Avis de tempête

For Art au Centre, Camille Lemille carries out a project that started from encounters made this summer in Detroit (USA), a complex city that recovers slowly from economic and social bankruptcy and several crises. The artist questions a space in transition, that of cities and our habitats, urban centers metamorphosed into places of speculation, functional spaces, tight flows “and not places that we appropriate, where we stop, where we hang out, where we live”[1].

Camille Lemille combines texts and images, testimonies and preconceived ideas and brings a disturbance, an inner storm. It is a swirling gesture that interrupts the graphic and textual compositions of the screen prints on tiles. A storm that spreads beyond borders and brings to Liège another example of the failure of capitalism and industrialization and the very concrete consequences that this failure has on all citizens. Camille Lemille uses fragments of words and images to disturb the received testimonies and to test the elements of language that seem so familiar to us and yet totally inaudible. A collaboration with Detroit-based artist Paul Johnson emerged from her interactions with local artists. The collab takes the form of an animation that announces, through drawing and movement, the present and future precariousness within our living spaces.

Camille Lemille displays property ads in the window and shifts the cursor of investment and the commodification of housing towards its current crisis and its out-of-control evolution. The artist gives voice to shared experiences, establishes a picture of absurd, precarious or unlivable situations, like the reproducibility of the medium that exhausts its source until it disappears.

[1] Mona Chollet, Chez Soi, Une Odyssée de l’espace domestique, 2015, Editions de la Découverte, p. 66