Itinéraires Fantômes in Mousse Magazine
“Itinéraires Fantômes” at Capc Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux
Rafael Moreno, Brain loops and technical survivors, 2023–24, “Itinéraires Fantômes” at Capc Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 2024. Courtesy: the artist and galerie Gaudel de Stampa, Paris. Photo: Arthur Péquin via Mousse Magazine
The exhibition “Phantom Itineraries” suggests that artworks are haunted. It begins with an intuition that certain are able to beckon ghosts to them (attraction), or that others have been haunted by the same ghost across different eras (transmission). The exhibition offers an inhabited experience, through a selection of artworks by artists preoccupied with this subject.
“Phantom Itineraries” developed from conversations among the curators Ana Iwataki and Marion Vasseur Raluy and the artist Alexandra Grant with and on the work of the writer and theorist Hélène Cixous. In one of their exchanges, Cixous pronounced herself a ghost, surrounded by ghosts. Her recent book, Mdeilmm (October 2022) considers Victor Hugo’s experience of automatic writing while channeling the spirit of William Shakespeare. From this interest and intuition around ghosts shared by Cixous and the curators came the invitation to fourteen artists to join these strange itineraries. The artists in the exhibition are not simply interested in ghosts as subjects but convoke them via their practices and varying methods.
The exhibition shares its title with a tarot deck conceived by Hélène Cixous and Alexandra Grant, published by X Artists’ Books. This deck structures the exhibition through its 72 cards that bring together archetypes, collective histories, personal accounts, artworks, and literary figures. The resulting tarot constitutes a cixousienne carto-choreography. In the way that tarot permits a reading of the future, these cards serve as a guide for visitors to seek out their own Phantom Itineraries through free association and movement. Entering the exhibition implies an agreement to follow an impossible-to-plot path, with intuition and intimacy as guides for finding traces of these ghosts.