Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have worked together as a team since 2007.Their work combines video, installation and research so as to offer alternative narratives to straight mind. They regularly work with performing artists and musicians.
In the monumental Baroque space of the Bellelay abbey church they are presenting the installation You Ask Me To Not Give Up Up Up, a roller coaster made of wood and PVC. Its hundred-meter-long circular path weaves between the church’s columns, soars over the alter, gently slopes to a height of eight meters approaching the balconies and then drops vertiginously, leaning to one side as it rounds a corner and slipping through a narrow doorway. Its graceful curves replicate the abbey’s arches. Its spectacular dimensions and movements evoke aspects of the Baroque period.
The figure of a roller coaster is often employed to describe dramatic moments in our lives that produce strong contradictory emotions. At a time when a reactionary offensive threatens to wipe out, overnight, the gains in individual freedoms won through long-term struggle, this representation of a roller coaster by Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz constitutes a deeply meaningful image of recent historical sequences.
Nevertheless, the two artists do not intend their piece as simply a metaphor. They conceive it as a functional model of reality that serves to test hypotheses. Rolling up and down these sharp slopes is a single self-propelled loudspeaker that navigates along the rails and through the obstacles in its path, from which it cannot turn aside. Its only option is to keep going and do another lap, over and over again. This artistic experiment shows that the fatigue of endless repetition can weigh us down, but also that persistence becomes a kind of resistance.
The loudspeaker broadcasts a sound piece composed by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz in collaboration with Colin Self and performed by this artist and musician. With its voice and movement, the loudspeaker comes alive, like a person urgently expressing themself. Colin Self’s melancholic singing, with a voice ranging widely from falsetto to bass, opens a space for lamentation. This refrain echoes the twists and turns of the circuit and embraces the ornamentation of the abbey church.
Speaking of rights, gender and power, the lyrics recount both the odyssey of the loudspeaker and the personal journey of someone who loves freedom but is subject to the contradictory demands of the social fabric they confront. The speaker, a word that in English can mean either an electronic device that magnifies sounds or a human orator, becomes an undefined subject, a queer embodiment.
Known for their collaboration with performers whose filmed work becomes the raw material for videos, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz are fascinated by répetition in the French senses of the word, which means both repeating and rehearsal. With each recurrence the body acquires a greater skill. This obstinacy is at the very heart of the notion of commitment. Antigone, a mythological symbol of resistance, is thus known as the child who stubbornly disobeys. Her tragic heroism shakes the tyrant because he knows it can become contagious.
The powerful echoes produced by the vastness of the church further amplify the words spoken by Colin Self. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, describes the myth of the nymph Echo, who is condemned to passively repeat the words of others. Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz cite a reinterpretation of this myth by the philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who considers the nymph’s repetition of speech fragments as a way of altering the message. Amplified by the persistent environmental echo, the song is transformed and emancipated from its source, opening up a collective and transhistorical space. The overlapping voices create a polyphony joined by the choir of visitors expressing their own emotions, mixing in with the voices of the past that haunts Bellelay and even those of a future to which Echo is calling out.
Far from sinking into the helpless melancholy that often afflicts emancipatory movements after experiencing defeats, this exhibition suggests that by listening attentively we can become aware of a subtle upward spiral, and acquire the confidence that comes from repeating our acts, our words, our slogans and our songs again and again. It also celebrates the pleasure of joining together and remaining together, of reliving the joy of speed and the thrills of crazy swerves and dizzying roller coasters descents.
