Elsewhere… Or Further Away

With the exhibition ailleurs... ou plus loin, the Frac Centre-Val de Loire continues its exploration of the notion of wandering. This eternal quest for oneself and others, the real world and dreams, leading to the same result of uncertainty, even illusion, but always close to a truth. Going elsewhere to find oneself. And others. Going somewhere else to escape monotony and routine. To live an experience that evades predictions and controls, without being measured by the distance travelled or the time spent. Because it's a journey through time and space, a quest for the self as well as a discovery of the other, the desire to be elsewhere, the pursuit of the far-off, act as transformative, initiatory processes that will give birth to a new world, so similar and yet so different from the one we left behind. We vacillate between the fear of no longer recognising our loved ones and the fear of having been forgotten by them. And then there's the memory of oneself. When we return, we are still young, the land we left behind has not seen us grow old, has kept nothing of our doubts, our loves or our tears. It only remembers our arrogant, mad youth, convinced that we were going to conquer the world. So how do you put your old carcass down? How do we put our old carcass down where there is no memory of us? The question is an abysmal one, and only works of art venture into these depths for us.

 

Has Elsewhere become too close or has it disappeared? We are busy trying to reach it and it laughs at us, fools that we are to believe that it is far away. But he is further away. Farther than hope, farther than freedom, farther than justice, farther than love, farther than living, farther than truth. But it seems, according to some, that further away is where a work of art resides. Elsewhere escapes as it reveals, it is flight and discovery. And only a few words, a few images, a few sounds or smells will enable us to grasp, in fragments, the experience of an elsewhere and to exorcise its loss and oblivion.