Les filles de l'air - Marie-Blanche Rossi

Les filles de l'air is a spatial and interactive book that offers a unique reading experience, blending text, sound, images, and videos generated through movement. An introspective project, the artist recounts her immigration story, an apparent outcome of the imperceptible transmission of family ties. It unfolds through a fragmentary narrative, whose pieces form part of a larger whole, embodied by the exhibition’s central element: the book. Full comprehension of the story emerges through movement in space and is reassembled within the physical book through the combination of the various media employed.

At the origin of this meticulous exploration, initiated several months ago, lies the artist’s book of the same name—the project’s first iteration—in which the artist gathers scattered fragments of memory surfacing from her mind. The title refers to plants whose roots grow outside the soil.

A true quest for identity, Les filles de l'air observes an immigrant journey and the resulting loss of bearings, seeking to bring forth new possible understandings. Through its fragmented narration, the artist employs reminiscence as a process to represent the workings of memory, often irregular and incomplete. Now captured within the experience, these fragments of story bear witness to a partial and imperfect reconstruction of childhood memories, evoking lived and idealized sensations.

The resulting installation takes the form of a mental object which, through its structure and the media that compose it, evokes a state of reverie punctuated by brief moments of lucidity. Fixed on paper through text, these moments of clarity give way to the blur and dreamlike quality of images projected in video. In this way, Mari-Blanche Rossi hopes to offer the audience an opportunity to expand their imagination in response to the work, while also prompting reflection on their own existence.