FROM ACT TO ACT
Brussels, April 2024
For her second solo show at the Brussels-based Sorry We’re Closed gallery, the French painter ANASTASIA BAY has created an opus in the form of an exhibition opera: Maestra Lacrymae. It's a world in which characters and referential paintings are hijacked from their eras and reappear, summoned into the present.
With this project, Bay has crossed the boundaries of painting by inviting the art of costume and musical composition to take part. While Lily Sato, Camille Lamy and Sara Daniel designed the costumes presented in the exhibition, artist and musician JOSEPH SCHIANO DI LOMBO gave shapes and souls to the five pictorial figures of this opera.
As part of the exhibition, the Bozar Museum in Brussels invited the artists to stage a sound performance on April 25. On this occasion, we spoke with the two artists about the origins of their collaboration, the construction of the opera from painting to sound, and the next steps in their ongoing partnership.
Anastasia, Joseph, this is the first time you worked together, what was the starting point of this collaboration?
Anastasia Bay: Since the beginning, the project Maestra Lacrymae has been imagined as a work combining several disciplines. First, we discussed the subject with friends and Emilie Pischedda proposed to put me in touch with Joseph. I think this creative meeting could only come from an external person who immediately observed similarities in our ways of working, sensitivities and common intentions.
Anastasia, you are an artist and you also have a collaborative practice with other artists, under the name Clovis XV. How has this transversality nourished your idea of moving towards a collaborative and dramaturgical form around your practice of painting?
AB: Clovis XV is an artistic collective that became an exhibition space, then a residence one. It has always been a hybrid form that pushed us to address issues related to the group and the collaborative, such as maintaining its own artistic identity within the collective, creating a link between artists with different practices while respecting the intentions of each, etc. We collaborated with writers to accompany the exhibitions with fictional and non-descriptive texts. We thought of the relationship between writing and visual art not as a simple description but as a dialogue, a real step aside that could allow viewers to perceive an extension of the exhibition from a dramaturgical angle.
Joseph, in the same way, you walk between crossed disciplines such as music, composition, draft and writing. How do you find balance in this tightrope-walking practice?
Joseph Schiano Di Lombo: What interests me more than balance is movement: the one guided by intuition and, even more, by envy. In the case of my practice, the balance moves systematically like this: if I make too much music, I want to draw, and so on. I often get inspiration in public transport: most of my poems are written in the subway or on trains, and the texts I wrote for this Opera with Anastasia have just followed the same protocol. Also, desire remains very important! It may not be the reason for every work, but I tend to believe I could hardly do anything vibrant without it.
Anastasia, Maestra Lacrymae is your second solo exhibition at the gallery Sorry We’re Closed. This time, you’ve invited many collaborators. This is a strong gesture, with an ecology of practice. What methodology did you adopt during the creation? Have you developed common protocol tools?
AB: At the very beginning, I looked to define what is called the “character” in classical dramaturgy. This aimed to specifically identify every character of this Opera, insisting more on their motivations than on their actions. I worked in a rhizomatic way, nourishing each character with iconographic references, extracts of texts and all kinds of documentation that can touch as closely as possible the psychology of the heroines. It created a solid foundation to build our exchanges. Very quickly, the 5 figures of this project were baptized with nicknames and specific behaviours. Once these were embodied, I think it was much more obvious for Joseph to make them sing, while respecting their intentions. The costumers Lily Sato, Sara Daniel, and Camille Lamy proposed materials and techniques to create costumes and Quentin Lamouroux thought about a font for each character.
JSDL: I first met Anastasia in her studio with Émilie, who fed creative exchanges throughout the whole process. I saw the great paintings that are now on the ground floor of the gallery and entered Anastasia’s pictural world. After that, communication based on words was an essential part of our collaboration. To put these characters into poems and music, I needed to meet them, to understand precisely what Anastasia wanted them to say. I requested Anastasia and Emilie to write texts close to ultrasound or ekphrasis. Thanks to this step, I’ve been able to better identify the characters of this Opera and to assign them words, stamps, and musical characters. Anastasia gave me great confidence.
