[Summer 2021]

Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens
Querelle entre deux puces pour savoir à qui appartient le chien sur lequel elles vivent
Fondation Grantham pour l’art et l’environnement, Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham
27.09.2020 — 26.06.2021

Par Noémie Fortin

[Excerpt]
Presented at the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment, the exhibition Querelle entre deux puces pour savoir à qui appartient le chien sur lequel elles vivent presents works produced by Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens during a research residency in the summer of 2020. Preoccupied with bringing ideas into the visual realm, Ibghy and Lemmens are pursuing their collaborative practice with a series of works intended to materialize abstract notions regarding land ownership and territory. The corpus was developed through research, meetings, and discussions with scientists and farmers. With a combination of videos, installations, and photographs, the exhibition offers a sensitive, well-informed portrait of the use, contamination, and appropriation of land in rural areas.

The exhibition opens with the video Herber, désherber, presented on a screen placed on the floor. We see the hands and bare feet of a farmer kneeling to plant seeds and weed the beds. Her movements are repeated at a constant pace, following the cadence of manual labour inherent to the principles of organic agriculture. This juxtaposition of complementary but opposed actions – planting some seedlings and pulling out others – exposes the complexity of the actions needed to maintain human life and underlines the violence and care involved in using the soil for the purpose of nutrition…
Translated by Käthe Roth
 

See the magazine for the complete article and more images: Ciel variable 117 – SHIFTED