Benoît Barbagli

All around, the water

The Eva Vautier Gallery is pleased to present All around, waterBenoit Barbagli's first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Benoît Barbagli has a protean artistic practice, he draws his works from nature. He questions the ethics of the image and the imprint it leaves. In the artist's images, taken mostly in natural environments and in groups, the sharing and the privileged link he has with his environment are reflected. He has been collaborating since 2018 with the PALAM (from the Latin "in the presence of") collective, of which he is a founding member.

For Elodie Antoine, art historian, "the work of Benoît Barbagli questions the contemporary possibilities of photographic writing through performance. He offers us a photographic narrative whose subject remains enigmatic.

Who is the narrator? The author, the performers?
The artist seems to voluntarily blur the tracks leaving to the viewer the place that Roland Barthes offered to the reader - The reader is born of the death of the author.

The aquatic universes staged by Barbagli return us to states and primordial forms - the amniotic liquid, the circle, in which come to move and curl up naked bodies. A body to body with nature, an ancestral state of man in his close and privileged relationship with the elements: water, air, earth. Elements that are echoed in his sculptures - from the curve of the rising waters to the expansion of life since the birth of mankind to the variations of the earth's temperatures. Barbagli's photographic and sculptural works question our being in the world, its mutations and metamorphoses, its possible alternatives as well."

Past exhibition

Benoit Barbagli - All around the water

November 25, 2022 - January 28, 2023

Video Immersion

As part of Benoît Barbagli's solo exhibition, Tout autour, l'eau à la galerie, the artist proposes an immersive video(Immersion, 2022) on the first floor of the gallery, which invites the viewer to discover the genesis of his exhibition presented on the first floor.

View of exhibition All around the water

François Fernandez photography

Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier

The harder the collapse hits, the more joy is needed. Do not see in these words, a don't look up[1] diverting the eye from the causes, but a tool for revolutionary use.

Joy is the binding force of our interactions, a power to act, a power to build collectively. By making the common possible, it becomes an act of resistance. Without the common, ecological thinking is out of whack.

The planetary limits exceeded[2] one by one, what can joy, what can a few immersed bodies swimming in a circle under water, without clothes, without tools, without words?

A few frantic movements to reach the surface, take a breath and dive back down, in apnea, in weightlessness: all around the water, all around life. Together, naked, immersed in water, we deconstruct the sophistications of our culture, we redraw the immediate relationships of which nature is the first link, omnipresent, unsurpassable.

Beyond the qualities (or lack thereof) of technical composition, visual originality, and execution, it is the resonance of human ties and emotions immersed in nature that make up an aesthetic: an ethic of perception.

Since we entered the Anthropocene era, water, the origin of life, is rising. The seas are rising by 3.5 mm per year. The factors are various (melting ice, expansion of the oceans ...) ^[3] but one thing seems certain, we have a collective responsibility. Under the paradigm of science, the rise of the seas reactivates our millennial fears of the deluge. Water is both omnipresent and precious, polymorphous, fluid, calm or stormy. The 70% of water that we are made of resonates with the equal share of water that covers the earth's surface. If science observes this comparison, poetry pursues it and suggests that this equality induces a relationship between the sea and ourselves: our mind, our brain, does not store our history and our memory locally, but acts as a receiver whose body constitutes the antenna which only comes to interpret and individualize our thoughts. Our memory is the water itself. Emotion is the message, and joy is the most powerful tool to access it. Joy itself is the motor or the pretext, the desire or the requirement of our repeated dives and immersions in these seas, lakes and rivers, as a means of enlarging the common, of enlarging the access to our collective entity. It is under the aegis of this story, that time and time again, we went underwater, in a bed of posidonia in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, We tried to fall asleep underwater (2018), or to play underwater music in the creeks of Trayas, Jazz underwater (2021). All around, the waterThis is the story of the stories that become images and then myths. One of them took place in September 2021 at the lake of Saint-Cassien, for the exhibition Under Chaos, Life, a sort of introduction to the exhibition All around, Water. Hold underwater for eight seconds, come back up, dive again. We repeat this as much as possible... The camera, fixed on a flying propeller thingy, takes pictures at five second intervals. So we had to keep at least this time, plus the time to dive, all synchronized between us. Challenging! We were five that day: Aimée, Benoît, Diego, Katalina and Yoan. Constrained by the surrounding objects for the realization of the scenes, we had moved stones from one bank to the other. Their weight required a collaborative effort. A work that may seem absurd or incongruous, but whose bodies are delivered to the evocative power of water, exalting our imaginations. The images that emerge are mixed with our cultural archetypes. Each challenge has two faces, the one that opposes you and the one of the opportunity it offers. That day, it was a resolution of the founding myths of the modern individual, the myth of Sisyphus became a collective epic. By reconstructing the lost meaning of eternally repeated work in a common element. This second face joy resounds in the water, with us.