What interested you in using this somewhat outdated form that is “opera”? What were the current challenges?
JSDL: Like painting and Alexandrine, opera is full of a big history that is hard to ignore. I tend to believe that it takes an equivalent amount of lightness and impertinence to approach such forms. I think it was initially the desire to create a stagework that encourages the deployment of solitary practices. Finally, what is most encouraging about opera is its propensity to open up forms, to encourage "sympoietic" initiatives (Donna Haraway, Living with Disorder). Opera can be considered insofar as it does not prevent itself from being something other than itself. In the composition, I tried to get away from it, for the simple reason that I don’t really like it. On the other hand, what excites me are the less noisy ancestors: the Orphic and Delphic hymns, the mysteries of the Middle Ages and the masquerade! These fantasies guided me in writing, also because my voice did not allow anything else, which has the advantage of having created songs that everyone can remember and sing very easily. I hope that this work of which we accompany the birth, whatever its final form, will lead us in its movement, gradually forgetting the category to which we wanted to relate it.
AB: Myth and opera are structures, frameworks that carry meanings, but the challenge is above all to re-appropriate them and make them something singular. From this point of view, I found it relevant to reverse the roles, when we know that painters throughout history have been invited to create the scenery for the stage. The 5 characters are part of recurring figures in my paintings: the harlequin, the crier, the broodstock. Developing them via different mediums also allowed me to understand what they had to transmit to us. Gathering collaborators around these characters became the force of this proposal, to give them shapes, volumes and sounds. All of that gives them an extra soul in some ways. Myth is an archetype, a passionate situation that can easily be invested by contemporary protagonists. In the same way, what interested me in opera is rather its immersive structure in which the senses are solicited simultaneously, creating this feeling of being invaded, not knowing where to look with the fear of missing something.
You both drew on the myths; Anastasia to give birth to the characters who would be incarnated in your pictorial work, Joseph to look for how these myths can be treated in music. What did this proofreading make you discover?
AB: As I said earlier, myths are inexhaustible sources as long as we can decontextualize them. They have marked the history of Western painting and I have always maintained a relationship with the representation of figures from these symbolic narratives, whether Greek, biblical or Hebrew. When I was still a student in Fine Arts, I already represented this figure of mud that was the Golem, which for me embodied the states that crossed me during the act of creation. It’s a good example because it was used again in Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus, and even recently in Poor Things. This figure is part of the constantly updated myths.
JSDL: What I discovered during this work is that myths are living beings, not just words on yellowed papers that stink in the attic, not just characters and scenes. If a myth changes, it breathes. From the Golem to the Arlequine, through Ephesus’ Artemis who makes his comeback, Dibutades who puts the points on the hiccups and Penelope who hacks the system: the lines that Anastasia moves plunge these stories into our time and, conversely, our time into the stories. We can wonder who changes first, is it us or is it the myths? In both cases, one certain thing is that myths are anything but mythos: if we can not help saying things, it’s necessary to admit that they say a lot about us.
How did this link between painting and music work fertilize your respective practices?
JSDL: What is paradoxical about this collaborative project is that it put me in front of myself, more than any other "solo" project. To get the job done, I had to run headlong. I wrote, composed and recorded the Opera in one month, alone in my living room. We talked about the project in January but I could really focus on it in early March. Time constraints prevented me from thinking about distributing the roles at this stage (while singing in my microphone, I felt that such words sounded bad, so I returned to the words to modify the text). In this emergency, I didn’t realize that for the very first time, I was at the same time singing, writing lyrics, recording my instruments with microphones and without adding any virtual instruments! I also think I have reached musical characters so far unfettered in my previous compositions: more violent, less linear, more energetic, less caressing than usual. Anastasia, in a sense and involuntarily, transformed me. I thank her for that!
