Denay’s Critique
In the work Incremental Self: Les Corps Transparents, Emmanuelle Lainé uses furniture and objects taken from their normal context to capture the transitional states of her subjects. Lainé set up multiple screens and speakers to portray the successive layers of interaction that occurs in the everyday lives of her subjects. Lainé’s work seeks to explore the following question: “How [do we] find adequate theoretical and imaginary representations for our lived conditions and how [do we] experiment together with alternative forms of posthuman subjectivity?”
Lainé succeeded in representing the chaos and overlap of everyday life events. She used multiple screens–some separated and some combined–to play different scenes, which gave the audience an experience of being right in the middle of discretely intertwining human lives. She introduced multiple long pauses in her work, as well as bursts of ghostly whispers, both of which acted to induce uncertainty and anxiety in the audience. The random objects strategically scattered around the space, and having the screens hanging from chains above school tables were both confusing and unsettling, and thus achieved Lainé’s purpose.
Lainé did not succeed in exploring forms of posthuman subjectivity, at least in my opinion. The subjects’ stories were definitely interesting, such as the artist describing her intimate connection with her paint brush and the mechanic speaking of his profession as something he had been destined to do. But listening to these stories did not give me any enlightenment into different forms of posthuman subjectivity. These subjects just seemed to be describing their past, present, and future, and not much beyond that.
Ann-Chandler’s Critique
Emmanuelle Lainé’s work is strongly influenced by and perhaps even based on context. Her fascinating installations tend to be very site-specific, and her current exhibition at the Bétonsalon, Incremental Self: Les Corps Transparents, is no different. Site-specificity can be seen in many different aspects of the work, such as the positioning of the installation in the narrow, rectangle-shaped room, the way the installation interacts with the windows and walls, and the materials used.
Incremental Self: Les Corps Transparents was designed so that the screens showing the videos can only be viewed when the audience is standing against the back wall to face the windows and video screens. On the other hand, the scrolling textbox can only be observed from the opposite side of the room or by looking in through the windows from the outside. Because of this arrangement, the scrolling text and videos cannot be seen at the same time, and the text is the only visible element of the installation to viewers looking in the windows from the outside. This unusual arrangement succeeds in disorienting the viewer, for French-speaking viewers and non-French-speaking viewers alike. While the English transcription in the scrolling text box is disorienting for French-speakers, particularly if it is the only element of the installation that they see through the window, non-French-speakers are just as disoriented by the videos in French (which are not captioned). The English transcription displayed through the scrolling text box is not synchronized with the videos and cannot be viewed at the same time as the videos, and reading the scrambled written transcriptions in the brochure while trying to watch the videos is difficult and distracting. The placement of the installation in the room, of the elements within the installation, and the design of secondary materials (such as transcriptions) succeed in creating a disorienting experience for any viewer.
Personally, the most fascinating context-dependent element of this installation is the materials chosen, which are very industrial and site-specific on nearly every level. To begin with, the room itself in which Incremental Self: Les Corps Transparents is located is very industrial, with an unfinished concrete floor and exposed pipes and wires, so the chains and hard drafting tables used in the installation are very coherent with the space of the Bétonsalon. On a bigger scale, the Bétonsalon is located on the Université Paris Diderot’s campus, which was formerly a very large flour mill, and has maintained a very industrial feel since being converted to a university. Lainé’s installation reflects this industrial style of the Université Paris Diderot. Finally, on the largest scale, the neighborhood in which the Bétonsalon is located has a very industrial past, which is mirrored by the current architecture in the 13th arrondissement, so the materials used to create Incremental Self: Les Corps Transparents pay tribute to the history of the arrondissement where the installation takes place as well.
Incremental Self: Les Corps Transparents becomes much more interesting and unique when site-specificity is taken into account. Although I do not know exactly what will happen to this specific installation after the exhibition is over, I imagine that it will not be sold or transferred to another gallery or museum because it is so grounded in site-specificity. The arrangement, position, and materials used in this installation would lose their current purpose if they were rearranged in a new space. Lainé’s work discusses objects as an extension of the body, and it seems as though she also creates her installations with a similar theme: to be extensions of their contexts.