Sisyphus Collective II, 2021

The water in the seas is rising, the water in the rivers and lakes at the end of the summer of 2022 was at its lowest. We looked for the posidonia fields which allowed us to realize the Hydrophila series ^[4] a few months earlier, they were out of the water. What can joy do, if the water disappears? What can joy do if it doesn't mutate into an electrical surge to disconnect the stock market platforms, capitalism and the Artificial Intelligences that suck up the real? What can joy be without economic decline? These words are not an injunction to happiness, such an injunction would always be questionable if it did not require the revolutionary to sprout and grow. Without anti-capitalist revolution, without gender revolution and without ecological revolution, joy is only entertainment. Is the artist still this eccentric individual, attracting the light by the freedom he has to be himself, by the indifference he displays to the pressure of social norms? Is art and should it be the noise of an individual who frees himself? Sisters of each other, art and freedom have seen during these last decades, their relationship deeply evolve. The artistic avant-garde, far from wanting to simply enjoy its freedom, lives with these ecological and social constraints in order to imagine how to build a new one, collective, in echo with its environment. With the Anthropocene and the collapse on the horizon, artists face a major challenge. They find themselves, as a result of modernity, placed on the central cornerstone of the norms that have built the individual. While we have all become artists through technologies and networks such as Instagram and TikTok, creators of everything and nothing, Fluxus in spite of ourselves, the time has come when the artist operates a withdrawal movement, as an act of resistance and construction. And this, by putting the primacy to question again, at the same time, its relation to the environment and its relation to the collective. Without the collective, ecology stumbles and more broadly all struggles. There will undoubtedly still be a work of catharsis produced by the art, which unties the spirit and projects worlds-works of the author, whose refinement and personal work of these creators are and will always be rich of contributions in sensitivity. It will still make a mark, but not a movement. If it is more difficult since the 80's to recognize the artistic movements that follow one another, it is because history still questions the individualities that carry these movements. But what has been at stake since then is no longer one artist opposing another, one individuality facing another, but something of the order of a shared struggle, of a collective freedom. Thus, social and societal struggles and ecology have become the tripod of a movement that art and our modern societies are taking. We can see it as a constraint, and some people express suffering from it. It is not uncommon that the concentration of themes (intersectional, feminist, social, ecological), automatically excludes a significant number of artists from the public field whose work is focused on the refinement of an individual expression without direct societal stakes. Even if it is fair to say that this moment is a system, for example the Venice Biennale has for the first time welcomed more women than men in 2022 and the Istanbul Biennale has reached a figure of about 80%, it is not fair to argue that access would be barred to those whose art would not be "minor enough". What gives meaning today in art is deeply connected with the common, and each of us, regardless of our identities, can only find happiness in participating in this construction. And if our work is common, so is our intelligence. Intelligence is a collective competence, we do not think alone, it could even be that we do not think at all, that we are only an echo, a mirage of the sum of the surrounding thoughts, themselves mirages... We do not create alone, our inventions are collective, our works too. We are working on the construction of a sentence that is still in its infancy and that makes the link with what we think is essential: to draw a new world through our joy. When Picasso admits, "if the small artists copy, the great artists steal" it is that he understood that little finally returns to him. The more recognized an artist is, the greater his larceny is. Everything is an echo of this collective hubbub, acquired by word, sight, serendipity or telepathy. If theft and property are synonymous in Marx, they are also synonymous in art. The signature which monopolizes the work is mark of the individual, it participates in the creation of the dominant history turned towards the individuals, the capital and the viriarchy. It is of the same nature as primitive accumulation, so much so that the work itself, when the artist has built up sufficient power, is finally returned to the bourgeoisie, adding cultural capital to its financial capital. As such, artists become the guarantors of the social structure ^[5] . Intelligence and intuition are collective resources and it is by treating them as such that we can build a relationship with nature. Whether you are a hummingbird, a localist or a revolutionary, we are crossed by paradoxes that prevent us from creating, from seeing this new world appear, while the current one is collapsing. When will this end of the light/darkness that Antonio Gramsci announced a hundred years ago? The question is not about time, but about life. And of life, I only know the joy that contains this strength capable of resisting the growing entropy. Science establishes predictive models, politics legislates on ecological issues, the media communicates and raises awareness. It is common to see exhibitions that have an ecological awareness as a hook. Art is sometimes confused with the issue of the latter, as a possibility to raise awareness of the coming climate catastrophe. However, this is not its role. It is not its role either to operate a translation between the scientific content and the public, as a way to better communicate with the emotion where the reason fails. Art simply builds an aesthetic. It is by this means that the freedom appeared constrained above seems to be reborn here, as the search for an aesthetic whose reports seem to be tuned to the concerns of the common. This search for agreement is the expression of freedom. One can easily associate the idea of building an aesthetic with "looking for the new", imagining other pictorial forms of plastic expression, and moving the limits. Here, we define aesthetics as a set of gestures and behaviors whose source is co-constructed between the individual and his social body in order to integrate in an image the substance of this link: ethics. That is to say to integrate by their sensitivity of the elements which will create in an image in the broad sense (photo, video, performance, sculpture?) a balance, a tension, whose sensitive, the emotion binds with a concern. Integrate into the work a resonance of ethical perceptions of the relationship between individuals and the environment. It differs from a more classical conception in that it implies that the elements that compose an image are always linked to a situation, to an economic, social and cultural moment. Aesthetics, before being a pure plastic discipline, that is to say a vibration of the sensitivity inside the matter, is first of all the construction of a vision. To build this aesthetic is to build an ethics of perception. An ethics of the perception is not reduced to the representation by an image, of an idea within a work - representation of the fragility of the nature, representation of the relations of social violence, of war - But it is well by the presence of collective behaviors (anthropo-relational, or eco-relational), that arises a balance in the image-work as a harmonious system of value whose stake is emotional. The work becomes much more than the final shot (for photo or video), it is the sensitive work on human links and their relationship to nature. It is through this prism that it is possible to create a palpable tension between the current collapse of our society and joy. They become inseparable as their destiny is linked. In All around, the water The immersion of the bodies is a choice angle to build this link between us and nature. " We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself. This slogan, chanted at climate protests since at least 2016, echoes this idea, and politically translates how aesthetics recomposes our identities: we no longer recognize ourselves in this individual normalized by capital (consumer), we only recognize ourselves in nature. What does this aesthetic consist of? If it does not find its source in pictoriality, and since most of its elements are barely perceptible, how can it be given a content? Among the many possible answers and tools, we will mention one that is called: theflying machine. The expression " flying machine " is an expression that appeared in my practice well before the use of a drone, it did not refer to this object. The flying camera object does not only have the purpose of creating an image, it does not concern the pictorial plasticity produced, but indirectly impregnates it. It is a method to bring out the work on the relationships that the authors have with each other and with their environment. In practice, theflying camera or flying cameras group together during a photographic session several cameras in automatic mode most of the time, which pass from hand to hand. This blurs the stability of the relationship between the photographer and the model. The image is no longer constructed by a single look, nor by a single genre. Everyone becomes a model and a photographer in turn. Nudity has historically had in my practice, vocation to immerse the body in nature, to remove the cultural and social marks that the dressed body emits, to declare that a naked body is not only sexual. As deconstructed as the author tries to be, the naked body tends to produce a "male gaze", which objectifies and normalizes the female body ^[6] . The flying machine is in this sense a tool that collectively crosses our views, giving each individual an equal role and equal consideration. The author becomes what is common in the individual. ^[7] It remains that the collective is always ephemeral, emerges then dissolves, in an environment where the individual is enthroned. Even if it is resistant, it is difficult to free itself from the organizational modes of society. This is why the collective is never a state of affairs, even if several tools can give it a materiality (an association, a place, a collective practice, or simply a name), it is always a counter-power against larger, more stable entities. To the stammering of my so candid question: Is joy, besides being laughable only desirable? Aimée Fleury refusing the all-encompassing interaction with joy answers: "I have nothing to add to joy". This sentence resounded in my memory for a long time. "She is suspicious at the very least, joy is often that of the oppressors." If I doubt her answer, I doubt mine as well. Do I evoke, when speaking of joy, a libidinous desire, an injunction to enjoyment hidden in an ecological and social purpose, built by 5000 years of viriarchy? "Joy does not need art, it is complete, and is sufficient to itself" she answered. To hold from one end to the other of one's body and mind paradoxes that will open new paradigms when the time comes. Much more than a manifesto, it is an attempt to put together a piece of the unfinished, sometimes clumsy or erroneous sketch of the architecture of our future world.

