Billboard Series #32:
Lucile Desamory
De Werveldende Wirwar
29/06 – 29/10/2024
As a visual artist, Lucile Desamory (°1977, Brussels) brings neglected narratives to light. From the testimony of a woman describing her encounter with a UFO in Dark Matter (2010) to the investigation of a journalist trapped in an infernal time loop in Abracadabra (2013), the Belgian artist challenges the way we experience the world.
Her exploration of reality and its shadow leads her to develop a multifaceted practice: in order to make the grey zone between belief and incredulity emerge, she combines media such as painting, installation, performance, and cinema until they become one. Through film projects that embrace a collaborative approach, she bends the conventions of genres such as ghost movies, soap operas and musicals.
Within the context of Billboard Series, Lucile Desamory created a gouache-painted poster for De wervelende wirwar (The Swirling Tangle), a TV series and feature film produced in 2024. Shot in the city of Aalst, it unfolds in twelve chapters following the daily wanderings of Joke, a soap opera actress played by Joke Devynck, until her fate is disrupted by a solar eclipse. Guided by a voice-over that seems to already know what will happen, the actress ends up in a whirlwind connecting past, present, and future. From then on, the camera of Lucile Desamory records the twists and turns of Joke’s memory.
Looking at the poster that covers the wall of an old welding factory, the audience comes across characters and artifacts featured in the film. Joke towers over them, her gaze engaging that of the viewers. The billboard follows the tradition of hand painted posters and transforms the surroundings into a potential film set. It echoes with the gouache photograms that appear repeatedly in De wervelende wirwar. During the brief moment of transition between two chapters, they turn into the moving images of the film, superimposed on one another as a double exposure of the scene and its undercurrent.
Whether through her film or the poster that serves as its extension, Lucile Desamory pursues her quest to represent the unexplained and translate the deep emotions that stem from witnessing it. Ultimately, her contribution to Billboard Series offers a multilayered reading of a precarious world constantly restructured by our own imagination, like a dream from which we might awaken at any moment.
Lucile Desamory lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been shown among others at the Berlin Film Festival; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Tate Modern, London; steirischer herbst, Graz; Shanghai Biennale; and Wiels, Brussels.
De Werveldende Wirwar was produced by Escautville, with CaSk Films and Netwerk Aalst as co-producers. It is being supported by VAF, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, KANAL – Centre Pompidou, Jester, Beursschouwburg, Taxipalais Kunsthalle Tirol, and Ellen de Bruijne Projects.
Watch the trailer here:
All images courtesy of the artist
Installation photography: Michiel De Cleene
Text: Manon Laverdure
Billboard Series is a long-term art project in public space, for which every three months an artist is invited to create a new, site-specific work for a 50 m2 billboard on Dok Noord, Ghent. Through changing presentations, Billboard Series wants to build a sustainable and productive dialogue with the surrounding neighbourhood and urban landscape, reflect on the changes that this neighbourhood is currently undergoing, and introduce a broad audience to different visual languages and ways of looking at the world.
Billboard Series is a project of artlead, together with 019. Billboard Series is curated by Thomas Caron, takes place within a scenography by architect Olivier Goethals, and is being developed with the support of the City of Ghent.