There is obviously the emergence of political questions in this opera/exhibition. What aspects does it address and how does music, bringing a poetic distance, come to bind by a powerful sweetness, a form of sharing a reflection on a certain state of the world?
JSDL: It’s true that there is something flattering in the form that the texts and music have taken, while the characters are willingly monstrous, tearful and anti-heroic. While dialoguing with these invisible but visible figures, mute but singing, I also felt that I had more than ever the free field to visit the old forms, from Plainchant to Bransle of Burgundy and rhymed poetry. For me, going into the past is perhaps not "political" but it insists on something important: going to what has already been done is not only retrograde, as well as what is presented as an advance can actually represent a step backwards. I believe these oppositions run through this Opera. Curiously, these characters seem to be there to shake the world, without moving that much. The Opera doesn’t present an actual action, but an internal, contained, secret and revealed metamorphosis, from act to act, from character to character.
AB: There was already in the representation of the characters a soft resistance: a head can appear as cut but it is presented as standing in a hut of its immaculate strawberry, the Genitrice strips her bow but does not shoot, the elongated and exposed Golem figure evokes a soft version of the Gorgone. These characters are living beings in metamorphosis who overcome their passions with gentleness. The gentleness here is what Anne Dufourmentelle speaks of, it’s a powerful life force that accompanies a struggle against oppression. I think Joseph summed it up very well when he wrote: “Take me as a volcano that is capable of love.”
The sustained presence of writing in this project is rarely visible in the field of visual arts. Joseph wrote and composed all the songs, corresponding to each of the characters, which seems to bring out a form of language of its own. What is your relationship to writing and language?
AB: I started by writing prose texts that acted as scenarios for the characters. They were accompanied by drawings like storyboards. Then, I sent them to Joseph who re-interpreted them to create his own texts. It was important that I get rid of this part, that it becomes autonomous so it completely escapes me. I discovered his texts with great joy. From this moment, we shared the characters, they became multiple beings with their own contradictions. We argued about their behaviours, talking about them as relatives. It was very exciting because we saw them take shape little by little and assert themselves.
The link between writing and the visual field has existed for several centuries, especially between poets and painters. The two practices are autonomous but deal with common allegories, they enlight each other with different means and thus they strengthen and open breaches.
JSDL: Regarding writing, I opted for extremely framed forms, almost as heavy as the ones in opera. I wrote most of the poems before setting them to music, as soon as I had a space to think about it and the text had to kind of sing itself. There was music before the actual music somehow. Metric and rhyme induce a constraint, and constraints are needed so I can feel a certain freedom is coming. All the songs are rhymed, composed in septains, octet or alexandrines.
These five characters are currently inanimate, disembodied. They are beings of representations, a bit like the character of the Golem. Joseph, how do you plan to give them “body”?
JSDL: We could actually only evoke the future of these five figures. In a sense, the characters are already alive, vibrating in Anastasia’s painting. In the exhibition, the absence of bodies in the exhibited costumes is also a form of presence, reinforced by the curves of the ceramics. The question of distributing these roles is open! We already have small ideas in mind, but it would be a shame to spoil the surprise.
These characters are part of a history that pre-exists them, just as we are. Anastasia, you referred in this exhibition to Hebrew, Mediterranean and European mythologies. In your previous exhibition, you talked about the Orient. How do you look at history and what is your connection with it?
AB: I don’t know if it’s a professional deformation or a mental construction, but when an idea arises I first have paintings in mind. It comes before the words and by analogy, I walk from one work to another. When I imagined Arlequine, I immediately had in mind the painting by Caravaggio of Judith and Holofernes. I always end up towards the founding myths. Maestra Lacrymae presents the material of an opera in the making. It’s the “pilot episode” that presents the characters that will be developed later. I already imagine a future exhibition that would deal specifically with the decor, then each of the characters by developing their own characteristics through painting. What I like about this project is its complexity. It’s a project that is important to us to develop in the long term, also in other places than a gallery. The idea is to use the right support for each stage of the project. Obviously, the wish to be able to share the music pushes us to imagine a form of recording. We have ideas of performers in mind but we don’t want to say too much about it for now.
