The contemporary arts center, Les Tanneries, in Amilly, is featuring a collective exhibition on the theme astral mysteries.
It’s 2017. 146 years ago, in 1871, Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) wrote Astral Eternity in the prison of Fort du Taureau in the Bay of Morlaix, where he was held captive in “the solitude of a prison surrounded by water that he was not even allowed to see.” Blanqui, this “perpetual insurgent,” spent over thirty years behind bars, incarcerated for the intransigence of his actions and political writings (called “revolutionary”; that is indeed what they are, since they are a call to an uprising addressed to the people still allowed to desire anything). Blanqui was one of the theorists of the Paris Commune, an insurrection in which, imprisoned and isolated, he was unable to participate.
So, in 1871, what does he do? He charts the heavens and outlines a cosmogony. He seizes the only opening available to him as an infinitesimal human, facing the immensity of the universe, which he can glimpse through the lucarne of his dungeon. And what does write? In a text that resembles a scientific treatise, he composes an hymn to the ever-changing nature, to the revolutions in the star systems, to a new astronomy, to cosmic possibilities, to the eternity of necessary motions.
Today, in France, just as the presidential elections are under way, there are many schools named after Auguste Blanqui. However, few of the students know who their patron was, about his significance or the energy that motivated him. We have forgotten that the call of the stars is also a way of life anchored in a reality, in a here-and-now, in artisanal making as much as in artistic gestures: Blanqui teaches us that these two types of practice are one and the same, and it is up to us to recognize it, and to recognize it soon. Thus, if Rebecca Digne films the gestures of a carpenter tracing chalk lines on the ground, it is to better chart the stars and use them as a framework, that is to say, as shelter. All these gestures are purposeful, present, and eternal all at the same time. They make us what we are. We encounter a similar overlap of domains when Juliette Agnel uses a digital camera obscura to film the destruction of Les Halles in Paris, while at the same time photographing the summer sky over a Spanish desert.
It’s a question of raising the possibility of a metaphysics rooted in the earth, since the contemplation of a starry sky, far from being a simple distraction, also implies the observation of what is down below, that is cities, fields, oceans and their inhabitants, that is to say, us. Politics, ecology, and the arts join forces in a conscious reflection on the urgent issues of resistance. Thus Mel O’Callaghan stages a man who resists with all his body—with nothing but his body—the incommensurable force of a water hose aimed at him by firefighters in riot gear. Similarly, when Jérôme Zonder paints a portrait of Blanqui, he uses his hand and his own fingerprints. Marie-Luce Nadal, in turn, cultivates eternity in her tribute to the “Wine of the Graces” showing how the fruit is gathered at the level of the human body before it is turned into a beverage. The body, as the embodied power to act, is the site of an ongoing ordeal.
Guy Debord, in his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, alludes to Blanqui’s melancholy. Like Debord, Blanqui moves in the dark and is consumed by fire: at the end of his inspired, sublime text, he becomes aware of the absence of “progress,” and senses the power of the eternal return of the forces of the present. But this cannot be the end of it, he cries out, inviting us to extend the writing into bifurcations and to refuse straight lines: this is why the sound of the stars recorded by Charlotte Charbonnel or the mirror reflections of constellations captured by Edouard Wolton remind us that we must prolong, by repeating it, the gesture of looking upwards. While Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet’s Spectacles without objects reenacts Saint-Simonianism and revolutionary holidays, they are re-interpreting History in order to make use of it with the resources at our disposal, that is to say, by asking a question: is a community still possible? This exhibition will offer a tentative, open answer—just as it should be.
Léa Bismuth
Léa Bismuth is a writer and exhibition curator. She lives and works in Paris.
Featured artists: Juliette Agnel, Charlotte Charbonnel, Guy Debord, Rebecca Digne, Louise Hervé et Chloé Maillet, Marie-Luce Nadal, Mel O’Callaghan, Edouard Wolton, and Jérôme Zonder
L’Éternité par les astres
April 23 to August 27, 2017
Les Tanneries Centre d’art contemporain
234 rue des Ponts
45200 Amilly
France
[i] Jacques Rancière, Preface to L’Éternité par les astres. Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2012, p. 7.
