Diptyques

Diptyques

“There are no taboos left in Holland,” one of the artists from the Het Wilde Weten collective told me. I was in residence there during the fall of 1998, on Robertfruinstraat in Rotterdam, in the former convent of the Franciscan nuns from Bennebroek. However, things seemed different when I decided to reinvest the space of the deconsecrated chapel, returning to two activities which it evoked for me: the religious services of its original vocation and the presentation of concerts, as it is often the case in some religious buildings, whether still in function or not.

Through a series of ads in Rotterdam’s conservatory and music school, and a message seen by a friend in a piano store in The Hague, I brought together a second flutist and a cellist to play Haydn’s London Trios, and a Sonata a tre by Pierre Gabriel Buffardin, discovered in a music store in Amsterdam.

I also convinced some members of the Russian orthodox community with whom I spent time in Rotterdam, as well as a childhood friend, a Québécois of Russian decent living in The Hague, to come and sing a thanksgiving service, so as to have the chapel resounding again with sacred words.

I then decided to document photographically these two activities in the chapel space. Therefore, these are not staged photographs, but rather, live moments within activities that really happened in time and space. This is a subtle distinction, but it is necessary in order to differentiate this project from all the current work in staged photography, and situate this body of work within the realms of real-life experience and performance art practice.

Each diptych brings together two parallel moments of both activities, thus creating a renewed narrative. As in several of my previous visual works, the images are juxtaposed but remain separate because of the frames and the white wall space between the components, acting as a kind of symbolic margin on which the meaning of the work depends. The space in the photographs is also divided in two, and the activities take place in the lower third, against the wood-panelled background. Nothing interferes with the whiteness of the walls in the apse and vault, thus emphasizing the upward thrust. The luxury of a so-called empty space reflects the immateriality of music and prayer, two sound activities of which photography does not retain any trace.

Being the artist who conceived the work, I am also present in the two groups of images, thus appearing in activities that are peripheral—in principle—to my work as a visual artist. Hence, this photographic project is raising issues of personal identity and the boundaries of the artistic vocation, while opening up a path to the spiritual and the immaterial.

Denis Lessard

(première parution : Vox n° 9 (automne 2000), n. p.)

Voir également :

Sylvie Cotton, «Chapelle sixtyque», ETC Montréal n° 53 (mars-avril-mai 2001), p. 38-41.
Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Diptyques, Centre VU, Québec, 2002, n.p.