Lena Brudieux maps out discrepancies, tolerates noise but sometimes prefers silence to calm her disturbed sleep. Two meters from her bed, she is already abroad: allowing the contours of a universe to emerge where floating figures, temporary architectures, and gestures to heal the incurable unfold. Here, a single sign can combine several meanings, and bodies wander, adapt, and constrain themselves in order to survive. One wakes up “askew,” in an intermediate state where certain elements support each other—as if to prevent themselves from falling—and where others seem suspended in a semi-conscious state. For those who experience it differently, the night is not a time of rest, but “a fallow period, worked underground by mysterious forces that ferment in the dark and suddenly allow unexpected flowers to bloom in the light”(1). Lena Brudieux’s solo exhibition at Port des Créateurs is therefore conceived as an environment that reflects the infinite potentialities of this troubled in-between state. She explores the repercussions of urban oppression on sleep and questions how this tension is replayed in sleepwalking, which is at once a release valve, an act of resistance, and a space for emancipation from social norms. The whole work questions a little-known, quasi-parascientific interstitial zone, where studies related to sleep sometimes prove to be just as relevant as a form of mysticism of banality.

(1) Chloé Thomas, Parce que la nuit, Rivages, 2023. « une jachère, travaillée souterrainement par des forces mystérieuses qui fermentent dans le noir et qui, d’un coup, laissent percer au jour des fleurs inespérées »

Sarah Lolley