21.03.2014

Ritual

21.03.2014

Ritual

I am very attached to this moment of sharing and exchange, of getting together at mealtimes, snacks, simply coming together to share nourishment. My photographs however often show dishes all on their own, meals prepared for a single person, a single ingredient, or a single piece of fruit; maybe that’s a way to show what appears before my eyes, a point of view that all of us can perceive when we sit down at the table.

After a long period devoted to pastries, I moved on to soups (yes, that’s a pretty wide shift in focus!). My fascination with vegetables continues to grow: I dream of gardening, learning everything about planting and cultivating them, but city life involves so many constraints. So that’s why I limit myself to going out walking and cooking. Of course, I devote my school projects to vegetables and food.

After a long period devoted to pastries, I moved on to soups (yes, that’s a pretty wide shift in focus!). My fascination with vegetables continues to grow: I dream of gardening, learning everything about planting and cultivating them, but city life involves so many constraints. So that’s why I limit myself to going out walking and cooking. Of course, I devote my school projects to vegetables and food.

For my exam at the start of the school year, I wrote a sort of performance piece that a friend played for me. She was wearing a costume I had made (a long robe made from very light cotton and a short pair of white pants that was just as light) and she then had to perform “the ritual of soup”. Everything was very orchestrated, and each movement was carefully planned and choreographed. A little while after, while looking for information about the origins of tea, I discovered an extraordinary Japanese procession, “the tea ceremony”. Without knowing it, I had diverted this ritual, using the same sort of actions, utensils, and similar costumes too. All the action centered on the Gourd God (the ceramic figure seen in the photograph above), a pattypan squash before which the sacrifice of a carrot was performed.

So my passion for vegetables led me to gourds and their immense variety. I was so taken with them that I orchestrated them into my projects so I could tell stories with no head and no tail. In these projects, there is a lot of satire and irony; I try to ask a certain number of questions about daily ritual, how to divert ritual, transform it into fiction, put it into a new light.

Instagram could perhaps be one of my daily rituals (or perhaps a recurring ritual), where I put ordinary things on the stage simply by modifying image colorimetry and almost totally mastering what passes before the lens of my iPhone.

Lucie Malbéqui
Student at the Fine Arts Institute in Lyon

http://epidemiologie.tumblr.com/ (site under construction)
http://ink361.com/clotildeboisrenard
http://instagram.com/clotildeboisrenard
https://www.facebook.com/luciemalbequi

 

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