Mémé

Sarah Vanhee is returning to the conventional stage, specifically an Italian-style theatre, with her new production, Mémé. In this instance, the artist has eschewed the open air, the prison, the living room of a flat, and the room where companies meet to discuss their strategies. These are just a few of the settings in which the Belgian artist, performer, and author has previously delivered interventions, lectures, films, and performances. These works exemplify a hybrid, interdisciplinary, and socially committed artistic conception.

A comparable strategy, albeit one that evinces a distinct mode of inventiveness (a dialogue with puppets), is articulated in Mémé. To achieve this, Vanhee has conducted an in-depth examination of her personal history, specifically focusing on the period when her two grandmothers were working and gainfully employed. One woman had seven children, while the other had nine. The women were devoted to the home and to the land they cultivated. Their exclusive focus on work was put at the service of others over the course of their long lives. In Vanhee's view, the subjects were bodies engaged in physical labour that rarely experienced pleasure, joy, or the realisation of their illusions. This is not a reflection of the period during which the Belgian artist, born in 1980, has lived. In the contemporary era, women are subjected to a distinct form of exploitation. The grandmothers, who existed on society’s periphery, had a life of their own, and it is to them that the Belgian artist is dedicating this exhibition.

Her scenography is simple. Alone on a stage populated by voices, Vanhee surrounds herself with objects, videos and puppets (ghosts, shadows and children) created in collaboration with the Mexican puppeteer Toztli Abril de Dios, who has created nearly 80 figures, and sounds provoked by Ibelisse Guardia Ferraguti.

These puppets - or rather, dolls - do not speak. Only Vanhee does. Through her, she gives them back the word that she shares with the words of the artist. The muteness of Vanhee's own family is also alluded to by this muteness. “They are the story of my family's silences, which are those of the landscape of my childhood in Flanders," says the artist. That silent childhood’s landscape, from which she draws her own memories and those of conversations with her parents, refers to the landscape of that Belgian agricultural region, a crossroads of cultures, often the product of the passing of wars, where the horizon "seems to be crossed by a silence full of wandering ghosts".

By juxtaposing a vanished time, which comes to the present with the force of Vanhee's words, and the contemporary testimony of the artist herself as a woman, Mémé illuminates two eras and points to the reflection of that femininity of the past in the women of today, in an ode that celebrates and transcends these intertwined lives.