painting-voice-video installation

 

B(earth)

2007-08

Acrylic painting on canvas measuring 400 x 150 cm (made up of two panels of 200 x 150 cm each), light and spooling sound recording 21 minutes long, two 4:3 digital video screened simultaneously and mirroring the painting.

An installation by Ludivine Allegue and Yvon Bonenfant

Painting, videography: Ludivine Allegue
Sound, voice: Yvon Bonenfant

Compositional assistant: Francis Silkstone

About B(earth)

Vocal composition takes place in the medium of time. Its narrative takes place between a beginning and an end in successive, though due to the multi-tracked nature of the recording process, sometimes simultaneous, sequences. This is not the case for the painted image, the perception of which is not sequential. Rather than a segment of time, painting is like a circle. It embodies an instant as the intersection of different temporalities. That’s the reason why it was particularly interesting to develop our reflection processes around the notion of gesture while working in the studio. Because the act of painting, via the interface of focusing on corporeal gesture, becomes as sequential as the act of vocal composition; both involve a physical relationship to non-form: emptiness or blankness in painting, silence in vocal creation, which is (at least while in the studio), unmediated by digital technology.

Allegue, “Receiving otherness” in Allegue, L. and Bonenfant, Y. (2008), ‘Textures and Translations: B(earth)in between Extended Voice and Visual Arts’, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 1: 3, pp. 237–256, doi: 10.1386/jafp.1.3.237/7, p.243.

To witness how the body’s parts could inflect voice’s textures definitely opened inner places that I had not yet visited in my painting. From a corporeal point of view, the incarnation of breath through voice generates a physical vibration that is as real for the generator as for the receptor of the sound. If skin appears to me as a container that visually manifests the experience of being, voice belongs to what is contained. It can fill what we might call the infinity we carry within us, and it reveals internal spaces through vibration. For me this relates to volume, a quality that painting, being bidimensional, does not necessarily involve. Painting shows me my skin and embodies my vision. Receiving voice echoed my body’s pace: blood, heart, breath.

Allegue, “Receiving otherness”, in Allegue, L. and Bonenfant, Y. (2008), ‘Textures and Translations: B(earth)in between Extended Voice and Visual Arts’, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 1: 3, pp. 237–256, doi: 10.1386/jafp.1.3.237/7, p.244.

B(earth) is pronounced birth but we chose this improbable orthography to suggest the notion of being, as much as that of death, through a reference to the return of the body to the original earth. We meant the transformation of being that goes necessarily through matter, through body.

Like the thread. This vertical time that restores us to that forgotten place of ours: hidden where unborn words are.

Allegue, L. and Bonenfant, Y. (2008), ‘Textures and Translations: B(earth)in between Extended Voice and Visual Arts’, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 1: 3, pp. 237–256, doi: 10.1386/jafp.1.3.237/7, p.255.

 

To view excerpts of B(earth), please click HERE.

To listen to radio excerpts of Letras y Notas by Eva Santamaría on B(EARTH), click on B(EARTH)

Exhibitions

2009 – Alsager Arts Centre, Manchester, UK. 27 April -1 May 2009

2008 – Atrium, Cardiff, UK. 26-29 de Junio de 2008. B(earth) – by Allegue & Bonenfant.

2008 – Talmart Gallery, http://www.talmart.com, 13 de Mayo – 1 de Junio de 2008, Paris, FR (B(earth) – Allegue & Bonenfant

Residencies

2009 – Alsager Arts Centre, Manchester, UK. 27 April -1 May 2009

2007 – Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art Limoges-Aubusson (Ministère de la Culture), FR 9 de Mayo – 13 de Julio 2007

Commissions

2008 – Three art videos within project “Extending vocal bodies into audiovisual media” directed by vocal artist Yvon Bonenfant. Funded by the University of Winchester (UK) and the British Academy.

2007 – Painting for project “Textures” co-directed with vocal artist Yvon Bonenfant. Funded by the University of Winchester (UK), IDEAT (CNRS/ Universidad PARIS 1, FR) and technical support of the ENSA Limoges Aubusson (Ministère de la Culture, FR)

Publications

2014 Unavoidable hyphen, in “L’artiste Chercheur”, p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e | Vol. 1 | No. 1 | October 2014. C.N.R.S., Université Sorbonne Paris 1, Institut ACTE, EsPAS (Esthétique de la performance et des Arts du Spectacle), ISSN 2426-3893.

2011 “Un geste contient l’immensité” in Migrations/Mutations. Paysages dans l’art contemporain, E. Chiron dir., Paris, Pub. de la Sorbonne, ISBN 978-2-85944-649-9, ISSN 1268-7723.

2008 Allegue, L. and Bonenfant, Y. (2008), ‘Textures and Translations: B(earth)in between Extended Voice and Visual Arts’, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 1: 3, pp. 237–256, doi: 10.1386/jafp.1.3.237/7

 

 

© Painting – Ludivine Allegue. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ludivine Allegue with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.