As deep as our sleep, as fast as your heart, 2001, is the work of Emmanuelle Antille, a young artist from Lausanne, and it’s an exciting departure from the sybaritic, ambient work of the Zurich circle around Pipilotti Rist and Ugo Rondinone, known for their atmospheric images and tapestries of sound. Doug Aitken’s installations, with their disjointed narrative structures, seem a more appropriate comparison. But Antille blurs the definitions of genres even more radically. A simple plot, as if conceived for the kind of psychological drama at which John Cassavetes used to excel in his films starring Gena Rowlands, unfolds in a multi-perspectival installation. Only the physical directness of the individual images brings the many-layered projection together again, so that ultimately, isolated and intense sequences are fixed in one’s memory, like the flotsam of a dream: for instance, a mother’s aged hands caressing her daughter’s face, as if she were able to gaze once again on her own face as a young woman.
Soft carpeting, a living-room set of eight sofas arranged along the walls, and lots of throw pillows created an ambience somewhere between domestic intimacy and the anonymity of a private viewing booth. Three screens floated freely in the center of the strictly symmetrical installation, forming a room within the room. Here one witnessed a dreamlike story unfold in distinct temporal and spatial phases: A mother awakens her daughter, then goes with her into the bathroom to scrub her back. Afterward, she puts the young woman, still wearing a brilliant red dress, back to bed and carefully tucks her in. She then puts on her daughter’s shoes and begins to dance in the living room, while the young woman goes back to sleep, presumably dreaming.
In the meantime, in wall projections flanking these screens at two corners of the gallery, twilight changed repeatedly from night to day, day to night over a small seaside town. It was like the view one wakes to see out the window in the morning when the memory of dreams is still present, or else sees shortly before fading into sleep. Two monitors, one on the left and one on the right, underscored the home-theater atmosphere and added ritualistic details to the central scene: Over and over the mother, like the baby she once was, playfully bites at the thighs of her grown child as she lies in bed.
These images betray a strong personal relationship between the two actresses as much as between the characters they play, even without the work being explicitly autobiographical. What the public might suspect, but could hardly be expected to know for certain, is that the performers are the artist and her mother. The two women play these intimate scenes with a perversely fascinating mixture of artifice and real experience, past and present.
—Hans Rudolf Reust
Translated from German by Sara Ogger.
