With This Chapter begins twice, Eve-Gabriel Chaba-non brings together several recurring threads of their practice. Among them is the creation of inclusive and engaged situations in which a script of commonness is rehearsed. For this exhibition, the artist presents a new body of works, in which the notions of sociability and of collective, political, and economic constructions are articulated through collages of text, textile, ceramics, and found objects. By fostering contaminations between living beings, materials, histories, and reference systems, Ève-Gabriel Chabanon questions the autonomy of the modern subject, replacing it with a sense of existential pluralism.
At the entrance of the exhibition, a cracked black blanket hangs. It is a found reversed astrakhan coat. The artist re-enacts the artisanal gestures of tanning and hand-stitching inherent to its original making in order to restore the broken piece – knowing that one such garment needs about thirty karakul lambskins. Strip-ped of its satin lining, dismembered, and repatched together, its fragments reveal a unified body: a composite beast, precious and powerful. If one pays attention, the reversed spelling of “Somatic Communism” can be deciphered—like a slogan, a rallying cry. “Somatic Communism” recalls a previous installation by the artist in which a vitrine display showed mushroom cultures feeding on abandoned garments worn by people who shared with the artist the intimacy of a community.
In the FRONTROOM, a metallic creature stretches in a bow, as if to welcome the visitor. It drags behind it a long white mane – formed by hundreds of clay pipes’ fragments, collected by the artist on the banks of the river Thames. Testifying to a popular culture deeply rooted in the everyday life of Victorian London, the pipes were mass-produced from white clay. Often considered disposable, these objects accompanied the rise of tobacco and its associated social practices. Dropped or discarded from quays and markets, they now lie as shells, fossils, embedded in the river’s sediment. Assembled here, they formed a choir of silent inhalation that welcomes the viewer.
A series of hanging mobiles is suspended from the ceiling. They hold vines of clay pipes, snake plants like, and scarecrows in the shape of ceramic plates, which have been pierced several times –like eyes or lenses?––rendering them unusable. Some of these plates are spread out horizontally, offering a nearly voyeuristic glimpse into nests where porous eggs, alone or as a group, listen and sense in order to form themselves as individuals in becoming.
Through the remnants of various fabrics and clothes, dyed and proliferated by mycelium during the various iterations of this work, Ève-Gabriel Chabanon creates here a new patchwork on the scale of the exhibition space. These assemblages, almost organic, nourished by the traces of absent bodies, sketches a portrait of a marginal collectivity. This collectivity underpins a network of subjectivities, where surplus becomes shared resource. The work interrogates social, economic, and identity constructions, taking the body as a porous site of memory and transformation.
Ève-Gabriel Chabanon
Over the years, Ève Gabriel Chabanon has developed a hybrid practice that explores our relationship to work as well as to collective, political, and economic structures. With This Chapter Begins Twice, the artist opens a new research cycle centered on translation, the body, and the collective creation of narratives. The artist invites the audience to reflect on the multitude of bodies and narratives that unfold on a surface such as textile, and that mesh together across language, material, and community. Based between Brussels and Geneva, they teach in the TRANSforme Master’s programme at the art school HEAD in Geneva.
Exhibition supported by WBI Wallonie-Bruxelles Inter-national.