Precious thanks to all those people who have made this exhibition and this book possible, Elodie Antoine, Mona Barbagli, Tom Barbagli, Tristan Blumel, Evan Bourgeau, Katalina Cearca, Clémence, Flora Defaut, Diego Evrad, Aimée Fleury, Gabriela Guyez, Léonie Focqueu, Camille Franch-Guerra, Leah Friedman, Nina Kypraios, Sarah Laouini, Anne-Sophie Lecharme, Yoan Malet, Cédric Mounier, Pénélope Morterolle, Jean-pierre Soardi, Célia Vanhoutte, Eva Vautier, Anne-Laure Wuillai

Don't look up: Cosmic Denial, a 2021 film by Adam McKay metaphorizing climate denial. ↑
The planetary limits are the thresholds that humanity should not exceed in order not to compromise the favorable conditions in which it has been able to develop and to be able to live sustainably in a safe ecosystem, i.e. by avoiding brutal and difficult to predict modifications of the planetary environment. en.wikipedia.%C3% ↑
Source Iopscience Predictability of twentieth century sea-level rise from past data. ↑
Cover photograph ↑
Transparency commits me however to recall that I sign my works, number them, value them, rarefy them, integrate them inside a cultural movement. In short, I prepare them for their acquisition by capital, relying on both revolution and institution. And this even through this text. Difficult paradox. ↑
It was a difficult thing for me to overcome or even simply mitigate these culturally induced social reflexes. ↑
The photographic sessions often contain several projects, from different artists, by putting our bodies and tools together, and after a redistribution to each one of what they consider to be their work. Technocratically Yours created by Aimée Fleury is the result of one of these collective sessions. ↑

See less

Statement, All around the water

By Benoit Barbagli

2022 – Benoît Barbagli “All around, the water”.

Deep Breath, 2022

A series of photographs Love jumps and Expression of an emotion in love (2014) à There is a link between water, music and life (2018) or at Natural revolution (2020) through to paintings Ecotopia's ink jets (2020), Benoit Barbagli's work embraces the land, the sea and the sky through the prism of the body.

His photographs put in majesty as many naked bodies, faces adorned with flowers, as arms stretched towards the sky. His body leaves it to the elements to do their work and/or his work. This is how painting was born, not without filiation with his elder, Yves Klein, but a contrario of the latter, without any demiurgic will. And if the subjects of his photographs are "guided" and/or accompanied in their acts, they do not replace the brushes of the artist in a modernist logic of pictorial renewal. They are bodies - neither objects of the conductor's desire, nor pictorial tools, nor models - free bodies to whom the artist proposes collective experiences in the middle of nature - in the middle of the forest and the waters. The shots are pretexts for a collective experience in places most often unknown to these bodies. It is rather a question of discovery of a place and an environment, of a quest for the potentialities of natural spaces.

