Living in Corrèze without a driving license for several years already now, I occupy a special position: that of a passenger, a place that is both constrained and privileged. Being a co-pilot means being inside and outside, protected by the passenger compartment but entirely focused on what happens beyond the window. This position has made me attentive to what escapes, to what arises in the margins of the visible.
In these rural territories of the Corrèze or Creuse, travel is mostly done by car, and night trips are frequent, especially in winter. The night is still present as a continuous environment, little fragmented by public lighting. It wraps, it absorbs. And it is precisely in this continuity that the light of the car headlights produces a break: it does not illuminate so much as it cuts, tears off, imposes brutal apparitions of what was not intended to be seen; the exhibition grows from this experience.
Born in Rouen, France, in 1998, Sarah Melen lives and works in Meymac and is active in the artist’s collective, Fossil Future, part of a growing scene that explores art-making as a mode of life and how the contexts of collective work and rural locations make possible a different living and thinking with art.
