Lise Bardou

To Go Around

June 29-30 and July 1-2 | 2017

On the 29th of June, at 7:00 PM, Zaratan – Arte Contemporânea is thrilled to presents To Go Around, an exhibition by Lise Bardou, artist in residency at Zaratan AIR, who is presenting a new series of artworks, produced in a short period of time
Stemming from antropological studies and fieldwork, her artwork challenges the liminal spaces and approach the idea of the body as a vector. A vector which provides, through movement and rhythm, the transition from different body and mind states.
The titled of the exhibition, To Go Around, come from a Paul Connerton’s book, “How modernity forgets”. This expression is used by the Walpiri (Australian Moderns Aborigines ); «To Go Around» in this context means «a place to express what might speak of as making a detour».

Going around Lisbon with this reading in mind, Lise Bardou started to identify and imagine certain lines - some of them geographical, other created by the flow of people, other drawn by herself. Lines that aggregate and disaggregate into fluid conveniences. An intuitively perceptible order that only manifests itself in the intervals of visibility. How to turn around the intangible, or getting closer to it?

She started her research from filming the path of two important religious processions, “Procissão de Nossa Senhora da Saude” and the “Procissão das Velas”, observing the walker's movement. Joining the community into a special space and time of displacement, the procession congregate very different people, categorized by their costumes, their instruments and attitudes.

In the videos and drawings presented at Zaratan, Lise Bardou is erasing many physical/material information from the objective documentation of the parade, arriving to other abstract compositions which underline the movement, the duration, and the rhythm of the pilgrims - both the real believers and the ones who are escaping or already escape from the cerimony.

Continuing her research of invisible line crossing the physical space. Lise Bardou turns her attention to the water running under the city, to recreate the underground water way of Lisbon from one fountain to another, going below and above the city. From church to church, from fountains to fountain, the artist is molding another perception of space.

BIO:
Born in Toulouse (France), Lise Bardou is an artist graduated in June 2016 at EBABX (Fine Art’s school of Bordeaux). She is working especially with video and drawing installation on particular places and landscapes, their rhythm and movement. Most of the time her work is based on anthropological and historical research and evokes rituals, myth and belief of a community as she did with the tarantism phenomenon for her thesis research, including the question of in between, mouvement, rythme, trance, music and ritual as a therapy.
"Tinged with the languishing warmth of the Mediterranean culture, Lise Bardou’s work is generous and contemplative. It has something to do with ruin, the long naps in the sun after a good meal, but also the party, the music, the dancing and the rituals, now and then, covered by the songs of the cicadas." Adrien Défago