... Pour survivre à la vie

setting up a cozy gathering space featuring a trunk, cushions, tea, Breton galettes, incense, and a lamp

“Marika Bührmann’s artistic practice consists of engaging with a group of individuals and citizens in a significant body of work that lies halfway between living testimony and the imagination essential to individual and collective life. Unlike documentary art, Marika Bührmann’s artistic approach is also far removed from any pretense of assuming the role of a social worker or psychologist.

Indeed, the creative act lies in the artist’s ability to provoke in others—at least in those who are open to it—openings, disorientations, or shifts toward spaces of the infinitely intimate and the infinitely collective. Marika Bührmann invites us to push past personal, cultural, or social barriers that we believe to be insurmountable or unshakable. And it is individuals themselves who embody and create this potential. In other words, the citizen as a subject is shaped by this power of creation, imagination, and ongoing engagement with their own lives and their environment. They are not merely individuals living within a community, but are active participants in spaces of freedom. It would therefore be incorrect to say that the artist merely draws on a real-life context and simply plunges the residents back into their harsh reality. To put it in slightly more provocative terms, the challenge is to establish a form of counter-power to the absences or practices that enable socialization processes. Furthermore, according to Marika Bührmann, socialization processes are inseparable from a profound approach to listening to oneself and to others. This approach makes it possible to bring out words and gestures that, on the surface, may seem simple and insignificant in the context of social mediation, which aims to produce immediate results within the social sphere. The answers to our society’s greatest ills often lie in listening to our bodies and to our own voices as well as those of others. The goal, therefore, is to foster a sharing of the intimate within a public space that, by definition, is meant to facilitate functional circulation rather than habitation, and collective forms of sociability rather than intersubjective relationships. “On the contrary, Marika Bührmann traces possible paths of intimacy through subtle gestures, silences that create memories, and words.”

Larys Frogier, « Marika Bührmann », in ’Cerise, François, Jean-Pierre, Karima et Monique vous invitent…’, Bourges : Galerie du Haïdouc, 2003

… Pour survivre à la vie is a project that Marika Bührmann adapted for two different venues in Rennes, taking two different forms. It consists of a “portable” gathering space (a trunk, meditation cushions, tea, and a lamp), designed to spark encounters and conversations around the question, “What would you do to survive life?” At La Criée, the living room, a slideshow, and the artist’s journal served as evidence of this project, which was carried out during a two-month residency in the La Chesnais neighborhood of Saint-Nazaire. During this time, Marika Bührmann lived in one of the high-rise buildings and set up her living room in its lobby. The next step was to use the act of writing—which plays a significant role in her work—to recount each of her encounters, much like portraits. In Rennes, Marika Bührmann revived the project at a community center to engage more spontaneously with residents of the Maurepas neighborhood. She took over the lobby space and invited visitors to the venue to gather over tea and cake to discuss the idea of “surviving life” in order to document their actions.

Alexandra Gillet