Agnès Varda
The Twin Shores
30 Oct 2012 - 07 Apr 2013
Agnès Varda
Les Gens de la Terrasse [The People on the Terrace], 2010. Video, 2’33’
Photo: Guillermo Mendo
Les Gens de la Terrasse [The People on the Terrace], 2010. Video, 2’33’
Photo: Guillermo Mendo
THE TWIN SHORES OF AGNÈS VARDA
30 October 2012 – 7 April 2013
Exhibition Session: Surround Action: Conceptual Peripheries
Having filmed the seaside and the beach so much, I could be taken for a specialist. Here I show a photo of the sea and we can imagine the wind which, at that moment, whips the crest of a wave up into jets of water. I also propose that the movement which continues the image is cinema, another representation of the seaside, we hear the last wavelet that comes and flattens itself on the sand, well, the sand is real sand, it's reality.
But I also really like trees, mosses and fig leafs, cats, and potatoes, heart-shaped ones above all. As for death, widows bear the burden of it. I've met some on the island of Noirmoutier. Wives of sailors, wives of sorrows, as the local expression has it. I've done fourteen portraits of them. I've created a way of presenting them: they surround a central image, as in old polyptych paintings. Each visitor is invited to listen to one or the other of them, in private, each person will recognize in these more or less old women a mother, aunt or grandmother, or a neighbour.
Another project in the exhibition is to show a film in response to an enigmatic photograph. Every image questions us. The gaze is tantamount to curiosity, empathy and, at times, the play of imagination. One day in 1956 some people were captured by my lens in a surprising configuration, as if staged. This is Le terrasse du Corbusier (Le Corbusier's Terrace). Who were they? What were they doing there? And why on that day? This photo has inspired and prompted me to invent a history for these unknowns. I've filmed Les Gens de la Terrasse (The People on the Terrace) by inventing the three or four minutes prior to and after the clicking of the shutter.
An exhibition is an open notebook, a sheaf of disparate notes, but it's a single person who expresses him- or herself in a discontinuous, contradictory way. The diversity of this gathering of my works is something I stand by. It enables me to share my impressions with different, more or less intrigued and sensitive people of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. I would like the encounter to take place between these representative works of mine and the people of Seville.
Agnès Varda
30 October 2012 – 7 April 2013
Exhibition Session: Surround Action: Conceptual Peripheries
Having filmed the seaside and the beach so much, I could be taken for a specialist. Here I show a photo of the sea and we can imagine the wind which, at that moment, whips the crest of a wave up into jets of water. I also propose that the movement which continues the image is cinema, another representation of the seaside, we hear the last wavelet that comes and flattens itself on the sand, well, the sand is real sand, it's reality.
But I also really like trees, mosses and fig leafs, cats, and potatoes, heart-shaped ones above all. As for death, widows bear the burden of it. I've met some on the island of Noirmoutier. Wives of sailors, wives of sorrows, as the local expression has it. I've done fourteen portraits of them. I've created a way of presenting them: they surround a central image, as in old polyptych paintings. Each visitor is invited to listen to one or the other of them, in private, each person will recognize in these more or less old women a mother, aunt or grandmother, or a neighbour.
Another project in the exhibition is to show a film in response to an enigmatic photograph. Every image questions us. The gaze is tantamount to curiosity, empathy and, at times, the play of imagination. One day in 1956 some people were captured by my lens in a surprising configuration, as if staged. This is Le terrasse du Corbusier (Le Corbusier's Terrace). Who were they? What were they doing there? And why on that day? This photo has inspired and prompted me to invent a history for these unknowns. I've filmed Les Gens de la Terrasse (The People on the Terrace) by inventing the three or four minutes prior to and after the clicking of the shutter.
An exhibition is an open notebook, a sheaf of disparate notes, but it's a single person who expresses him- or herself in a discontinuous, contradictory way. The diversity of this gathering of my works is something I stand by. It enables me to share my impressions with different, more or less intrigued and sensitive people of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. I would like the encounter to take place between these representative works of mine and the people of Seville.
Agnès Varda