Ma femme, ma hache, mon couteau croche
Ann Guillaume
French Paris-based artist Ann Guillaume’s and Avatar’s paths meet in the fall of 2014. The daughter of archaeologists, she has developed a practice geared towards archaeology and all professions that look to “write history”. She usually works in a site-specific fashion, collaborating with historians or archeologists to question our outlook on the object, on the memory of things and on their legacies.
Spending a few weeks in Quebec City to develop her project, “Ma femme, ma hache, mon couteau croche” (My wife, my axe, my crooked knife), thanks to a CNAP (France) research grant, she is in our studio revisiting the bell pattern in her work. The bell is an object dear to the artist’s research. It announces, it calls, it gives notice. In the company of Simon Paradis-Dionne, she is exploring the appearance and disappearance of sound frequencies from the recording of a bell.
“Taking them as the starting points of a research and scripting process, Ann Guillaume wants to uncover the notions of appearance and disappearance of this object. The bell travels through history, through geographies. Its uses and representations change and it becomes a pretext to analyse how societies contemplate the articulation between the uses and the representations, between the past and the present.”
