Tag Archives: Alex

A good Story never started with a Glass of Milk

Episodes of the series  “Alex” by Pauline Bastard
Now online on forde.ch

 

A good Story never started with a Glass of Milk’ is a polyphonic exhibition based around the idea of the anecdote. Instead of works of art, this show will gather oral material through a serie of public live meetings with the artists. However, it will not be a question of « telling » or « describing » pieces instead of showing them, nor is it about art at all. Maybe it’s not exactly an exhibition, but since art has always been about telling stories, it still counts.The anecdote is an archaic that gathered people together around the fire, around a meal. Brief and exemplary, the anecdote is a story that comes after the fact, that interprets reality and delivers a meaning, a secret. A collection of sensations, affects, reflections, images, it punctuates the language of the philosopher who uses it to reveal the complexity of a thought; it is a « savoir-dire », a theory in action, a mnemonic. (Definition borrowed from Claire de Ribaupierre, Anecdotes, JRP 2007)

 

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Alex

Alex is a fictional character created by the artiste Pauline Bastard. With the help of an anthropologist, a lawyer, psychoanalyst, stylist, decorator and writer, Alex has been imagined and followed for more than a year in the process of integration in real life, faced with the construction of its social, administrative and emotional existence.

 

The exhibition design allows visitors to slip inside the character’s life: benches and cushions with printed objects, standard furniture and personal effects of Alex, the display evokes a domestic interior and allows to discover 6 videos of Alex‘s life, from its genesis to its “first steps”.

A casting to choose the right Alex, the meetings of professionals, the moments of the construction of a character without a past… we are attending to fragments of the beginning of an existence, a creative process, not an avatar, but a person made of flesh and bone who face up urban and social relations. The result is an experiment movie: neither fiction nor documentary, dozens of hours of film are evidence of the existence of Alex.

 

With this Project, Pauline Bastard raises a number of questions.

How to manipulate the creative form? How to manipulate the natural and the supernatural without falling into chaos?

Alex talks about the construction of identity, of our society. Who is Alex?

 

This project has been awarded by Audi Talent Award and had receive the support of CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques).

 

Pauline Bastard creates complex narratives developed through installations, films and sculptures containing and relating to her experiments. Through collaborations she questions the construction of the self and its place in the contemporary world.

Pauline Bastard creates stories, making them happen, using situations as matter and taking seemingly unrealizable experiences as material for production.