Read the rest of the text

Elodie Antoine

Benoit Barbagli - body and water

As part of the OVNi Festival, he invited five artists to project, alongside him, videos on the theme of aquatic immersion: Evan Bourgeau, Tristan Blumel, Mona Barbagli, Camille Franch-Guerra, Aimée Fleury.

Water everywhere

Video loop created for the all around water exhibition

[vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” background_animation=”none”][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Benoît Barbagli

All around, the water

November 25, 2022 – January 28, 2023

[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][vc_column_text]

Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier
Benoît Barbagli "Tout autour, l'eau" 2022 vue exposition galerie Eva Vautier

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Views of Benoît Barbagli’s exhibition, All around, water ©François Fernandez[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” background_animation=”none”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]The Eva Vautier Gallery is pleased to present Tout autour, l’eau, Benoit Barbagli’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Benoît Barbagli has a protean artistic practice, he draws his works from nature. He questions the ethics of the image and the imprint it leaves. In the artist’s images, taken mostly in natural environments and in groups, the sharing and the privileged link he has with his environment are reflected. He has been collaborating since 2018 with the PALAM (from the Latin “in the presence of”) collective, of which he is a founding member.

For Elodie Antoine, art historian, “the work of Benoît Barbagli questions the contemporary possibilities of photographic writing through performance. He offers us a photographic narrative whose subject remains enigmatic.

Who is the narrator? The author, the performers?
The artist seems to voluntarily blur the tracks leaving to the viewer the place that Roland Barthes offered to the reader – The reader is born of the death of the author.

The aquatic universes staged by Barbagli return us to states and primordial forms – the amniotic liquid, the circle, in which come to move and curl up naked bodies. A body to body with nature, an ancestral state of man in his close and privileged relationship with the elements: water, air, earth. Elements that are echoed in his sculptures – from the curve of the rising waters to the expansion of life since the birth of mankind to the variations of the earth’s temperatures. Barbagli’s photographic and sculptural works question our being in the world, its mutations and metamorphoses, its possible alternatives as well.”[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][vc_empty_space][vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”Statement” tab_id=”1679403184481-6706dbfc-5616″][vc_column_text]The harder the collapse hits, the more joy is needed.

Do not see in these words, a don’t look up^[1 ] diverting the eye from the causes, but a tool for revolutionary use. Joy is the binding force of our interactions, a power to act, a power to build collectively. By making the common possible, it becomes an act of resistance.

Without the common, ecological thinking is out of whack.

The planetary limits exceeded^[2] one by one, what can joy, what can a few immersed bodies swimming in a circle under water, without clothes, without tools, without words?

A few frantic movements to reach the surface, take a breath and dive back down, in apnea, in weightlessness: all around the water, all around life.

Together, naked, immersed in water, we deconstruct the sophistications of our culture, we redraw the immediate relationships of which nature is the first link, omnipresent, unsurpassable.

Since we entered the Anthropocene era, water, the origin of life, is rising. The seas are rising by 3.5 mm per year. The factors are various (melting ice, expansion of the oceans …)^[3] but one thing seems certain, we have a collective responsibility.

Under the paradigm of science, the rise of the seas reactivates our millennial fears of the deluge. Water is both omnipresent and precious, polymorphous, fluid, calm or stormy. The 70% of water that we are made of resonates with the equal share of water that covers the earth’s surface.

If science observes this comparison, poetry pursues it and suggests that this equality induces a relationship between the sea and ourselves: our mind, our brain, does not store our history and our memory locally, but acts as a receiver whose body constitutes the antenna which only comes to interpret and individualize our thoughts.

Our memory is the water itself. Emotion is the message, and joy is the most powerful tool to access it.

Joy itself is the motor or the pretext, the desire or the requirement of our repeated dives and immersions in these seas, lakes and rivers, as a means of enlarging the common, of enlarging the access to our collective entity.

It is under the aegis of this story, that time and again, we went underwater, in a bed of posidonia in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, We tried to fall asleep underwater (2018 ), or to play underwater music in the creeks of Trayas, Jazz underwater (2021).

All around, the water tells these stories that become images and myths.

One of them took place in September 2021 at the lake of Saint-Cassien, for the exhibition Under Chaos, Life, a sort of introduction to the exhibition All around, Water.

Hold underwater for eight seconds, come back up, dive again. We repeat this as much as possible… The camera, fixed on a flying propeller thingy, takes pictures at five second intervals.

So we had to keep at least this time, plus the time to dive, all synchronized between us. Challenging!

We were five that day: Aimée, Benoît, Diego, Katalina and Yoan.

Constrained by the surrounding objects for the realization of the scenes, we had moved stones from one bank to the other. Their weight required a collaborative effort. A work that may seem absurd or incongruous, but whose bodies are delivered to the evocative power of water, exalting our imaginations. The images that emerge are mixed with our cultural archetypes.

Each challenge has two faces, the one that opposes you and the one of the opportunity it offers. That day, it was a resolution of the founding myths of the modern individual, the myth of Sisyphus became a collective epic. By reconstructing the lost meaning of eternally repeated work in a common element.

This second face joy resounds in the water, with us.

