How to live in circumscribed spaces? Le stade de la soif revolves around this question. This exhibition takes place as a follow up to an artist residency at Le Cube – independent art room.
Through a collaborative approach involving communities, and consisting of video processing, the project is a mixture of documentary and fiction. Régis Baudy depicts fishermen in industrial areas, activists fighting to preserve the memory of the French Resistance during the Second World War, as well as men wondering what the meaning of manhood is nowadays.
Like in the case of Harnes for example, the video in which the artist asks several natives of the city Nord-Pas de Calais to re-perform actions of resistance to the occupation in 1939-1945. With this act, Baudy foregrounds the manner in which this experience has pervaded their collective memory.
Also, in Fishing Melody, Régis Baudy explores the shores of Dunkirk and offers an immersion in the environment of fishermen that is both threatening and threatened. Fishing Melody evokes the disarray of men confronted with the disappearance of fishing grounds and a difficult socio-economic reality, in order to highlight the notion of survival that kneads their daily lives.
Another video presented in the exhibition, Untitled (Virility) betrays unconscious projections related to the notion of virility, which contemporary societies have reduced to the values of domination and conformity.
Last but not least, Le Stade de la soif presents a series of eponymous drawings, made by the artist as part of a residence at Le Cube- independent art room. Exhibited in exclusivity, this series ignites questionings related to social expectations and tensions through sport as a metaphor for supremacy and pressure.
Thus, each presented project in the exhibition Le stade de la soif is the expression of a suspension in time that could be akin to states of survival in an originally alienating human society.
In parallel with his residency and exhibition at Le Cube- independent art room, Régis Baudy present his projects and positions as part of a screening evening at 18, derb el ferrane in Marrakech.
Documentation
• Press release Régis Baudy
• Handout
Press
• “Fishing melody” in 50°Nord
• “V.I.R.I.L.I.T.Y. Expression of Ideology