Clémence Lollia Hilaire
Clémence Lollia Hilaire - Harvest
Galerie Fons Welters
16 Mar – 26 Apr 2024
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Opening Saturday 16 March 5-7 PM
Clémence Lollia Hilaire
Harvest
16 March – 26 April
A few hours before the exhibition opened, I walked to my studio to open the door and turn on the works.
Entering building / facing door / tapping jacket pocket / no keys / opening bag / finding keys / fitting key for studio 001 through studio 001 door lock.
This gesture, I could do with my eyes closed after having walked the same stairs and opened the same studio door almost every day for the past year. But this time the outcome of the usual operation had a different outcome. Today, the door wouldn’t open.
Inspecting the key / putting the key back in the lock / turning a quarter to the right this time / turning a quarter to the left / shaking the door / getting slightly annoyed.
Getting Joppe to kick the studio door / Calling Daisy / getting Joppe to kick the door again.
After repeating the operation for what felt like hours and being helped by different hands and techniques, I finally called a locksmith, hoping someone would be able to come quick enough on a Saturday morning and for a reasonable fee.
Sitting by stairs / Embarrassed smiles to early visitors / ‘No, it’s not a performance, no’ / ‘Yes, the locksmith is on his way, yes’
In a last desperate attempt, I approached my ear to the door, wiggling the key and trying to understand what had caused the lock to get stuck. I heard voices coming from the inside of the room. I pressed my ear to the keyhole. It sounded like an argument, I could only catch bits of it.
The work was off, and the lights as well. But it sounded like the girls.
The following text is a transcription of fragments of conversation I overheard behind the closed door of my own exhibition.
The works were off, and the lights as well. But I am sure of it now, it must have been the girls.
<<
-No, I'm not feeling it, sorry. I would build a concrete wall if I could.
*Don’t be ridiculous.
-… and what exactly did she want to record?
*Who?
-The woman filming, who else! Remember, the hospital?
-Pass the candies.
*She said she had felt the same pain.
-And would filming it make the pain go away?
And now what? Showing it ? Sorry but I don’t get the logic.
…
The candies, please!
*My mom used to tell me a folktale when I was younger,
There was a man, with eyes so wide, he could see at 360 degrees without moving his head. For this reason he called himself the god of all gods. This wide eyed man mastered the craft of naming and classifying in rigid distinctions everything that surrounded him, from the smallest aquatic living being to the people whose language and belief he could not grasp…
-You’re done with your story? It just does not make sense to put the pain under the scrutiny and judgement of those who don't know simply because they haven't felt it. I don’t get it.
*If you gave me a chance to finish…
The only thing that one can be sure of when it comes to chronic disease: the pain will show up, and when it does, you cannot be sure you will.
-Babe, I’m not sure I get what you mean?
*Nevermind.
So, I continue my story:
The wide eyed man only responded with what he thought was logic to what he could see. The optic was his realm, and his tools were shaped and sharpened solely to respond to sight. With this understanding he determined who…
- … Who was part of his boy’s club and who wasn’t.
So basic Anarcha, I got it! If I go with your story, what confuses me is:
Why would SHE want to use the same tools which have been used by this one eyed man?
*The wide eyed man.
-Why would she want to capture and exhibit a pain that we alone have been feeling and continue to feel now? That only WE understand. Let them have their phallocentric ordering of discourse and aesthetics. I just don’t want representation, that representation. I'm not opening the door!
…
* I am only trying to understand, don’t shout at me!
-There are pains one doesn't just expose, because of the risk of perpetuating a spectacle expected by those who created the representational regime she is now trying to make hers. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
*Maybe she simply forgot her basics? I don’t know. Ok let’s skip to the end of the story:
Those who were defined outside the category the wide eyed man had considered his fellows, saw their eyesight split in two: Their right eye was able to catch and comprehend forms and categories that were dominant in the world; While their left eye had to be exercised to see through a different spectrum that only they could perceive…
-Justice surely won't come from a show, not from SHOWING. Would it ??
…
Pass the candies please.
*Dear, you're just too stubborn. What do you think Lu? You haven't said much.
~“The black woman bleeds over and thereby violates and contaminates the edge and boundary between the contemporary moment and a persistent history of black subjection.”
-Can you please stop speaking in riddles, both of you!
~I’m just reading from this book I found in the storage! If we gonna stay locked in here, we might as well find something to do. Creating new forms is necessarily a constant theorization of our own conditions of (im)possibility, and exu-be-ran-ce.
-It was better when you were quiet, you know?
~We are living dead, fleshing out of form.
-Stop being so pessimistic!
~Precisely. The formless will recognize themselves. Just let them in.
Dialogue imagined by Dina Mimi and Clémence Lollia Hilaire.
Clémence Lollia Hilaire (1995, Guadeloupe) is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, whose practice manifests in the form of videos, sculptures and audio works. Her search for moments of ontological slippage and category transgression lead her to construct narratives where records of personal experience loosely coexist with more than human and mythical protagonists.
She studied at Rietveld Academy and was participant at De Ateliers (2022-2023). She has showed her work at the Coventry Biennial (2023), Wereld Museum, Rotterdam (2022), Galerie Fons Welters (2021), Het Hem (2021), Marwan (2020) and her work is part of the collection of the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.