You cite the emblematic painting by James Ensor in the exhibition, The Entrance of Christ in Brussels, which is now in Los Angeles. This painting reveals a mixture of popular festivals and political demonstrations. What is the function of these pagan forms for you in a contemporary society that is so far removed from the modalities of gathering?
AB: It’s funny because I saw this painting more than a year ago at the Getty Center and I was just starting to work on the opera. As I was travelling, it was the right time for note-taking, putting ideas on paper and doing first sketches. This painting was a real shock. As soon as I entered the room, I could feel the crowd movements, the screams, the drums. More than referring to this painting, I wanted to refer to the immersive force it released. I immediately knew it would be the inspiration for the setting of the opera. There had to be this relationship between the set, audience and participants. I see this noise and crowd that links the characters together as the narrative pattern. Here is a sentence I wrote in my notes: “It’s not the demonstration that overflows, it’s the overflow that manifests.” The impertinence of the carnival, its archetypal characters, its games of masks and unveiling tell us about an ancient and ceremonial substrate of killing, purification and revolt.
JSDL: In music, these large gatherings and this voice of the collective are personified by the choir. Regarding this last one, we can wonder if it’s the voice of the last character, Arlequine, the great kaleidoscopic figure. It’s true that dancing, walking, shouting, crying, and singing together are something rare if we observe five minutes the way our society is built. Yet, it’s not dead. Collective gestures are flourishing everywhere, and we still see places where people from different generations meet. This is also why we can hope that operas will change.
Speaking of celebration, you are about to give a second visibility, as a second stage to your collaboration, with a concert & performance entitled La Fièvre Quinte, in Bozar in Brussels on the 25th of April at the Rotunda Bertouile, as part of James Ensor’s exhibition. Can you tell us more about it?
JSDL: With this concert, a new step will be taken. For the first time, the opera will try to detach itself from the sound piece towards a concertante form, passing from the gallery to the stage. I will be at the piano to propose a "reduction", which is an arrangement of the symphonic work towards a pianistic form. With the title La Fièvre Quinte, we tried to evoke the mercury that rises in the middle of crowds, Saturnalia and Saturday nights. Obviously, it will take place in a more institutional setting, under a large crystal chandelier - 100% opera! The fifth is also an interval of five notes, in echo with the five acts, characters, ceramics and costumes of Anastasia. The idea is to make sensitive the expressive ambitus of these characters and their transformations, although in a minimalist set-up.
AB: With this invitation from Bozar, we will already take a step forward from the representation. For this performance, the costumes will be worn in a parade that will take us from the gallery to the museum. Surrounded by an unruly and masked horde, the five costumes will appear as five giants of the Belgian carnivals, to finally join Joseph in the Rotunda Bertouille. Here, Joseph will propose a “reduction” of the opera alone at the piano, surrounded by spectators hidden behind paper masks, creating the illusion of a living painting.
How do you consider the continuation of this collaboration?
AB: I have the feeling that it will follow up on many proposals, such as a recording and performances. It will take a lot of work, but I hope we can one day get to a stage performance in a suitable place.
JSDL: Regarding music, I would like to make it a record. I want to take the time to do it because I’m convinced that it can take an even more complete form, to honour a meeting that has already been so fruitful! For the show, we will move forward together with Anastasia and everyone who is involved and wants to join this great and feverish party.
The performance La Fièvre Quinte will take place at Bozar in Brussels on the 25th of April at 9.30 pm
Maestra Lacrymae is on view at Sorry We’re Closed until 6th of July
Interview by Emilie Pischedda
All pictures by Sorry We’re Closed and HV Studio