Noémie Sauve, Directions for Use
Developers
and planners imagine territories for all to share, but in so doing they
do not make them suitable for each individual person. The more one
drifts from the statistical norm that defines common behaviors and
manners, the less one is likely to fully blossom within this shared
space. The space left for other, especially non-human, elements of life
in our cities is revealing of this tension between the norm and the
margin. If what Gilles Clément has called the “third landscape” has
allowed nature to develop more spontaneously and freely across squares,
gardens, and parks, it nevertheless remains the case that wildlife’s
dominant ways of being in the city remain adaptation, hiding, and
fugitivity. The city dweller never ceases to be amazed by the power of
the living to defy urban constraints in order to emerge and grow –
whether perched on the edge of a window, jutting out a crack in the
asphalt, or hidden in an air vent.
The
work of Noémie Sauve proceeds from this amazement as much as it
attempts to provoke it anew. Following a longtime interest in modes of
inhabiting a world largely meant for humans, she has undertaken multiple
projects aiming at being able to occupy a territory by the simple fact
of existing in it. These have taken a number of different forms, from
organizing public events (concerts, lectures, community meetings,
skillshares…) when she was a member of a squat (in Grenoble), to staging
collective and living adaptations of her early visual work in the
streets of Paris. She has drawn from this for her series
“Disconographies” (2006 onwards) - a genial pop-surrealistic collage
blending disco and iconography. Inspired by Ulf Poschardt's 2002 book Dj Culture,
this series of photographs documents the energy of an existence
centered on dance taking hold of streets and squares, which, alas,
didn't ask even ask for that.
Her involvement in Clinamen,
an organization founded in 2012 that seeks to galvanize urban areas by
promoting pastoral activities, stems from the same desire: to use fine
art as a tool for collective action. Among the many actions of the
collective, the most significant and publicized has been doubtlessly the
grazing of a flock of sheep across the urban landscape of the northern banlieues of Paris. In making farm animals present in an unsuitable context, Clinamen
intended to bring agriculture amidst townspeople, and in so doing to
question the modes of living and eating by initiating moment of
communality and exchange around the contemporary issues of agriculture.
Noémie Sauve works at generating a “disconographic” representation of
this collective, which embodies the issues she holds dear – by, for
example, incorporating heirloom seeds in some of her drawings, offering a
new circulation to this essential peasant matter. She is dedicated to
the life and activities of the collective, for example, by designing
street furniture for transhumance and by participating in building the
infrastructure needed for the pastoral activities of the organization –
such as sheep pens, greenhouses, and sheds.
Noémie Sauve equally participates in Jolly Rogers,
a collective composed of architects, town-planners, site managers,
landscapers, and artists, who together devise and build urban sheepfolds
as well as part of the infrastructures of Jazz à Luz, a
festival of jazz and improvised music in the Pyrenees. These structures
are conceived as forms of improvised and ephemeral architecture, which
use a great quantity of reclaimed and recovered materials while never
sacrificing the aesthetics of the project to the economy of means. In
this practice, she experiences, besides the integration into the
countryside, objects, and tools, the materials that will be of singular
importance in her studio work. After a long nomadic apprenticeship, more
experimental than academic in nature, between Lyon, Grenoble, Paris,
and Quebec, it is hardly surprising that it took her quite some times to
choose the most adequate studio for her own personal artistic practice.
In 2011, she started working in the Ateliers Paul Flury in
Montreuil-sous-Bois, which offers a great variety of tools of
production, including foundries, ovens, molding studios, cutting
studios... From that point on, “studio-obsessed,” Noémie Sauve has felt
free to fulfill her need to create and to experiment relentlessly while
doing so. In her work, she combines an intense involvement with drawing –
a direct and spontaneous practice supported by her taste for
improvisation, relentlessly filling up numerous experimental sketchbooks
– with a taste for complex mechanical processes. For instance, La Bête (2015) presents a canine head sculpted in a block of Carrara marble and penciled afterwards. In her Peaux de Sculptures [Sculpture Skins]
series (2015), embossings are pressed from the imprint of a sculpture
made out of modeling clay, coated with rabbit-skin glue, and then gone
over with graphite pencil and colored crayons. Each step of this
vertiginous process mobilizes her innate sense of improvisation,
allowing her to continuously reinvent a process that endlessly revives
her, allowing her to rework and rethink basic technical categories. In
the end, what is a Sculpture Skin exactly? Is it a drawing, a print, a sculpture, an engraving?
