Amarrer à l'ombre

Installation

The exhibition Amarrer à l'ombre (Mooring in the Shade) is the result of a partnership between La Criée contemporary art centre in Rennes and the National Maritime Museum in Port-Louis, as part of the Territories EXTRA project. Artist Gabrielle Manglou takes over the powder magazine with a project specially designed for the coming. Following a two-month stay at the city of Port-Louis, the exhibition is the result of her research and creative work.

The history linking Port-Louis and Reunion Island forms the backdrop to the artist's research: naval explorations, colonial history and vernacular culture feed into her work. The artist focuses on the subtle or unanticipated links between Port-Louis and Réunion, giving voice to the stories of objects that have been lost in the fabric of history, which she calls the ‘silent widths' of a culture.

The title of the exhibition, Amarrer à l'ombre (Mooring in the Shade), is an explicit reference to linguistic terminology and the citydel's maritime vocation. For Gabrielle Manglou, the term ‘moving', wisely used in Réunion Creole, encapsulates the entire vocabulary of connection: uniting, attaching, trunging together. It also refers to her artistic practice, which proceeds in a rhizomatic manner, seeing out relationships and organizing them into a system of associations between seemingly distant worlds and materials.

The artist invites us to a poetic mooring, where shade – a protective element in Réunion's tropical climate – also recalls the opposition to light: a metaphor for the visible and the invisible, for what is in full sunlight and what is hidden from view and concealed in the folds of history. Gabrielle Manglou delves into the sediments that accumulate in the folds that cover and dream, the folds where the materials of history set**.

Fold-fold, cover-reveal, dig-fill, involve-explain, sewing-undoing, unifying-undoing are all gestures echoing in the artist's visual repertoire. The installation is designed for powderwood condenses these gestures in a set of heteroclite forms, a system in its own right where each work is illuminated by the relationship she has with the others around her.

On platforms, like so many islets floating in space, we deploys an inventory of objects, sculptures and assemblies that dialogue and response, knowingly organized into categories according to their real, metaphorical or evocative function.

Benchmark objects such as ground grid, refer to the idea of brands: they allow us to orient ourselves in this visual vocabulary Unpublished. Cordages and attachments are universal objects whose primary function is to bind, unite. These are object references, like shells that have passed through times and cultures, first exchanged as currency and tangible signs of prosperity and power.

Each element is a key to going through this new story, and if the artist foils the function of objects or diverts materials from them, It is to exalt the poetic and evocative power. The moving artist uses its assemblages as reminders of colonial times. It refers to power and prestige with its ropes transformed into  old haircuts, but also violence and trade in precious goods with its shells inlaid with pearls, chocolates made of paper chewed paper that mimic cannonballs, or leathers that draw the shape of the seaweed from the coast.