VIDEO INSTALLATION

In STILL TOO SAD TO TELL YOU, ten screens invite you to an intimate experience where tears, as they are put on display, also beg to be collected. Faces may become stages and landscapes depending on whether your vision blurs, a tear forms, you break into tears or sob, you cry a river or a torrent, you wipe or share your tears, in silence, in gasps, in deep sighs, loud, short or long cries interspersed with words, whole or truncated, whether you suffocate or drown…

STILL TOO SAD TO TELL YOU is directly inspired by I am too sad to tell you (video self-portrait by artist Bas Jan Ader). As she pays homage to this almost five decades old motif, Anne-Cécile Vandalem takes it up in order to better displace the gaze and multiply the angles of approach. She proposes an immersive installation made up of several portraits—women, men and children, some actors, some not, famous or unknown—so many faces offered and tears shed—in order to question the anthropological (temporal, social and cultural) but also the plastic dimensions of the topic at hand: the pleasure of tears and their representation.

STILL TOO SAD TO TELL YOU is the counterpoint to SADNESSES, Das Fräulein (Kompanie)’s next production.

This small-scale installation locates the topic on a strictly individual level and unveils the aesthetic power of solitary lachrymal manifestations; in turn, SADNESSES explores this theme in a public setting in the middle of a community. In the former, the language of tears—a language that enacts the powerlessness of words and stipulates the difficulty of action—yields a semiology of sadness. In the latter, the artist exposes daily sadnesses precisely when language is tantamount to a weapon; explores the power relations at stake, but also the active transformational power of emotions.