Chambre (Room), 2012

Site-specific video installation. Two videos, video projector, television, bed, lamp, books and found objects, dimensions variable

Chambre reconstructs a bedroom inside a windowless exhibition space. An unmade bed, a bedside lamp, books and scattered objects establish an intimate domestic setting. On the wall, a video of a window overlooking a garden is projected in the position occupied by the actual window in my bedroom. Its soundtrack—distant conversations, children playing and ordinary outdoor sounds—introduces another space and another temporality into the enclosed room.

A television displays a text written without the letter L, using the lipogram as a formal constraint. The text evokes a person who has disappeared while repeatedly questioning how far intimacy and disclosure can go. Georges Perec’s La Disparition, placed among the books on the floor, makes the constraint visible within the installation itself. Produced in the context of mourning, Chambre brings together absence, memory and restraint through autonomous elements that coexist without merging into a single narrative. Its contrapuntal structure anticipates the later importance of parallel temporalities, spatial displacement and indirect forms of representation in my practice.

Installation view of Chambre, showing the reconstructed bedroom, the projected window and the television displaying the lipogrammatic text.