Sisyphus Collective II, 2021

What can joy do, if the water disappears? What can joy do if it doesn’t mutate into an electrical surge to disconnect the stock market platforms, capitalism and the Artificial Intelligences that suck up the real? What can joy be without economic decline?

These words are not an injunction to happiness, such an injunction would always be questionable if it did not require the revolutionary to sprout and grow.

Without anti-capitalist revolution, without gender revolution and without ecological revolution, joy is only entertainment.

Is the artist still this eccentric individual, attracting the light by the freedom he has to be himself, by the indifference he displays to the pressure of social norms? Is art and should it be the noise of an individual who frees himself?

Sisters of each other, art and freedom have seen during these last decades, their relationship deeply evolve. The artistic avant-garde, far from wanting to simply enjoy its freedom, lives with these ecological and social constraints in order to imagine how to build a new one, collective, in echo with its environment.

With the Anthropocene and the collapse on the horizon, artists face a major challenge. They find themselves, as a result of modernity, placed on the central cornerstone of the norms that have built the individual. While we have all become artists through technologies and networks such as Instagram and TikTok, creators of everything and nothing, Fluxus in spite of ourselves, the time has come when the artist operates a withdrawal movement, as an act of resistance and construction. And this, by putting the primacy to question again, at the same time, its relation to the environment and its relation to the collective. Without the collective, ecology stumbles and more broadly all struggles.

There will undoubtedly still be a work of catharsis produced by the art, which unties the spirit and projects worlds-works of the author, whose refinement and personal work of these creators are and will always be rich of contributions in sensitivity. It will still make a mark, but not a movement.

If it is more difficult since the 80’s to recognize the artistic movements that follow one another, it is because history still questions the individualities that carry these movements. But what has been at stake since then is no longer one artist opposing another, one individuality facing another, but something of the order of a shared struggle, of a collective freedom.

Thus, social and societal struggles and ecology have become the tripod of a movement that art and our modern societies are taking.

We can see it as a constraint, and some people express suffering from it. It is not uncommon that the concentration of themes (intersectional, feminist, social, ecological), automatically excludes a significant number of artists from the public field whose work is focused on the refinement of an individual expression without direct societal stakes. Even if it is fair to say that this moment is a system, for example the Venice Biennale has for the first time welcomed more women than men in 2022 and the Istanbul Biennale has reached a figure of about 80%, it is not fair to argue that access would be barred to those whose art would not be “minor enough”.

What gives meaning today in art is deeply connected with the common, and each of us, regardless of our identities, can only find happiness in participating in this construction.

And if our work is common, so is our intelligence.

Intelligence is a collective competence, we do not think alone, it could even be that we do not think at all, that we are only an echo, a mirage of the sum of the surrounding thoughts, themselves mirages… We do not create alone, our inventions are collective, our works too.

We are working on the construction of a sentence that is still in its infancy and that makes the link with what we think is essential: to draw a new world through our joy.

When Picasso admits, “if the small artists copy, the great artists steal” it is that he understood that little finally returns to him. The more recognized an artist is, the greater his larceny is. Everything is an echo of this collective hubbub, acquired by word, sight, serendipity or telepathy.

If theft and property are synonymous in Marx, they are also synonymous in art.

The signature which monopolizes the work is mark of the individual, it participates in the creation of the dominant history turned towards the individuals, the capital and the viriarchy. It is of the same nature as primitive accumulation, so much so that the work itself, when the artist has built up sufficient power, is finally returned to the bourgeoisie, adding cultural capital to its financial capital. As such, artists become the guarantors of the social structure^[5].

Intelligence and intuition are collective resources and it is by treating them as such that we can build a relationship with nature. Whether you are a hummingbird, a localist or a revolutionary, we are crossed by paradoxes that prevent us from creating, from seeing this new world appear, while the current one is collapsing. When will this end of the light/darkness that Antonio Gramsci announced a hundred years ago?

The question is not about time, but about life. And of life, I only know the joy that contains this strength capable of resisting the growing entropy.

Science establishes predictive models, politics legislates on ecological issues, the media communicates and raises awareness.

It is common to see exhibitions that have an ecological awareness as a hook.

Art is sometimes confused with the issue of the latter, as a possibility to raise awareness of the coming climate catastrophe. However, this is not its role. It is not its role either to operate a translation between the scientific content and the public, as a way to better communicate with the emotion where the reason fails.

Art simply builds an aesthetic.

It is by this means that the freedom appeared constrained above seems to be reborn here, as the search for an aesthetic whose reports seem to be tuned to the concerns of the common. This search for agreement is the expression of freedom.

One can easily associate the idea of building an aesthetic with “looking for the new”, imagining other pictorial forms of plastic expression, and moving the limits.

Here, we define aesthetics as a set of gestures and behaviors whose source is co-constructed between the individual and his social body in order to integrate in an image the substance of this link: ethics.

That is to say to integrate by their sensitivity of the elements which will create in an image in the broad sense (photo, video, performance, sculpture?) a balance, a tension, whose sensitive, the emotion binds with a concern.

Integrate into the work a resonance of ethical perceptions of the relationship between individuals and the environment.

It differs from a more classical conception in that it implies that the elements that compose an image are always linked to a situation, to an economic, social and cultural moment. Aesthetics, before being a pure plastic discipline, that is to say a vibration of the sensitivity inside the matter, is first of all the construction of a vision.

To build this aesthetic is to build an ethics of perception.

