LITANY FOR BROTHERS OF MELANCHOLY
Agathe Boulanger & Grégoire Devidal
6 October 2016

 

Lecture Performance as part of the exhibition "Straub/Huillet/Weiss. Alienation Towards Our Small Familiar World"

"There was a negative form. The shape of a conflict. Marguerite Duras and Hervé Guibert developed a baseless hatred towards each other. There was an emergency. We had to offer them a post-mortem conciliation, we had to meet them, with their gangs: the dead and the living. The litany is one of multiple stories about this research, the immediate on, the condensed version of all these months we spent observing this constellation of people who hated each other as much as they maintained desire between them." The lecture performance is part of the installation "The Conciliation" which is on show at the current exhibition. The research-based work traces the ambivalent relationship of Duras and Guibert with made-up letters, documents and interviews, aiming to reconcile the artists subsequently. In their multimedia performance, a séance-like setting, Boulanger and Devidal embody also Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and other companions.

Agathe Boulanger (born 1983) postgraduates at the ENSBA in Lyon in 2016. Before, she and Grégoire Devidal (born 1987) studied together at the école des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux.

Images
Agathe Boulanger & Grégoire Devidal, 2016