Nous deux (The two of us)

In Nous Deux (The two of us – 2007) ConiglioViola’s artists tell a sort of fairy-tail that project their own story out of time and reality. The project is composed by eleven photographies plus the video Le vent nous portera. The eleven images are linked each to other by an ideal tale in which the artists – through a complex work of digital body art – modify their own present images to represent themselves as two children.

Le vent nous portera

HDV video /  4’00’’ /  2007

The exhibition is composed by two section:

  1. Tunnel with steroscopies. A completely obscured tunnel. On the walls eleven luminescent couples of holes invite visitors to look inside. Here the whole collection of eleven images appear in a miniturized and three-dimensional version, thanks to the use of the ancient techinique of stereoscopy.
    At the end of the tunnel is projected the video Le vent nous portera, featuring the artists-children beyond the bars of a prison.
  2. Labyrinth with lightboxes

The prison – from which the two children dream to escape in the video – is a metaphor of the relationship between the artist and his work, that can give him eternal life but also immobilize his life. But the prison is also a metaphot of life itself, in its being determined, from which the art consent to escape to invent different possibilities. Nous Deux tells in an autobiographical and sometimes melancholic fairy tale, an attempt to escape from time and from reality but also escape from Art.

Martina: I don’t know how much faith you have. But in my view, what is arguably your most lyrical and atmospheric project touches on this very subject, being built around sharing as a narrative as well as being an autobiographical strategy… I’m talking about Nous Deux.
Brice:
Just a second though, to talk about this I have to go back to ConiglioViola, which sprang from an idea of mine, a need, and in the beginning it was almost like an anonymous creature crawling around the web, with no-one knowing who had given birth to it. At a certain point, however, I felt the desire to share this project with the person I was closest to. There was this obsession for the number two, which for me is a perfect and impossible number, as my astrologist told me. Well I wanted to go beyond the dream of “forever”.All artists tend to project themselves into the future, because their works inevitably outlive them. That wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to project my relationship, artistic or personal, it’s the same thing for me! Into the past too, so I could really say “forever”.
Nous Deux
is an imaginary autobiography. Mine and that of my then partner in crime. There are 11 images (because 1+1=2) telling the story of two naughty children, us two. They were created by manipulating current photographs, by means of what I describe as digital body art, that I used a year before in the video Romantici.
The eleven works were exhibited using a stereoscope, a very old technique that once again recalls the number two…
How many times, when we meet someone important at a certain point in our lives, do we wonder what would have happened if we had met somewhere else, at another time, in another era? This is the tragedy of being able to live only one existence, one thing at a time, something I have always been obsessed with (and I think it shows a bit in ConiglioViola). It is also the dialectics of possible worlds. This is what I use art for, to live the lives I haven’t lived, as well as escaping from my own. The heart of Nous Deux is an image, tender but brutal, of the two children in prison, which also appears in the video Le vent nous portera. Here prison is the metaphor for the determination of our existence, Bastille-like… and art is the hot air balloon/rabbit that the children dream of escaping on.
Martina: Brice, are we talking about you or about your work now?
Brice:
The point is that I have no interest in documenting something that’s in my head, there’s no point in that, what I want and hope to do is create worlds that can be shared.

from “Interview with Mr. Rabbit ” by Martina Corgnati
In “Sono un pirata / Sono un signore” ed. Silvana 2009

 

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