An ethics of the perception is not reduced to the representation by an image, of an idea within a work – representation of the fragility of the nature, representation of the relations of social violence, of war – But it is well by the presence of collective behaviors (anthropo-relational, or eco-relational), that arises a balance in the image-work as a harmonious system of value whose stake is emotional.

The work becomes much more than the final shot (for photo or video), it is the sensitive work on human links and their relationship to nature.

It is through this prism that it is possible to create a palpable tension between the current collapse of our society and joy. They become inseparable as their destiny is linked.

In All around, water , the immersion of the bodies is a choice angle to build this link between us and nature.

“ We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself. This slogan, chanted at climate protests since at least 2016, echoes this idea, and politically translates how aesthetics recomposes our identities: we no longer recognize ourselves in this individual normalized by capital (consumer), we only recognize ourselves in nature.

What does this aesthetic consist of? If it does not find its source in pictoriality, and since most of its elements are barely perceptible, how can it be given a content?

Among the many possible answers and tools, we will mention one that is called: theflying machine.

The expression ” flying machine ” is an expression that appeared in my practice well before the use of a drone, and it did not refer to this object.

The flying camera object does not only have the purpose of creating an image, it does not concern the pictorial plasticity produced, but indirectly impregnates it.

It is a method to bring out the work on the relationships that the authors have with each other and with their environment.

In practice, theflying camera or flying cameras group together during a photographic session several cameras in automatic mode most of the time, which pass from hand to hand. This blurs the stability of the relationship between the photographer and the model. The image is no longer constructed by a single look, nor by a single genre. Everyone becomes a model and a photographer in turn.

Nudity has historically had in my practice, vocation to immerse the body in nature, to remove the cultural and social marks that the dressed body emits, to declare that a naked body is not only sexual. As deconstructed as the author tries to be, the naked body tends to produce a “male gaze”, which objectifies and normalizes the female body^[6].

The flying machine is in this sense a tool that collectively crosses our views, giving each individual an equal role and equal consideration. The author becomes what is common in the individual.^[7]

It remains that the collective is always ephemeral, emerges then dissolves, in an environment where the individual is enthroned. Even if it is resistant, it is difficult to free itself from the organizational modes of society.

This is why the collective is never a state of affairs, even if several tools can give it a materiality (an association, a place, a collective practice, or simply a name), it is always a counter-power against larger, more stable entities.

To the stammering of my so candid question: Is joy, besides being laughable only desirable?

Aimée Fleury refusing the all-encompassing interaction with joy answers: “I have nothing to add to joy”. This sentence resounded in my memory for a long time.

“It is suspicious at a minimum, joy is often that of the oppressors.”

If I doubt his answer, I doubt mine too.

Do I evoke, when speaking of joy, a libidinous desire, an injunction to enjoyment hidden in an ecological and social purpose, built by 5000 years of viriarchy?

“Joy does not need art, it is complete, and is sufficient to itself”, she answered me.

Much more than a manifesto, this text is a questioning. To hold from one end to the other of one’s body and mind paradoxes that will open new paradigms when the time comes.

Much more than a manifesto, it is an attempt to put together a piece of the unfinished, sometimes clumsy or erroneous sketch of the architecture of our future world.

Precious thanks to all those people who made this exhibition and book possible,

Elodie Antoine, Mona Barbagli, Tom Barbagli, Tristan Blumel, Evan Bourgeau, Katalina Cearca, Clémence, Flora Defaut, Diego Evrad, Aimée Fleury, Gabriela Guyez, Léonie Focqueu, Camille Franch-Guerra, Leah Friedman Nina Kypraios, Sarah Laouini, Anne-Sophie Lecharme, Yoan Malet, Cédric Mounier, Pénélope Morterolle, Jean-pierre Soardi, Célia Vanhoutte, Eva Vautier, Anne-Laure Wuillai, Collectif Palam, Eva Vautier gallery.

Don’t Look Up: Cosmic Denial, a 2021 film by Adam McKay metaphorizing climate denial. ↑
The planetary limits are the thresholds that humanity should not exceed in order not to compromise the favorable conditions in which it has been able to develop and to be able to live sustainably in a safe ecosystem, i.e. by avoiding brutal and difficult to predict modifications of the planetary environment.en.wikipedia.%C3% ↑
Source Iopscience Predictability of twentieth century sea-level rise from past data. ↑
Cover photograph ↑
Transparency commits me however to recall that I sign my works, number them, value them, rarefy them, integrate them inside a cultural movement. In short, I prepare them for their acquisition by capital, relying on both revolution and institution. And this even through this text. Difficult paradox. ↑
It was a difficult thing for me to overcome or even just mitigate these culturally induced social reflexes. ↑
The photographic sessions often contain several projects, from different artists, by putting our bodies and tools together, and after a redistribution to each of them of what they consider to be their work. Technocratically Yours created by Aimée Fleury is the result of one of these collective sessions. ↑

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As part of Benoît Barbagli‘s solo exhibition, Tout autour, l’eau à la galerie, the artist proposes an immersive video(Immersion, 2022) on the first floor of the gallery, which invites the viewer to discover the genesis of his exhibition presented on the first floor.

The video Envers l’or, projected every day at 4pm, directed by Evan Bourgeau, is presented in the form of a documentary and retraces the expedition of the PALAM collective for the exhibition Sous la glace l’eau (Caisse d’épargne, Nice, 2020).

