THE CLARA RIVAULT’S OUTSTRETCHED HAND

My skin shreds the pocket of my jeans, my fingers slip into its breast and collect a cold body that I guess plural. Its rough walls caress my skin, which sometimes gets lost in softer songs. Once I get out of this cell that is my garment, I become aware of its gravity. These are two bronze fingers that intertwine and untie as I move. The cut wall is polished, so the contours of my face can be seen. I have in my hand The Promise of a Promise, a work by Clara Rivault. What a strange feeling to make these inert limbs dance in my palm, this relic of a frozen moment, traces of a outdated consensus that now slips from hand to hand.

Clara Rivault’s work is eminently personal, based on memories of ancestors, chance encounters; but it interferes with us by taking on the air of collective stories, poems. With La Main, the artist lets us enter into the intimacy of a conversation she shares with her grandmother. A sound work in which we discover the trembling voice of an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease. She gropes in a vaporous mind where memories hide behind the disease. To discover it, we must listen carefully, approaching an imposing speaker that delivers only a whisper. We are talking about debris caused by Allied bombing. Collateral damage from a conflict that was coming to an end and destroyed his home. It is a hand of particular beauty, a hand that the remains have left intact but whose rest of the body is buried under the rubble. And the voice concludes: “Mom had beautiful hands, very beautiful hands. »

From this residence there remains a memory and a photograph. It dates back to 1944 and already the house is nothing more than a pile of murderous stones, a gaping wound in the architecture of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. This archive, which is now intimate to us, is being enlarged and transferred to the ground by Clara Rivault. So much so that to continue the exhibition we have to trample it, crush this hand that has become a mental sculpture, tread on the parent rubble of the ruins of Aleppo and elsewhere.