Today's landscape is in a constant evolution, it transforms more or less quickly, in a more or less visible way. This transformation generates appearances but also progressive disappearances, total or partial. These disappearances are intrinsically linked to a memory and to the problems of modern times. Is it necessary to resist to this disappearance, why and how?
This is a complex question that requires the remarkable capacity to seize a furtive present in which one would find a fragile balance between the cult of the memory and the necessary will to forget. This includes a reflection on the "treatment" of our emotions regardless of their nature, the need to give them more space, find new ways to share and to transform them.
Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz criticizes, for example, the affirmation of positive psychology in a capitalist society that forces us to be happy. Sometimes, the artificial and automatic transformation of trauma into "force" leads to ignoring and denying the people's suffering, which hinders the assimilation and collective reconstruction of other emotions. On the contrary, she proposes to highlight our emotional fragilities and feelings as real forces in a society that wants to transform us into insensitive, tough individuals.
Works of Aurélie Pertusot are based on repetitions and cycles. They tell quiet and un-heroic stories of our times. Things repeatedly intertwine with one another. Monotonous and repetitive gestures like sewing the white canvas make us pause and lose ourselves in the omnipresent whiteness. Her peculiar attention to spaces makes them almost breathe, stretch in time and become suspended as if “blinded by nostalgia[1]”. The nearly invisible and intimate works transcend time, hunt us like a ghost from a French philosopher, Jacques Derrida’s hauntology discourse, where the figure of the ghost represents absent presences. Every generation feels nostalgia for what had been before – “either for those that they never lived through, or in the ghostly half-remembrance of childhood eras.[2]” It has been thoroughly researched that nostalgia helps us to conquer discomfort and anxiety. Upcycled memories become our protective shield against discomfort, stress and lack of grounding in the present. British writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher sees hauntology[3] as a new depressive state of nostalgia. A nostalgia for a better world that we have waited for which never came, a preserved past which turned into another utopia. Instead we got a world which disappoints and discontents. This melancholic repetition of the archaic prevents us from imagining something new. As Mark Fisher would say, it is “a slow cancellation of the future.” against which there is maybe still time to react.
The evolution of the landscape is currently extremely rapid and spectacular in the Dolne Miasto district, in the midst of «revitalization». The reorganization of the area is causing changes in the habits of the residents, meaning a relocation for some in the face of the arrival of a more affluent population, and the difficulties in dealing with the debris, the quantity of which is ever increasing. Obviously it is more than our human problem, it simultaneously impacts non-human actors of the local fauna and flora, spiraling ecological devastation.
The author of the exhibition aims to explore the subjective links between the landscape, emotional attachement and memory. It is an inquiry into the structure of what is, an analysis of the structure of reality. The displayed works aim to present current processes of disappearance and appearance through the perception of the invisible. They explore a subjective and emotional memory that gives an account of the Covid-19 lockdown period between October and November 2020. Aurélie Pertusot peels layer after layer, thread upon thread, and weaves for us a quiet story of the district seen through her eyes.
*”Gh-ostalgies” is an invented word that contracts several words, as the verb “to host”, and the words “ghostology” (study of ghosts or spirits) and “nostalgia”.
Aurélie Pertusot about her Gdańsk based residency experience:
My interests in Gdansk’s architecture and its evolution date back to my trip in 2013. I had chosen to spend my vacation in Poland because of my grandmother who had often visited Poland during her youth. I thus wanted to learn more about Polish culture. My residency planned for 2020 was split in two stages because of the pandemic: October to November 2020 and March to April 2022. I first devoted my time to the observation of the urban and natural landscape re-modeled by the phenomenon of every day modernization. I took 600 photos of different architectures in various neighborhoods. Gradually I became specifically interested in the current transformations of Dolne Miasto district. Finally I got closer to some buildings to photograph fragments of walls since I was fascinated by the materiality of bricks, their colors and their ability to preserve traces of the past.
I focused on the strong architectural presence of some collective and individual houses – still not renovated - constituting urban landmarks, physical testimonies of history and memory. I was touched by the relationship between the inhabitants and their surrounding, which seemed to me like some kind of devotion. These observations have directed my research around the emotional relationship that one can have with a territory and the possible links between a place of habitation, an emotion and a memory. My intention is to evoke an urban landscape that disappears and transforms rapidly, to propose a sensitive spatial perception and to leave a subjective trace.
[1] „ …Who wants to sleep in the city that never wakes up? Blinded by nostalgia.. ” excerpt from the piece „ Old Yelllow Bricks”Arctic Monkey band Year of release: 2007
[2] https://przekroj.pl/en/society/remembering-the-future-enis-yucekoralp
[3] Hauntology - represents a Derridean wordplay, a combination of the words 'ontology' and 'hanter' (French for haunt). Although it sounds the same in French as ontology, it is unlike the study of being - it rather deals with what is not really there.
Aurélie Pertusot is a French visual and sound artist born in 1983 in Nancy graduated from the Ecoles Nationales Supérieures d’Art in Nancy (2007), Bourges (2018) and Exercising Modernity Academy (2022). Since 2008, she co-founded several performance's groups, including the duo 'Les Trotteuses' to create concerts of experimental music exclusively using alarm clocks, 'Les actionnaires', and most recently 'Ana Colute'. From 2016 to 2018 she took part in the sound-art research project 'Arthesis' at the ENSA Fine Arts School in Bourges (FR).
In 2019 her work has been nominated for the Neuköllner Kunstpreis (Berlin) and the German André Evard prize. Her pieces and performances have been presented in Europe (Centre Pompidou, Quiet Cue and Galerie Mario Mazzoli in Berlin, Cave 12 in Genevia, Gothenburg Biennial, Fyns Museum in Odense, Ny Musikk at Bergen Kunsthall). In 2021 she was designated with a Fellowship at the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen Foundation (DE) and she showed the solo exhibition: ‘Concentration’ at the Musée des Beaux Arts de Nancy (FR) presenting a wide variety of her practice including installations, drawings and performances. On this occasion, two of her installations had become part of the museum's collection. She's currently a Fellow at the Pilecki Institut for a research project in Lodz.