ÉVEILLE MOI CRÉPUSCULE SUBLUNAIRE

A short while ago, I came across, by chance – if chance really exists – , a small book entitled The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction written by Ursula K. Le Guin and prefaced by Donna Haraway. This « Carrier Bag », this container that Le Guin places at the heart of the history of humanity as the first artefact created by humans – in opposition to the sharp tool or the deadly army – puts in perspective another history that brings an entirely transcended vision of our place in the world, our evolution and our ability to transform reality. This metaphor of the receptacle, the container, the bag that overflows with elements and alternative histories seems relevant to me to describe Camille Tsvetoukhine’s work. Indeed, the artworks of the artist spread out like a constellation of fragments, signs or symbols. Each of them are the gateway to a narrative or discursive universe whose story creation would be the final form. Each drawing, each painting, each ceramic, each textile, each text would become the container of a new history, a dimension both fictive and real that is able to reveal « our ability to invent myths to comprehend the world in which we live. » (Ursula K. Le Guin, Le Langage de la nuit, p. 92.).

The artworks presented in the display window drag us into another dimension through a Carroll-like layout, a dimension full of levitating capes, esoteric ceramics and an outsize paintbrush. Using organic materials such as textile or clay and the figuration of landscape and natural ornaments, the artist reclaims with humor and diversion the emblematic figure of the witch, a figure of emancipation and subversion that has been allowing an ecofeminist questioning of our society since the 1960s. It might be a matter of detecting a metaphor of the artist in the alterity of the witch, the ritual making room for the artwork and its potential of transformation and the reappropriation of our view of the world.