*** In adherence to guidelines edicted by the Swiss national government and the Canton of Vaud, we will postpone our first “Derek Jarman: the Archives” event, which was scheduled for Wednesday, March 18. A new date will be announced soon. ***

 

La Becque | Artist Residency is pleased to invite you to the first of a series of evenings dedicated to Derek Jarman. “Derek Jarman: les archives” is conceived as an interlude between the first part of the Modern Nature project, which took place in September 2019, and the second chapter that is set to start in early June 2020.

Curated by Elias Carella, “Derek Jarman: les archives” offers a glimpse into the growing research and archive material that has been collected at La Becque around the work and life of Derek Jarman while developing site-specific artistic interventions revolving around a garden designed as an homage to the British artist and filmmaker’s Prospect Cottage. This first event in the series will include a talk by artist Camille Dumond, a screening of Jarman’s feature-length film “The Garden” (1990), and a presentation of Ian Wooldridge’s video Infamy Effeminacy (2018).

 

Published by Editions Clinamen, French Geneva-based Camille Dumond’s Derek Jarman and the “Filming, Not the Film” is the first booklet of a series titled Entretien pour un Film published this March. In her essay, Dumond writes letters to Jarman, narrating her first visit to Jarman’s cottage and garden on the southern coast of Kent. She then explores Jarman’s filmmaking process, focusing on the relationship between the cottage architecture serving as a background to Jarman’s “The Garden” (1990) and the film’s plot. Quoting Beatriz Colomina’s analysis of modernist architecture “Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture As Mass Media” (1994) and Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), Dumond asks vital questions about our relationship to space, gender and architecture, and considers the possibility of a house and garden as an actor/actress playing an active role in filmmaking.

 

Filmed at Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, “The Garden” delves into the intricacies of gay identity in the 20th century. The film questions Section 28, a homophobic law active in the UK from 1988 until its final repeal in 2003. Almost without dialogues, the movie features Jarman’s innovative use of image reprojection on 16mm films as well as collages or, as New York Times critic Janet Maslin once wrote, an “assemblage of turbulent images”. Besides, the movie expresses a strong desire to escape the public sphere, the media, and to find privacy. The movie ends up being a paste-up of baroque imagery, religious references, painting-like photography, in a psychedelic celebration of activism.

 

“Infamy Effeminacy” is a film by British, Zurich-based artist and writer, Ian Wooldridge. Shot in 1991 in a paisley textile factory, the main footage was edited into a collage with images formed by the ornamental textile design typical from this factory. Pornography footage, text and sound are then added and gradually shape, in the words of the artist, “the central figure of a wizard (…) formed within a stark psychedelic narrative”. Wooldridge reflects on Jarman’s film with confident editing that mixes home movie-style shots with found footage. Tying domestic and political narratives, the film relates to the economic difficulties and industrial struggle in the UK and Europe since the end of the 1980s. Shown for the first time, “Infamy Effeminacy” will be screened by the fireplace in the library, home to La Becque’s Jarman archive.

 

Photo credit: Dream, Dungeness 1989: Richard Heslop filming Jarman in bed circled by dervishes. Photograph: Derek Brown

Save the date! During the long weekend of June 5 to 7, we will launch the second part of our “Modern Nature” project: initiated with curator Elise Lammer and launched in summer 2019, the program pays tribute to the life and work of British filmmaker, artist and writer Derek Jarman through artistic interventions proposed by regional as well as international artists. It revolves around a garden conceived specifically for the project as an homage to Jarman’s celebrated Prospect Cottage.

 

In early June 2020, a new series of artists, both Swiss and international, residents at La Becque or specifically invited for the project, will add their contributions to this garden in constant evolution, and join previous participants Adrien Chevalley, Marie Griesmar, Julie Monot, Prem Sahib, Garette Nelson, Florence Peake, and Eve Stainton in our open-ended conversation with Derek Jarman.

 

Stay tuned for more details!

Photo credit: Julien Gremaud (2019)