Remembering her blurred childhood vision, Morgane Tschiember embarks on a poetic quest in search of a sculptural world composed of shapes, materials, gestures and colors.In her work, Morgane tries to understand, assemble and transpose her perceptions to reach a universe of personal forms.
Emerging vision
Some films are best watched with your eyes closed. You tune in to the twittering of birds, then to the sound that intensifies like a rising sun. A dawn, a morning. First shots.
At first the shapes are vague, abstract, freely associated. An opal-like disc becomes a porthole. Beyond it, intersecting wires and textures swim into view; a trellis appears, then the outline of scaffolding. Only after the overall picture has been pieced together do we discover Morgane Tschiember's sculpture studio. In its portrayal of emerging vision, Xavier Mussel's film has constructed the studio in small glimpses, the way Cézanne, through a series of brushstrokes, reveals the Mont Sainte-Victoire.
This white-beige, monochrome universe, which matches the colours of the artist's eyes, is also a world in the making. An odd, charred shape emerges, as if from the depths of time, and there is room enough in the glass beads for entire worlds, be they glacial or aquatic. A journey through space-time, celebrated by a female chorus: a chorus of priestesses.
The act of opening our eyes and putting them to work is both the artist’s remembered childhood experience and that offered by the film to the viewer. First, the camera is tactile, filming Morgane's face up close, the way a blind man explores with his fingertips. But because sight is informed by touch, the camera goes on to reveal, in close-up shots, details that must be assembled, com-prehended. And so we see samples of crater material, volcanic magma, shrivelled cardboard, the crumbled columns of an imaginary temple and fragments of caves and shells, fossilised.
And suddenly, a memory rises up out of the twisted, doubled-up forms. That of the "bouquet of bottle caps" described by Marguerite Duras, of that "iron made vulnerable as flesh", in the Hiroshima museum. The beginning and end of the world are superimposed in a vision that has, once again, become blurred.
Everything will begin again, says Duras, in the constant dread of another bomb.
Everything will begin again, suggests Morgane Tschiember, and the phrase is no longer a bad omen, but a promise. Vision is born and will be reborn, emerging from the world of imagination, from the body that touches and holds, is itself touched and delights in visually reproducing that touch, the traces of which linger on. It will emerge through the grace of children, who know how to revive memories.
Sylvie Lopez-Jacob
Sylvie Lopez-Jacob has a degree in philosophy and a doctorate in the semiology of text and image. She teaches in secondary schools and at the Ecole nationale supérieure d'art in Bourges. For a long time now, she has been making the most of the encounter between art and philosophy. In her lectures and articles, cinema remains a privileged field of investigation. She has led numerous teaching projects focusing on aesthetic issues, in collaboration with painters, playwrights and writers including Yves Michaud, Pierre Bergounioux, Claude Viallat and Claude Lévèque.
Some films are best watched with your eyes closed. You tune in to the twittering of birds, then to the sound that intensifies like a rising sun. A dawn, a morning. First shots.
At first the shapes are vague, abstract, freely associated. An opal-like disc becomes a porthole. Beyond it, intersecting wires and textures swim into view; a trellis appears, then the outline of scaffolding. Only after the overall picture has been pieced together do we discover Morgane Tschiember's sculpture studio. In its portrayal of emerging vision, Xavier Mussel's film has constructed the studio in small glimpses, the way Cézanne, through a series of brushstrokes, reveals the Mont Sainte-Victoire.
This white-beige, monochrome universe, which matches the colours of the artist's eyes, is also a world in the making. An odd, charred shape emerges, as if from the depths of time, and there is room enough in the glass beads for entire worlds, be they glacial or aquatic. A journey through space-time, celebrated by a female chorus: a chorus of priestesses.
The act of opening our eyes and putting them to work is both the artist’s remembered childhood experience and that offered by the film to the viewer. First, the camera is tactile, filming Morgane's face up close, the way a blind man explores with his fingertips. But because sight is informed by touch, the camera goes on to reveal, in close-up shots, details that must be assembled, com-prehended. And so we see samples of crater material, volcanic magma, shrivelled cardboard, the crumbled columns of an imaginary temple and fragments of caves and shells, fossilised.
And suddenly, a memory rises up out of the twisted, doubled-up forms. That of the "bouquet of bottle caps" described by Marguerite Duras, of that "iron made vulnerable as flesh", in the Hiroshima museum. The beginning and end of the world are superimposed in a vision that has, once again, become blurred.
Everything will begin again, says Duras, in the constant dread of another bomb.
Everything will begin again, suggests Morgane Tschiember, and the phrase is no longer a bad omen, but a promise. Vision is born and will be reborn, emerging from the world of imagination, from the body that touches and holds, is itself touched and delights in visually reproducing that touch, the traces of which linger on. It will emerge through the grace of children, who know how to revive memories.
Sylvie Lopez-Jacob
Sylvie Lopez-Jacob has a degree in philosophy and a doctorate in the semiology of text and image. She teaches in secondary schools and at the Ecole nationale supérieure d'art in Bourges. For a long time now, she has been making the most of the encounter between art and philosophy. In her lectures and articles, cinema remains a privileged field of investigation. She has led numerous teaching projects focusing on aesthetic issues, in collaboration with painters, playwrights and writers including Yves Michaud, Pierre Bergounioux, Claude Viallat and Claude Lévèque.
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The Artist
Morgane Tschiember was born in 1976 in Brest, France.
Sculptor, she lives and works in Paris.
She is represented by the Loevenbruck gallery in Paris.
Morgane Tschiember was born in 1976 in Brest, France.
Sculptor, she lives and works in Paris.
She is represented by the Loevenbruck gallery in Paris.
Director
Xavier MusselCinematograper
Georges de Genevraye
Editor
Xavier Mussel
Rémi Guelfi
Music composer
Alexandre SciréDuration
00:07:34
