AWDB talks to Singapore-based artist Hélène Le Chatelier about Peruke Project’s September group show ‘Itinerant Practices’. Chatelier will be one of three artists exhibiting a selection of new works and signature pieces at the upcoming London exhibition.
In your own words, what does the idea of ‘home’ mean to you?
This is a tricky question! Especially when you have spent most of your adult life abroad rather than in your home country! So in a sense, I suppose that ‘home’ could be anywhere; any house (rather than a country) where I have spent some time with my family and imprinted my mark through artworks I create, objects, pieces of furniture, or books that represent personal memories which are very dear to me and which translate my journey up to now.
How has living a diasporic life shaped your practice?
In a way, it is the trigger that helped me to fully open the door to my practice. Being far from my origins probably gave me the chance, and maybe the daring, to re-open the door (a door I had closed several years before) to what was trapped within me for so many years. Living abroad also anchored my practice by developing a personal voice that questions our human condition and marvels at our commonalities instead of pointing to our differences, hopefully helping to build bridges between cultures, generations, and philosophical approaches.
My practice is rooted in introspection, leading me to confront my personal history. Dealing with memory, whether individual or collective, is a complex process. Sometimes, the physical distance from your own ecosystem, and the dive into a totally different culture challenge, and even more from your own memories, can help you to see more clearly that certain aspects of the human experience have no boundaries. They can be shared by anyone and can shape a kind of ubiquity, a comprehensive common awareness of what it means to be a human being on this planet. It is fascinating and moving to consider the world through this lens. Any human being is a universe within themselves that calls for compassion, as we all share this common experience of humbly dealing with our body and the memories it contains. It is an ordeal that very often challenges the ability of language to render the complexity of what it means to be human. As such, my practice questions a universal human experience consisting of dissecting the influence of memory and social context in our intimate space, no matter where we come from. I am particularly interested in the parts of us that are elusive, hidden, and unstable, lighting our transitional state as a constant of our human condition.
Your work ‘Missing Parts’ explores themes of individual and collective resilience among generations and communities. Can you expand on this?
Shedding light on our state-of-being in both social and private settings, Missing Parts hopes to highlight resilience as one of the commonalities of our human condition. Through the voices (and words) of different individuals living different lives in the same territory, it seeks to pay tribute to and to honour all of the unknown/anonymous individuals whose personal and untold stories constitute the narrative of social history in Singapore.
This series underlines the complexity of human beings, the multiplicity of faces and identities that can coexist under one roof, or in the same territory, or even sometimes within one single head, and the unique – specifically human – capacity to recompose and turn any content into a positive outcome, thanks to a slow and silent process of transformation and acceptance. All pieces of writing collected anonymously among various communities are turned into abstract or poetic objects conveying the notion that we carry within ourselves the capacity to build joy, lightness, and poetry, despite challenging circumstances. As a collaborative and inclusive project, Missing Parts hopes to build bridges among generations and various communities and to express the impact any encounter can have on us, shaping and transforming us forever, even long after the encounter has disappeared.
How have these messages, stories, and narratives inspired the way you produce these installations?
After working with my own memories, focusing on how it could be possible to ‘lighten’ memories, transforming them into poetic objects no matter their original heaviness, I naturally came to the point that I wanted this project to become a collective experience giving voices to people who are rarely heard. So I invited people from various communities to send me, anonymously, some memories they wanted me to ‘lighten’ for them and share on their behalf.
I have been extremely moved by the trust people put in this project and the pieces of writing I received deeply changed the way I look at each individual. Dealing with loss, pain, and suffering is part of our human experience, no matter where we come from. Despite our gender, nationality, financial means, or cultural background, we all need to be resilient if we want to survive and overcome difficulties. I am convinced that these experiences shape our compassion. Each text, each story I received constitutes a very unique, and yet universal concept and very precious content, seeking respect and love. Reading, and sometimes copying them, carefully as a way of welcoming them inside myself, I worked on each piece, using the same slow process of deconstruction, allowing me to transform them, while respecting the secrets and modesty of each participant. My purpose was to turn them into something I hope to be weightless, delicate, and soft. I also wanted to explore the idea of creating a safe environment by turning hard feelings and memories, that can be difficult to share with others, into something that could be acceptable and addressed through another form. We don’t need to get the full intimate content or story behind each individual to be compassionate. Sometimes speculations can be more powerful to open our hearts.
How have the methods of cutting, sculpting, pasting, and dissecting these stories changed the perception and meaning of the project?
I like it when the techniques I use reveal as much about the artwork itself as they do about the subject I have chosen to explore. One of my favourite mediums is paper. I like it for its frailty, but also for its resistance and its ability to absorb and bend. This is a malleable and light material offering infinite possibilities and characteristics which are a good reflection of our own fragility, but also our human ability to adapt and the unlimited potential we carry.
Here, I wanted to work on the topic of lightness. The creamy colour of the paper conveyed the idea of bringing light while communicating a soft and peaceful feeling that could lead to a restful place. Punching the paper manually was a very literal way to physically bring lightness to the material itself – and hopefully to the content – while letting the light pass through, creating airy and delicate laces. Working at a slow pace also plays a crucial role here – it would have been senseless to use a fast-paced process as resilience cannot be built at the click of a finger. Being resilient takes time. Sometimes we even need a lifetime to achieve such a goal. I definitely had to take this into account when producing this series.
The process of dissecting stories also reflects on the way we process memories; sometimes focusing on details, sometimes forgetting others, we all sort our memories to recompose our own truth. Acceptance to let go of certain aspects of what we have been through is the price for resilience. From the scale of nation, to one of a single human being, we recreate a subjective reality to serve different goals. From that perspective, our memory process can even become a political matter.
What has been your experience of working in SEA as someone who is not from the region?
Overall it has been a tremendous experience. Singapore is a place that has a lot to offer. It is a chance to be in close contact with so many cultures in such a small territory. It makes it a wonderful observatory to challenge my own experience. Southeast Asia, in general, is a very creative place offering exciting art scenes such as Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore among others.
At the same time it is not always easy to be the outsider here. Being a Westerner in the East, especially in a country with a colonial past, is not always comfortable. It challenges very much our collective history which is understandably very complex. Whether you like it or not, you soon have to realise that you carry with you what your origins convey, even if it has nothing to do with your own personal history. This is something you need to navigate. But for someone who is fascinated by the influence of displacement in the way we construct/deconstruct our identity, forced to negotiate constantly with our individual and collective memories, it is a wonderful source of inspiration.
Featuring the works of Hélène Le Chatelier, Lydia Janssen and Piers Bourke, ‘Itinerant Practices’ will run from 19 to 24 September 2023 at Cromwell Place in London.
INTERVIEW COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND PERUKE PROJECTS, SEPTEMBER 2023.