Tools
that allow artistic creation (whether in relation to architecture or
the fine arts) occupy an important place for this artist who admits that
she “walks along with arts and crafts.” This relation between arts and
crafts was highlighted in her 2014-15 residency in The Domaine de Belval
(Ardennes). The former hunting ground of the founders of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature
(Museum of Hunting and Nature), the site was converted into a center
for the training of hunters, for research in eco-ethology, and for
artistic experimentation. Within this paradoxical territory – wild and
domesticated at once, somewhere in between castle parks and primal
forests – Noémie Sauve has, among other things, followed the trainees of
a bow hunting class. There, she initiated a hybrid project she titled Domestication vs Pleine Lune [Domestication vs. Full Moon]. The
artworks she brought back from her journey present as much as they
distort tools for archery. Arrows, release mechanisms, sights, thumb
rings are reinterpreted, deconstructed through multiple formal technics:
drawings, engravings, or sculptures. In her sculpture series Animaux à Nourrir [Animals to Feed],
tin, glass, bronze, and ceramics are utilized to shape zoomorphic
hybrids that one can hold in his hand – threatening weapons at the mercy
of the holder’s powerful grip.
Her special attachment to tools had previously been the subject of one of Noemie's most spectacular works of art, L'Attelage
(2015), a drawing that came out of her residency at L'Aparté, an art
center near Trémelin, Brittany. The painting arose from the artist’s
questioning of the coexistence of and spatial distribution between human
and non-human actors. Sauve’s attention was caught by one of the many
activities offered to visitors at the Trémelin domain, a forest recently
converted into an ecotourism site: sled dog racing. These races, in
which mixed teams of Samoyeds and Greenland dogs compete, fascinated the
artist for multiple reasons: for the packs’ swirling violence no less
than for the material means (harness, collars, tethers) necessary to
channel the animal instinct in order to make it a form of entertainment.
Noemie
Sauve's aesthetics are infused with a form of baroque lyricism, a fact
attested to her by the precocious and delirious 2007 staging of her
painting, La Danseuse,
in front of the Centre Pompidou. Up to today, that photographic image
remains the header of her blog, perhaps as a permanent injunction to
herself against falling into a form of “romanticism” that often arises
from solitary studio work. “It takes a lot of effort to get as close as
possible to bad taste without falling into kitsch” says Noémie, who
still uses crayons and glitter in her drawing and stages her sculptures
on pop-psychedelic clouds (Ours Hydrocéphale,
2014). This aesthetic choice lays claims to a political goal: Through
amazement that it arouses, it intends to make accessible for a large
audience a complex iconography without necessarily appealing to the
intermediary of a user manual for the prevailing paradigms in
contemporary art. In the drawing Végétal vs Minéral (2015),
this could be swapped for the proposition – differently, but equally
political – that the artist takes up when faced with the question of the
development of the natural reserve of Trémelin. Planted with resinous
trees unable to take root in a salty soil, the park is neglected by
forest officers who are frustrated by its poor profit, indifferent to
touristic issues, which are out of the realm of their competency. The
forest’s paths are progressively blocked by trees any wind can uproot.
The
tree cemetery in Trémelin stands as a singular metaphor for the
struggles at stake in the use of a territory, so intimate to the
fundamental questions motivating Noémie Sauve's work. With a title
carefully chosen as always, Végétal vs Minéral,
the artist proposes a representation that she submits, first, to the
local inhabitants she has interacted with during its research and
creation. It is up to them, as to the broader audience looking at this
protean work, to appreciate its poetic feeling and to interrogate its
critical weight.
Raphaël
Abrille
february 2016
Raphaël
Abrille est conservateur-adjoint du musée de la Chasse et de la Nature
(à Paris et au Château de Chambord) depuis 2002. Il a contribué au
réaménagement muséographique du site parisien entre 2005 et 2007. Il
collabore au développement des musées de France consacrés à la
cynégétique: au musée de la Vénerie de Senlis, dont il est conservateur
(2005-2006) et au musée de la Chasse de Gien, où il contribue au
pilotage scientifique du projet muséographique (2008-2011). Au sein de
ces musées ou en tant que co-commissaire de la manifestation "Monuments
et Animaux" pour le centre des Monuments Nationaux (2011-2012), il
s'attache à élaborer un dialogue intime entre l'art contemporain et
lieux de patrimoine. Ses commissariats, recherches et publications
récentes portent tour à tour sur l'animalité dans la création
contemporaine, sur l'histoire des musées de chasse en Europe, sur la
mise en scène et la représentation du trophée, sur la peinture de chasse
de Gustave Courbet et sur l'histoire de la photographie cynégétique.