Proust lu / Variations
Véronique Aubouy
from February to March 2009
Begun in 1993 for a planned period of 30 years, Véronique Aubouy’s Reading Proust trains the camera on people from all kinds of backgrounds reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time aloud. Each reading (around 2 pages) is a portrait. The reader has no choice regarding the text, but can opt for a personal mode of presentation or dramatisation.
Invited to take up a one-year residency at Les Champs Libres, Véronique Aubouy focuses on the daily life of a city and its environs, filming 150 people at work or in iconic local settings. Variations is an autonomous work based on the idea of depicting a territory via the interweaving of selected fragments. Her portrait of Greater Rennes covers all the professions: the postwoman, railway worker, plumber, bus driver, roofer, archpriest, hatter, cheesemonger and more. The contemporary notion of the metropolitan area is a key factor in the making of the images: the diversity of localities and residents, with city people rubbing shoulders with farmers, highlights this new way of living together and sharing the same space.
This exhibition will take place at Les Champs Libres. At the same time La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art will be screening Véronique Aubouy’s readings of Proust by residents in different parts of Greater Rennes. Here we feel, as it were, a shifting visual and literary topography joining up with and extending the metropolitan area.