Between historical research, personal narrative and critical reflection on commons, Gisèle Gonon presents a new large-scale textile- and sound installation in Uus Rada. Speculative Lands explores the appropriation and exploitation of land under influence of powerful economic players.
By this time of the year, my calendar moves on from the buienmaand, also referred to as the lentemaand, to the grasmaand. The old Germanic terminology of months is bound to the seasons. Each name softly fluctuates between its character and its consequences. March is when spring hits off (lente) which includes the necessary showers (buien). The outcome of those first rays of sun and the never-ending rainfall is that in April, the grass starts sprouting. The month of February however, carries the name of a human activity as a response to the present climate. Gleaning (sprokkelen) means to harvest what has been left on the fields.
The central material in the exhibition employs the practice of gleaning. For a year, Gisèle Gonon gathered a large number of used fabrics from European rural areas, above all Estonia and France. The pieces blend together as well as they carry distinctive traces of their past use. In a conceptually consistent manner, the artist sutures them together with material that is intrinsically connected to farming processes. Guided by cadastral maps of her mother’s farmland in the French rural region of Monts du Lyonnais, she opens up questions about tenure, appropriation, and exploitation of space.
Speculative Lands uses labour as a peculiar yet successful tool to resonate on a personal as well as collective level. I find a similar approach in the writing of Annie Ernaux, painting a sensitive portrait of her father in A Man’s Place. It is through describing his relation to work that we can truly see him as a person. As can I see my own father, a mechanic, through her narrative. In The Gleaners and I, Agnes Varda interviewed practitioners throughout rural and urban France. Her insistence on the personal narratives of each group managed to coin the notion of gleaning at large. The filmmaker’s starting point was an oil painting from 1857 by Jean-François Millet named Des glaneuses. Unlike Ernaux’ example, the movie’s original French title (Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse), as well as the painting’s subject are women. In Uus Rada, Gonon consciously focuses on the female lineage of her family in the framework of labour as well as ownership.
Millet’s painting caused controversy with its unconventional portrayal of the working class, glorifying the practice on farmlands at an immense scale. Gisèle Gonon creates her own leeway in the hard matter of data by elevating flat matter to a cave-like structure and inviting the visitor in. When land becomes a shelter, it can provide an escape route for ownership not to fall into traps of economically-driven power structures such as land grabbing. Instead, it becomes a setting and designated space for a multitude of narratives. Invitation replaces appropriation. We can see this in the use of material, combining fabrics from diverse contexts. But the patched land also houses distinct whispers, each relating to fields, land, as well as the forest-like environment of the gallery space by means of their own mother tongue.
The exhibition takes place at the edge of the city. It’s rather symbolic to address farming, labour, and production at its original place – on the fringe, slightly outside. Yet this is a building for sculptural practices. Most of the public monuments in Tallinn were produced at Raja street and later transported to the central areas. During Soviet times, artists were often assigned the highest floor in the buildings in Lasnamäe, providing an incredible view, like the one a farmer has of their fields. Still, both are kept at distance while in continuous dialog and exchange with their surroundings. Gonon pinpoints a resemblance between artistic practice and farming labour – not only through the practice of gleaning but also a conscious investigative position towards time, repetition, and material. Whereas the building is equipped with a monumental studio for stone or plaster, and wood-, welding-, and plastic rooms, the artist invites soft, flexible material in the gallery space, as a fluctuating proposal that opens up space for rethinking commons and exchange.
Laura De Jaeger, March 2024
Gisèle Gonon [she/her] is a visual artist based between Berlin and Tallinn. Her research focuses on labour, especially models of agricultural production from which she draws analogies to artistic production. Her practice is a polymorphous corpus, ranging from installation and drawing to sound and video. Land is central to her work as a tool of production, but also as a symbolic and emotional space to be surveyed, mapped, and probed. Growing up on a peasant farm, she combines autobiographical elements from a working class, queer perspective with social sciences and empirical experience. Her installations have been exhibited (amongst others) at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Galerie de l’IESA Paris, gr_und Berlin and she participated in residencies at Nida Art Colony (Lithuania), Factatory (Lyon) and at Kunstihoone (Tallinn).
Fabrics formerly used in and collected from farms and rural areas across Europe, threads, webbing, metal eyelets, agricultural blue twine, ring insulators.
Audio: Soundscape in different languages and durations.
Co-producer: Laura De Jaeger
Graphic Design: Typokompanii (Andree Paat, Aimur Takk)
Photography: Joosep Kivimäe
The artist warmly thanks Denise Gonon, Mara Kirchberg, Laura De Jaeger, Cathy Douvre, Marion Orfila, Ats Kruusing, Sandra Ernits, Solveig Lill, Sarah Noonan, everyone who took part in the fabric harvesting, the Estonian Academy of Arts, EKKM and Uus Rada.
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the Stiftung Kunstfond.
Uus Rada is a community artist-run space located in a building designated to sculpture in Raja street, Tallinn, Estonia
Title: Speculative Lands
Open: 10.04.-20.04.2024
Uus Rada gallery, Raja 11a, Tallinn.
Tuesday – Sunday 14:00 – 18:00 or by appointment
www.giselegonon.net [1]