Benoît Barbagli

Immersion, 2022

Duration : 08:42

Evan Bourgeau

Similar to what we feel, 2022

Reactivation of video, performance and photography Polaroid 2020

Duration : 01:06

Mona Barbagli

Essential Action Proposal: Dreaming in the Water Reflection, 2022

Duration: 1:14

Essential Action Proposal: Feeling Strong and Small at the Same Time, 2022

Duration : 0:56

Tristan Blumel

Superficiality and depth, 2022

video poem from Avant Musique

Duration : 0:31

Aimée Fleury and Justine Leroy

Hygienically yours, 2020

Duration : 02:47

Camille Franch-Guerra

Conciliabule to the sea and the aside of the sea to Stromboli, 2022

Talk Series

Duration : 05:08

Benoît Barbagli

Under the chaos life, 2021

Duration : 03:41

Palam (Directed and edited by Evan Bourgeau)

Reverse Gold, 2021

Video documentary

Duration : 36:00

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Benoit Barbagli – body and water

“Proust, (…) visibly set himself the task of inexorably blurring, through extreme subtlety, the relationship between the writer and his characters: by making the narrator not the one who has seen, nor even the one who writes, but the one who is going to write (the young man in the novel – but, by the way, how old is he and who is he? – wants to write, but he cannot, and the novel ends when writing finally becomes possible), Proust gave modern writing its epic: by a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is often said, he made of his life itself a work of which his own book was like the model.”

Roland Barthes,
The death of the author,
1967
From
Land,
water, the body and
art

A series of photographs Love jumps and Expression of an emotion in love (2014) à There is a link between water, music and life (2018) or at Natural revolution (2020) through to paintings Ecotopia’s ink jets (2020), Benoit Barbagli’s work embraces the land, the sea and the sky through the prism of the body.

His photographs put in majesty as many naked bodies, faces adorned with flowers, as arms stretched towards the sky. His body leaves it to the elements to do their work and/or his work. This is how painting was born, not without filiation with his elder, Yves Klein, but a contrario of the latter, without any demiurgic will. And if the subjects of his photographs are “guided” and/or accompanied in their acts, they do not replace the brushes of the artist in a modernist logic of pictorial renewal. They are bodies – neither objects of the conductor’s desire, nor pictorial tools, nor models – free bodies to whom the artist proposes collective experiences in the middle of nature – in the middle of the forest and the waters. The shots are pretexts for a collective experience in places most often unknown to these bodies. It is rather a question of discovery of a place and an environment, of a quest for the potentialities of natural spaces.

Through common experiences, the bodies gradually find their natural place in the middle of the elements: sea, lake, mountain, forest. The title of the photographs (
Underwater mythology
,
Underwater Ritual
,
At 90° above the fire
) testifies to this close relationship with the elements.

Their author also observes an adelphity of the bodies, which he readily associates with the emergence of the sacred. As if these acculturated bodies found by dint of frequenting and practicing the natural environment a pre-cultural state that led them to become one with nature, to curl up in it.

This quest is not unrelated to the one sought at the dawn of the seventies by artists who had decided to make nature their studio: walking, running, tracing, marking, finding, gleaning, collecting, laying, moving.

Benoît Barbagli’s performances revive this privileged relationship with nature. That of those who have sought through their walks, their wanderings, their drifts to experience a relationship with the world outside the modern, arch-modern world. A world, in the eyes of some of them, dehumanized, a world without horizon. The English countryside, the Nevada desert, the hinterland of Nice, then appeared to them as a horizon, a possibility, a territory to explore far from the omnipresence of noise and culture of the cities.

Benoit Barbagli proposes to his fellow travelers an experience that is not solitary, but rather collective – a federative experience to create a common ground, a social body. A social body far from the conventions, the contemporary rites, those of consumption.

From the death of culture to the death of the author

Back in the workshop, what happens to this social body? What is its status, its place in the author’s work?

Who is the young man in the pictures? Is it the subject? Is he the author? Is he the instigator? Who is the eye behind the camera?

Is the alleged perpetrator the subject? What do these photographs tell us? Its author, its history, its body, its juvenility?

Where is the author?

Who are the characters? Where do these immersed bodies that we recognize from the series come from?

Benoit Barbagli inexorably blurs the lines. Like the way Roland Barthes looked at Marcel Proust’s work, Benoît Barbagli, although he sometimes appears in his recent photographs, and although he remains the author of them, willingly steps aside, not behind the camera1but rather behind a collective body – this collective body that gives meaning to its photographs – a utopian body?

And if this return to nature, this social body, this union with nature, even if it was transitory, fleeting, was in his eyes, the image of a possible relationship to the world to come?

This “next world” that we have been told about for a long time. This radiant future where ecology would become one of the hobbyhorses of the presidential candidates, these air travels which would be limited to a certain mileage in order to preserve our skies, our earth, too.

This sweet dream of conscious citizens – aware of the world they live in, not only their own but also that of others – beyond the Atlantic, the Amazon, the Dead Sea and the Adriatic, the Carpathians, the deserts of Gobi to the Negev.

The forms of freedom: the nest, the jump, the emancipation

The nest, the cocoon

From the bay of Villefranche to the Lake of Saint Cassien, passing by the Cap Ferra, the bodies seem to curl up and move in the recovered freedom of the amniotic liquid.

