Talk around the book Flying Carpet by Anna Meschiari, published by Boabooks in Geneva, with the artist and publisher Izet Sheshivari.

Knitted fabric on a cover, a rhombus, circles, a white opening, alternating blank and full-page printed pages. Faces, profiles with black lines. Threads. Scores, all repeated over two pages out of four. Cut-out writings, cubes, plans, aeroplanes, lives. A grey background, a grid. An index locates Anna Meschiari's research at the Bob Calle documentation centre, at Carré d'Art - Musée d'art contemporain de Nîmes. The book accompanies an exhibition, and why not others? Anna Meschiari's projects are born of the intrinsic dialogue between image and text, and it is the floating aspect of visual content that interests her. Over a period of several weeks, the artist explored the documentary collection on the theme of the flying carpet, described by Michel Leiris in Fibrilles (La règle du jeu, III - 1966) as a "work table".

Sets of codes, images folded up, selected and cut out, revealing new traces on the pages. The conceptual idea that accompanies the work is a state of research, of sampling. Research into folds, uses and shapes. Its title takes us back to a utopian place of knowledge and a nomadic space. Rich in pictorial iconography throughout the ages, the flying carpet represents a vehicle for magical thought, symbolic as a world in itself, a space suspended outside the rest of the world, a kind of heterotopia according to the concept defined by Michel Foucault. Take visual notes, and put together a book to come back to, with references. The place of the archive is the book and its forms. Documents and reframed images lose their primary functions, recounting new ideas, a personal reading, making a work page after page.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Thursday 30 May at 18.00

In French

Free admission, no registration