body, his perceptive memory...

IR
The third experience dwells in the imagination of the watcher, the spectator who fears to try or who waits for his turn.

KD
When the object is handled, it spreads, changes its shape and articulates with the manipulating body and the space. This point of view modifies the connection to the object and introduces the idea that this handling body is part of the work of art and contributes to the sculpture. It is also a space of imaginary projection for the person who has not manipulated or won ft do it. This person is invited to explore mentally the experience offered.
In order to apprehend my work, I think that it is ideal to combine these three experiences: the perception of the objects in abeyance, the outer perception when the object is manipulated by other people and, to finish, the use of the objects. In this jigsaw-like reconstitution I like to find the permanent but always incomplete porosity of the inside and of the outside and more particularly of the skin.

IR
Even if your sculptures exist as objects, they are waiting to be activated. You invite the visitors of the exhibition room to be part of the epenetrable - easy to handle – moveable – restricting – amusing f structures with directions for use. These pictures on a white background represent white figures outlined in black which wrap themselves in the article of clothing that keeps its colorful and photographic aspect.
These characters, created with the complicity of your family circle and emptied of their content, finally generate a new visual experience consisting of projecting oneself inside the object, like these figures with non-stereotyped bodies.

KD
The question of the handling of the objects brought me to create directions for use. At first, I used photos of people who were manipulating and then, I used drawings. Actually, the photos were understood as the account of an action, so they didn ft encourage to try the object.
The photograph was also a dead memory, carrying a past event, from another time. On the contrary, the drawing could represent a projected mental event. They could also be reminiscent of the recognizable direction of use – of any daily object – and produce a reading of one fs own action.
The physical presence of a real person to explain the handling to the people is something I find really important and which is part of the directions of use. At first, this outsider introduces the exchange, encourages and often makes possible the complete use of the object.
Then, the outsider can help people putting on clothes, covering them and going beyond the conventional distance that separates them from the other. He can be closer to them.

IR
Memory is a strong notion in the use of your sculptures, particularly in your video « Strada del muro, Romagnano Sesia » you directed in 2008. You can be seen dressed in a white suit, rubbing yourself against a wall then on the ground in an alley. The stones and the soil leave their mark on the suit and the suit leaves its textile fibres on the wall. A kind of exchange takes place, amplified by the soundtrack.

KD
The work of art you are talking about is very personal and finally quite unusual. I don ft direct a lot of videos. I only use pictures, photographs or videos in my work as documentary signs, palliatives, when the experience cannot be done. If the video is sometimes used, it is always during the experience and because the video serves it – like video security monitors whose recorded traces would have no interest but only for information.
But in this room, it is something completely different. The question raised here is about a performance made in the village of my grandfather – that I have never met – in a place I discovered on that day. I tried to rebuild a missing link in my family history, to materialize it, to embody it with my own body.
When I do these rubbings, I want to be one with the street and I try to appropriate it conscientiously. The different surfaces, upon which I confront myself with, change in their texture, shape and give this exploration the frame of a relentless quest for traces, scratches, tears that artificially rebuild a memory. I didn ft expect that this exchange would actually happen and I would also leave bits of the suit.

IR
You are interested in different aspects of the memory and naturally in its loss which generates loss of identity. Besides, this notion of amnesia is not excluded from the aesthetic aspect of your sculptures: some suits look like 18th Century camisoles.

KD
In fact, when I started to introduce the notion of time in my work, I became interested in memory and particularly in the memory of space, in the different perception mechanisms and in the way they build an identity. Memory is a moving matter shaped by a present that contains both past and future. In other words, memory relies on our previous perceptions, on our perceptions of the present where we call it back and on the perceptions we project. Memory is also many-sided: mechanical memory of the body, memory of actual experience, memory of the memory. It exists and lasts only when it is jointed to the memories of the other, in order to search a collective intersubjective memory.
When I made the body-driers for the Eveche Museum, they answered a thought I had on memories at work in the alteration that was in process. On that occasion, an exhibition room had been opened to contemporary artists to question this period of metamorphosis. The colour of the body-driers, a green close to turquoise, matched perfectly the colour used to underline the mouldings of the whole museum.
This painting, made in the 80s, was just a vulgar testimony about to disappear. The body-driers acted like an amplifier of the colour during the exhibition. But now that the colour has disappeared, the driers are the only memory of it.
My first approaches of the spatial memory have naturally led me to its loss and the disorientation it causes. I play a lot with the idea of keeping the person who handles the objects away from a natural apprehension of the space around him. When the body is deprived of the use of one leg, it questions itself on what seems to be acquired, as it is compelled to the present of the experience and its reality. In these dichotomies, the question of disorientation comes down to free the body from its environment, to confuse its perceptions in order to make it lose its footing while bringing it methodically back to the place where it stands.
I quite like camisoles, space-suits, technical protective clothing but also objects such as physiotherapist fs treatment platforms, fencing helmets, aviator armchairs c It is true that a camisole means a lot because it hampers the body and in the end, my objects necessitates constraints but these constraints are destined to play a game, to explore, to realize its presence in the world, to plunge into imagination and into a poetics of space. I create attempts at the impossible.
When I offer experiences, it is about space and the other, this other who is the first of all constraints and necessities. We find our way in spaces, and without the other we could not move on. We get experienced with and against. As far as memory is concerned, the other is the safeguard but also a spoilsport. A recollection is a negotiation and my objects negotiate too.

IR
Three sets of themes emerge in your work: ostriches, space suits and the public space. What are the links you weave between them?

KD
These three dimensions are connected and distinct at the same time. They allow me to multiply food for thought and to build a network which is constantly developing, with the experience of space and of the other in its centre. In the ostriches category nests an unusual thought on the in situ, these rooms explore huge spaces in proportion to the object fs size. I follow the myth of Alice in her country. The space suits are about the envelope, the clothes, the exploring or saving machine-outfit, the shackles that reinstate a form of heaviness.
Thanks to these objects, the body of the other gets more involved in the handling. I send it back to the image it has of itself: its measurements, its weight, its suppleness, its performance c I send it back to its materiality. Finally, the rooms destined to the public spaces open themselves wider on zones with no signs / eovermarked f. They let you get in touch with the collective and question routines, constraints, rules c It is a violent space for the objects that are inside, the relations are literal there. I like the loss of landmarks that my objects can generate and the loss of the identity of my objects as well. I look for a crack where my objects would find their place up to their disappearance.

IR
Language also finds its place: the titles of some of your works are word associations or puns.
Are they destined to a direct understanding of your works or only an invitation to the game?

KD
The titles are really an invitation to the game. They are often sound decompositions or words which seem unusual and an aspect of my work would have remained unexplored without the language. The titles are an incitement to find all the meanings of a word and all the manipulations that can be done with it. It is a way to cleverly side-step but not to escape the meaning. The aim is to give it space, volume. The titles are quite close to the fabric, they are another skin.

IR
By their aspect, some of your works of art – like Scaphandriers in 2007 – can be reminiscent of Lygia Clark fs. However, your work has no therapeutic aim: the experience is only about space.

KD
The evocation of Lygia Clark in my work is obvious and the spacesuits can be taken as a reference to her work. I am at one with this artist with the question of the use of the spectator, the thought about perception, and on what she calls the eEmpty-Full f, this juxtaposition between the inside and the outside, the wrong and the right side. She looks for fusion and totality when I look for a game of split and disorientation. Now, I am quite critical of her relation with therapy and creativity. The experience I offer is about space, the poetics of space and time. My objects don ft exist only within the experience they infer, they contain and are contained.