"The walls, the skin of the inhabitants of Montanou: even when torn, ripped, washed by the rain, hail, time, and the fading sun, the portraits have tough skin and the image, the dignity persists. Under the witness paper, behind the charcoal lines, words hide in the cracks, embedded, invisible to the naked eye, known only to you and us. We display you today for the last time. After almost two years, "Gallery" gently approaches its epilogue. Join us on July 1st at Parc Mathieu d'Agen, on the occasion of the North-East Neighborhood Festival, to take the time to reconnect and offer you the opportunity to compose and bind together the memory notebooks of this project."
Céline Garnavault and Rouge Hartley, June 2017
Excerpts from Jessica Hartley's logbook
November 2016 / "A little workshop break to recover from these three days of painting in the unstable November climate... I reconnect with the cheeks, noses, gazes of the inhabitants of Montanou, the texture of their skin in the charcoal, with this affection allowed only by long-term projects: the names, the trajectories, the buildings become familiar to us. They have entered our lives. We draw a bit of theirs. If we were anything other than creators, we would probably need to compartmentalize, draw a clear boundary. But we can remain vague, permeable, adjustable as we meet: the protocols of the beginnings seem far away. We are no longer in the system; we have entered the cycle."
September 2016 / "By spending a little time where I initially had only distant analyses, I learn that it is high time for me to finally make a shift. The public space (a bit like "the citizen act") has become this tank concept into which to pour abundantly the dominant broth. The tone seems to be: "if it is public, it belongs to no one, so do what you want with it." I long believed we were fighting against the predominance of advertising, the existing imagery, the poetic deficiency of the functional world, the commercial incentive. But that is no longer enough for me: it seems today that we must fight for, and gently, slide from public space to common space. For if there are places where it is the good of all and not that of anyone, it is indeed at the Grand Parc in Bordeaux, in Montanou in Agen, and probably elsewhere. And we do not do just anything with the good of all. We do not roll over "secular" cultural identities. We do not demand that some be invisible to others, and that some exist only in the realm of insult and violence. We try things and observe cautiously how these things are adopted. We unfold little by little. We insist gently, we repeat a gesture we hope is reparative. In short, I am searching, tentatively, around this idea of Mitoyens: these neighbors we are, with something in common."
1 day in Agen - February 9, 2015 / On the same day, I only jotted down a few notes. No immediate writing, I grasped nothing of the vivid, because the vivid was still formless. We decided, in advance and without certainties, on a gallery of portraits, collected over the course of encounters like a human calendar of a project we do not yet control. I wonder, however: are we mistaken? To say something about these few, is it really to say something about a neighborhood? What is a neighborhood? How to meet there? And above all, what to say about these encounters that is neither:
- a pathetic glorification intended to comfort the empathy of audiences without ties to the reality of a daily life - an intrusion with our words into their silence - a uniformization, nor a well-meaning singularization that would deny the social body - this banal reiteration: there is humanity in each one.-
I was counting on the passage of days to build the necessary panorama: yet, I still do not overlook the proposal. Something is troubling me: the taste for the political and for space. We have the time, the place. The only thing to invent is the manual, and the courage to take shape even with proposals doomed to failure.
The portrait proposal holds up, and holds me at heart: yet, I would like it to be only the premise, the function of contagion and necessary contact for the development of a more global, less intimate body, an arrangement of cells that could tell a bit about the rain on the roof of the social center, the yellow of the walls, the stacked apartments and the geographically intertwined destinies.
Another thought persists: why seek to say so much, when in the given context, doing is already immense. We must enter these buildings. "