Gathered members, spread out, symmetrical, dissymmetrical, immersed bodies detaching themselves from the green bottom of water, the alluvium forming more or less regular circles. The bodies themselves drawing a circle in the water, a circle which is not without echo to that of the watermelons of
Dead sea
(2008) by Sigalit Landau.

The circle – this uninterrupted line, in a closed circuit, is reminiscent of the nest in which birds are born. Nest, cocoon, circle naturally take on protective connotations. They sometimes evoke the desire to be one with nature, like the nests of Nils Udo:
The Nest,
1978 ;
In the garden of paradise,
1979 ;
Habitat
, 2000 ;
Water nest
2001; and Andy Goldsworthy :
Turn Hole
, 1986.

Whether it is realized on earth (Noël Dolla : Neutral Comment #2, 1969; Spatial Restructuring #3, 1970 ; Spatial Restructuring #5, 1980 ; Spatial restructuring n°122020); Robert Smithson: Spiral Getty, 1970 ; Spiral Hill, 1971 ; Amarillo Ramp, 1973 ; Sod Maze1974; Hervert Bayer: Mill Creek Canyon Earthwork1979-82; James Turrell: Roden crater (looking northeast)1977-present; Richard Long : Stone circle, 1976)

in the water (Christo and Jeanne-Claude,
Surrounded islands
1980-83) or in the air (Dennis Oppenheim :
Wirlpool, Eye of the Storm
(1973), the circular form is at the heart of the artists’ work in nature. The circle is not without echoing ancestral constructions, in particular that of Stonehenge (megalithic monument erected between -2600 and -1000 BC in Great Britain).

Wouldn’t this crown, this circle, also be the image and/or the form of withdrawal? The one experienced by a large part of the world’s population between December 2019 and June 2020.

The jump

Among the forms of freedom, we can also count that of jumping. Let’s think about parachute jumping or bungee jumping. If the gravity of a body in a vacuum can frighten some people, for others, on the contrary, it is a guarantee of freedom, a bit like the one known in water, from the amniotic liquid to sea water.

From the jump in the void (Yves Klein and Benoît Barbagli) to the one observed

in the recent images of Barbagli in shallow waters

of the Lake of Saint Cassien, the bodies incarnate a reconquered freedom,

won.

These bodies seem to crystallize a form of recovered freedom. Immersed in water, they no longer suffer from the effects of gravity and can move freely. And yet, these bodies are stopped under the effect of the camera by a fixed image. Barbagli gives to see this
hic
and
nunc
of freedom – this furtive, transitory, fleeting moment, to use the terms of Charles Baudelaire qualifying thus the painters of the modern life. The photographer thus tries to offer to this moment, an eternal dimension.

By immersing his images (
Double immersion
2022) in salt baths (boron salt), he not only re-enacts the immersion of the bodies but also endows them with a concrete surface, a crystallized salt crust. The photographic moment appears as a revelator, whereas the time of the workshop (the immersion in the salt of the photographic prints) on the contrary plays rather on the side of disappearance.

These images crystallize something – appearance, disappearance, momentum.

Emancipation

In 2007, the Invisible Committee – a collective of anonymous authors – published
The coming insurrection
(Edition La fabrique), a political, economic and social analysis of France at that time, followed by an application manual for mobilization, organization and revolt:

Not to wait any more, is to enter in one way or another in the insurrectionary logic

2

.

At the end of 2008, the intellectual and philosopher Julien Coupat was accused of having sabotaged the catenaries of train lines and of being the presumed author of the book mentioned above. At the beginning of December, Coupat was indicted along with nine of his friends and imprisoned in March. Artistic, militant and literary circles are mobilized. In a few weeks, the accused of the Republic becomes a hero in the eyes of a youth without any illusion on the political class of that time.

In 2009, another collective, Tiqqun, published
Contributions to the ongoing war
a collection of three texts previously published in October 2001 in the journal
Tiqqun 2
. The authors call for a rally. They state in the very first lines of the book:

The elementary human unit is not the body-individual, but the form-of-life.
The form-of-life is not the beyond of the naked life, it is rather its intimate polarization.
Each body is affected by its life-form as by a clinamen, an inclination, an attraction, a taste. What a body leans towards also leans towards it. This is true in every situation again. All inclinations are reciprocal
3

.

—

Through this introduction to the text “La guerre-civile, les formes- de-vie”, the authors place
the body
in the center of the human preoccupations, notably in its impulse towards the revolution.

This praise of the body considered not as a tool or object, but as a “form of life” is not without link with the artistic project of Benoit Barbagli. The body of the performers is not the extension and/or the image of the artist’s body. It is a
medium
which is embodied, anchored in life.

In 2009, a group of intellectuals, including Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Zizek, Kristine Ross and Alain Badiou, published
Democracy in what state?
(La fabrique). Inspired by the investigations carried out by the surrealists in the 1920s, the authors had tried to question and bring a new look to the concept of democracy.

The social body staged and implemented by Benoît Barbagli in his latest creations extends in its own way the questioning of the philosophers, suggesting perhaps that the question still remains open today. Works that, like the
Gestures of love
of
Coup de soleil
and
Liberation
advocate a form of emancipation, a celebration of giving and freedom – an ode to life.

1 It is not the eye behind the camera, the photographs being taken by drone in

geostationary position.

2 In invisible committee,
The coming insurrection
La fabrique, Paris, 2008, p. 83.

3 In Tiqqun,
Contributions to the ongoing war
La fabrique, Paris, 2009, p.15

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