22 empans et 1 palme

Leïla Pile’s work starts with the spatial context. Her textile practice is conceptual, performative and artisanal. She surveys places using her most personal tool: her body. The measuring process is a sensitive exploration and understanding of the scales and spaces that surround her.

Here, the artist applies her working protocol to the interior space of the window. With her hand, whose thumb and pinkie are imbued with pigment, she follows a line, traces it and reveals it. It’s a gesture that brings out the width of the room. The artist’s body becomes a unit of measurement, the span of her hand marks her own journey. Like writing, a succession of imprints appears through the windows.

A second line (replica of the previous one) has been woven. The warp* threads were previously stretched directly in space to adjust to its width as precisely as possible. Folded upon itself and arranged in the shop window, the woven strip materializes the actual, flexible and transposable measurement of the invested space. It becomes its archive. In parallel, the path traced with her fingers is reproduced in this strip.

* The warp is the set of threads in a fabric arranged parallel to the length of the fabric, through which the weft threads pass perpendicularly.