ARTISSIMA
Present Future Section
Stéphanie Saadé
November 1-3, 2019
Turin, Italy
A new central piece is featured, entitled The Encounter of the First and Last Particles of Dust. It is composed of 4 embroidered curtains coming from the artist’s personal sphere. The curtains compose an imposing but light installation, a thin undulating “wall” that one crosses when entering the exhibition space or when exiting it.
The curtains originate from the room that Saadé occupied as a teenager in the family home. Serving as a comfortable filter to the outside world, they isolated the private space of the room even more. 18 trajectories were embroidered on them in silver thread; they are the 18 most significant trajectories undertaken by the artist during her period of occupancy of the room, between 1995 to 2001. The fabric of the curtains bears the physical traces of its use: folded or unfolded, exposed to light, humidity and dust. Their surface and its faded flowery pattern is full, on a subtler and more imperceptible level, with all that happened mentally inside the space: thoughts, feelings, dreams, fears, learning, etc., associated with teenagehood. The room functioned as the shelter, generator and container of all this intimate history.
The time span between1995 to 2001 coincides, on a broader level, with the period succeeding to the end of the Lebanese war. During that period it had become easier to circulate in Lebanon and many regions, which used to be inaccessible due to the political situation of the country, had become reachable. Other areas had also become accessible in the sense that they had been constructed or reconstructed and now constituted actual destinations. The Encounter of the First and Last Particles of Dust is linked to the notion of displacement in many different ways: the memories attached to the embroidered trajectories intertwine personal stories with the country’s history of that particular time. Their number, 18, evokes the majority, the moment when one legally reaches full freedom of mobility, echoing the freedom of movement reached inside the Lebanese territory. These reminiscences are themselves not considered as fixed moments in time but are associated to motion: trips made but also the movement of memory itself when it travels back in the past.
Digiprint also relates in its own manner to routes and displacement: the subject of the photograph is the artist’s mobile phone’s screen. Its frequent manipulation results in it being covered in a thin film of grease. Coating its sharp design, the undesirable organic residue constitutes an essential material: fingers – but also the nails, the cheeks, the ears, the hair – sculpt the oil layer, and the camera captures the light refracted by this ephemeral and ever-changing relief. Despite their painterly aspect, the recorded strokes are purely functional ones: unorchestrated sweeps made in the course of communicating, researching, or idling. Some manifest movements of the mind, others movements of the body: the daily use of GPS systems to navigate in the city and on wider territories.
Around these works are organized other equally registering apparatuses: Double Altitude uses a simple system to document growth and applies it at a moment when physical growth has stopped; Exhibition Catalogue’s silver-coated pages allow the book to reflect, recording what is happening around it besides the information that it already contains; Second Nature’s most damaged part is gilded and given a second life, as is the worn fabric of the curtain with the delicate embroideries performed on it. Its sharpest edges, traces of an accident or a deliberate act of violence, become its asset.