CARMEN WINANT, NOTES ON FUNDAMENTAL JOY (PRINTED MATTER, 2019)
I chose this book to start a new series: “On my shelves”. I will select once a week a photographic book from my personal collection that I care for. Various independent photo editors and book collectors will also be invited to contribute to this section through interviews and presentations of books.
Is it possible to leave everything? Is it possible to start again, outside and beyond what you have never known, to reinvent what it means to exist, body and mind, on earth? – CW
Between the artist’s book and the historical document, Notes on fundamental joy brings together images from the archives of the Ovulars, a series of photography and printing workshops held in the 1980s within different separatist communities of women from the American west By selecting extracts from these archives and offering them out of context with a personal essay, the artist Carmen Winant summons to the front of the stage all the imagination linked to the utopias of the 1970s as well as the radicality of these feminist movements. , environmental and anti-capitalist. Documenting their daily lives, the photos certainly show the re-appropriation by these women of their own representation but also of their existence in the general sense. I wanted to start my selection with this book because it finds a new resonance for me today. Beyond the initial intention of the underground culture which produced them, it raises a subject to meditate on these particular days: How to live together?
Emilie Lauriola, manager of BAL Books
This contribution comes from BAL FROM HOME # 1
Because LE BAL is a community of individuals around an idea, the representation of the society of men/women and its challenges, we thought LE BAL FROM HOME as a ticket that would be sent to you every week. Not a consolation ticket but rather a sweet, friendly ticket, coming from each of us, like so many shards of BAL that slip into the interstice of time. Dave Heath liked to use the term “inner landscapes” to describe his portraits of anonymous people absorbed in themselves. Hopefully these pieces of BAL will find their way into your inner landscape otherwise. To receive LE BAL FROM HOME: https://www.le-bal.fr/lettre-information
