Louisiane Confidential, Room 36
The hotel room also belongs to a vaudevillian imagination, a blend of licence and convenience: it is a world of one-night stands, after-work drinks and burning passions à la Annie Ernaux. In Hôtel Casanova, she describes her affair with P. in raw detail, evoking hair, body hair and semen – the physiological remnants of what remains tangled in the sheets after the lovers have left. It is this sort of detail—trivial, to say the least—that inspired Alix Marie to create a piece specifically for the room 36. In her practice, which blends sculpture and photography, Alix Marie shapes the image and pushes its formal boundaries; she does not treat it as a fixed material, but as a malleable clay with which she forms objects. It is an unusual box entitled Encore (a reference to More, the film by Barbet Schroeder whose Parisian scenes were shot in the bedroom) that she places on the bed, inviting the viewer to immerse themselves in the abstract lines of naked, hairy bodies. We do not know to whom they belong, these lines that form a singular, skin-like landscape. A friend, a lover? Someone the photographer knows intimately, that is for sure. “I like to see photography as a way of preserving my intimate relationships,” she confides. To embalm a body, one must fill it with substances that preserve it. A strange metaphor, but perhaps not so far removed from the process at work in the erotic drive that runs through life. Bodies unite and fill one another, then separate and transform into a memory that is all too often a flattened image on a phone. As one approaches the box, one notices that the light emanating from it changes in intensity with the rhythm of breathing and exudes something eminently carnal, alive. With this installation, Alix Marie confronts us with a strange fetish, a luminous object of desire, which hides nothing but reveals not everything.
Léo De Boisgisson, 2023
Text written for Room Service, 2023. Taking as its starting point a reflection on the diverse practices of contemporary photographic creation on the one hand, and the iconic setting of the Hotel La Louisiane on the other, PhotoSaintGermain invited around ten artists to take up residence in a hotel room for four days. Building on the creative energy that emanates from La Louisiane, known for its tradition of welcoming artists since the 1930s, the festival has presented, every year since 2022, an interweaving of several curatorial projects centred on the image and its use across performance, exhibition and publication.
