Stéphanie Brossard | Exhibition Coming Soon
Through her work, Stéphanie Brossard explores the pulses of the world. By imagining chaos as a positive drive from which new possibilities arise, the artist exposes situations mixing natural and supernatural disturbances.
Her work is exhibited at the Frac Réunion (2020), at La Collection Lambert in Avignon (2021/2022), in London at No.9 Cork Street - Frieze (2023) and at Lafayette Anticipations in the group show Coming Show.
She has also taken part in major group exhibitions: House of digital art; Port Louis (2023), Frac Île de France (2023), Lagos Biennial (2024).
In 2016, she was awarded the Prix Yvon Lambert for young artists. In 2019, she was a finalist in the Talents Contemporains competition organised by the Schneider Foundation and in 2021 she was awarded the Mondes Nouveaux programme with the Pays Tremblés collective.
Transcript
Hello, my name is Stéphanie Brossard. I'm originally from Réunion. I grew up there and arrived on the continent to study and since then I've lived between the Hexagon and the island.
I have different mediums. Let's just say that most of the time we're going to find installation, photography and video. What drives me most often is natural hazards. We're going to have cyclones, eruptions and earthquakes, all the natural phenomena that make the world move. That'll get me working and I'm going to use these phenomena to try to understand my environment as well as possible. For me, these are the keys to understand my past, present and future.
This artwork is called Intempéries. I like when people ask what it's made of, because all the time, when someone asks me for the details of this work, I write "internet connection". This work is part of a series that uses data to understand what's surrounding us. There's also a software created by an engineer I work with. It's a programme designed to track cyclonic activity around the world : if a data appears, then a system is created, the programme will show it, and the artwork will get started.
This bathtub, this sculpture, is quite important for me because, at the start, I needed a container. It was this bathtub, I needed a story around this object. During a walk on the beach with my mother and my sister, as I walked, I could see a lot of tiles in the sand, and I started taking one, two, three… I realised that this was going to be on my bathtub. I think these are coming from the heights of the island, from building sites, etc. Unfortunately, everything is thrown into the gully, the rains washed them into the sea and there's a kind of cycle there. I just got these tiles that have been weathered, by natural phenomena and the elements, and I reintegrate them into a form that is almost like a mosaic or puzzle.
For Intempéries, I was reading a book called Salvage the Bonesby by Jesmyn Ward ; it's the story of a little girl who lives in a family of men because her mother died, and we're going to follow their preparations for Katrina. The father actually sees the signs in nature, he looks up at the sky and smells the humidity, he feels the birds...a lot of signs. He's getting ready and preparing his family for the arrival of this cyclone. At some point, the girl said she remembered her mum filling the bathtub when the cyclones were arriving. I thought : “wow!”. I always thought it was something very special, personal. Well, it sounds silly but I'd never really thought about it, I used to see my mother doing it and thought it was only my Mum's gesture.
This series of artworks are sort of warning signs. It's a new way of warning the public on how our world moves and how often. Cyclones are in a different rhythm, less spectacular. There are bound to be some during the exhibition. But we can't say if there will be three, four or five during the season. I have absolutely no idea. I think the work is also about that : the unpredictable. I think that if I'm also interested in these phenomena, if there's a place where I'm willing to lose control is there, in front of these phenomena : they're stronger than me. I have a relationship with the supernatural that is very present and very important in my work. And I think this series of artworks is about that too. It uses the vocabulary of the cinema of horror. Taps that turn on by themselves, shaking tables… We're totally in it. I create the programmes, the protocol, I start the artwork, but once it's launched, we won't have any control over it.