Hélène Lord

2008-2009

Cartographie du passage des heures (Mapping time)

Exhibitions

  • 2009Casa das onze Janelas, Belém-Pará, Brazil

During a residency in Bresil in 2008, I watched the flow of daily life in Belém, intrigued by the peculiarities of the community and wanting to follow its trajectories. Neither here nor there, between reality and fiction, I wished to map out the course of another existence, dwelling on the power of the gaze, on things that grab its attention, by which it is touched. Between the watchful eye and memory’s filters there slips recollections of images of things lying outside of us.* This sensory and emotional experience gave rise to a series of watercolour drawings in which the moods and colours of Belém emerged, along with those of the Island of Marajõ, rendering part of what I perceived and felt.

Cartographie du Passage des Heures (Mapping Time) is a mural installation whose mosaic assemblage presents fragments of a narrative itinerary in sixteen watercolour drawings and havaianas sandals (flip flops) made of paper.

*For a discussion of this, see Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls: Essays ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 ).