Emilie Danchin conveys questions in her work pertaining to the realism of
photography by involving the body in the pho- tographic space. It is very
vibrant as well as an organic ad- venture. Emilie Danchin does not photograph
reality as such, but a kind of dream rooted in the subject, to a certain extent
a somewhat inhabited or animated dreamy reality. To this effect, the
photographic act extends to a personal phenome- nology and the progressive
creation of a visual language ca- pable of relaying a personal experience
charged with images and emotions that, universally recognisable, are likely to
stir viewers’ feelings, disrupt thought and trigger dreams.
Emilie Danchin introduces here Le Bois des Rêves, the culmi- nation of a
performance and photographic work achieved in a property that is noteworthy in
terms of its architecture, as well as its gardens, in the Arts-and-Crafts style.
This heritage site lent itself to her proposal to have the freedom to take over
a space and a body, hers in this case. She tackles the question of origins in a
foreign place in a paradoxical way. It substitutes a space that no longer
exists, which represents her origins.
This property conjured up, through a combination of me- mories, her own English
place of birth, the houses belonging to her grandmothers, their gardens in the
countryside and seaside, baths, woodworks, smells, clothes, furniture, musica-
lity... a whole atmosphere that is generally, culturally familiar to her. And at
the same time, it recalled absence, missing people, invasion and emptiness of
the body and a house that until recently remained within the same family, loss
and the parentage that was interrupted.
By means of self-portrait, Emilie Danchin wondered what the inside of the house
would look like. How would the emotions generated by the exterior of the house
be conveyed in her outside landscapes? How would she extri- cate her body from
the matter to render it in a landscape having similar characteristics? How would
time intervene in this memory-enhanced place where her own body, her robe and
some of her clothes combined with those that belonged to three generations of
women, the house, gar- den, the photographic act itself have jointly become the
template for a vital identity-related fiction? Her aim was to found her hope of
investing a space, materialising and filling a form of absence, the place of the
origins, a kind of double of another imaginary space, distant and close,
inaccessible, erased, deleted, having left the body and the house and
nevertheless, inalienable yet.
Le Bois des Rêves is carried by the the artist’s body postures, which has become
a sensitive measure of the evocative potential of the place. Equally, the place
has given live to non-material memories, the vague outlines of which could not
have stood out without this inseparable staging of her body and the space. The
photographic medium is presented in a variety of aspects, black and white,
colour, varying formats and scales, as well as dialogue between fiction and
observation. Video is added to this. Processed as stills, this lends the
ensemble a form of heartbeat in real time as such of perception through gaze.
This results in
an art form in several phases, the assembly of which in its entirety impresses a
circular motion in space and physically creates time. Intimating the desire to
go on reconnais- sance, this photographic form espouses the volatility of space
and time, emotions, dreams and the sense of self. One marvels before the
representation of the memory space, whose autobiographical form is that of an
absolute memory and of a dream.
