Théodora Barat : "Proving Ground/ Ground Zero" at the Espace Le Carré de Lille
A graduate in Fine Arts from Nantes and Le Fresnoy, Théodora Barat uses film, photography and installations to stage her projects. Beneficiary of the Étant Donnés programme, organised by the Institut français, the FACE Foundation and the Villa Albertine, her Proving Ground/Ground Zero installation is on display at the Espace Le Carré de Lille until 23 December.
Updated on 19/12/2023
5 min
Your creative work combines sculpture, video, installation and photography. What are your main sources of inspiration?
I am not sure I can answer the question because I don't really have any inspiration: my projects generally come from surveys and a great deal of preparation and research, but also from connecting different things. The results of this research and investigation are at the core, and then, little by little, I pull the threads together and become aware of connections that might exist. Art has always been there, it has simply been an extension of my life. One of the reasons I came to video was because I received a very cinematic education with a sense of the moving image. I still find it hard to stick to one medium because, for me, everyone will discover and attach themselves to a very specific sphere. I see this as a sort of revelation and I cannot say the same thing in video as I do in sculpture.
You are currently writing a doctoral thesis on the effects of nuclear research in the Four Corners region in the United States. How did you approach the subject?
My projects really come about through serendipity. For the exhibition "Learning from New Jersey", I met a veteran who talked about a nuclear accident in the 60s and contamination in the surrounding area. This led him to the discovery of an abandoned salt mine in Utah, while I began an extensive research project in which I discovered the part that Utah played during the Cold War and the contaminated land That was hidden from the public. I realised that it was not just Utah that was concerned, it was the whole Four Corners region, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, which form a square and have an industrial relationship with uranium, and also with the atomic bomb.
You are a laureate of the Résidences Étant Donnés programme, organised by the Institut français, the FACE Foundation and the Villa Albertine. The result of this residency, the Proving Ground/Ground Zero installation, is on display at the Espace Le Carré in Lille until 23 December. Could you present this project that echoes your doctoral research to us?
It is a creative research thesis, which leads to an artistic production, carried out with the Radian doctoral programme. It includes two films, photos and sculptures, it's a multifaceted project where a lot of things come together. The first film, Americium, is a feature length film that deals with the issue of environmental racism, nuclear colonialism and the propaganda described in museums, including the opposition of stories between actors and victims. In the first part, I film the museums, the areas representing nuclear power and the various sites of nuclear tourism, where we see these mechanisms at work in the promotion of the creation of the first nuclear bomb in the United States. In the second part, two women speak in front of the camera: they are "downwinders", people who have been through a radioactive cloud. They talk about cancer, from generation to generation. Because of the loss of family members, the question is not "will I get cancer?" but "when will I get cancer?". The fate of New Mexico's inhabitants has been re-evaluated with the release of Oppenheimer, but until now they had been completely ignored and did not benefit from the financial compensation programme. The short film, (Atomic) Four Corners, is more focused on how the desert was viewed, in a colonial fashion, as the ultimate test site. This film intersects all these experimental architectures, places where the fact that there are real people living nearby has been ignored and the way in which environments, fauna, flora and humans have been destroyed.
You previously talked about the USA in your 2018 exhibition "Learning from New Jersey". What attracts you to the country? Do you consider it a particular field of research and exploration?
I spent all of my summers in the USA until I was 17, so it is a very familiar terrain. It is part of my DNA, both visual and human, and I grew up with the vision of these landscapes, these scales. I don't want to have an exotic relationship with the US at all, more a relationship that I find highly intimate. For me, this country represents a place of research and investigation, of questioning modernist and capitalist ideology. It is a territory, a country, that tests this ideology without a safety net, without limits in a kind of capitalist experiment. Nevertheless, I do not exclude being interested in nuclear power in France one day as the basis for a project, but, in my opinion, the US is a kind of matrix of nuclear colonialism, which was then developed by the other nuclear nations. The United States carried out tests in indigenous, Native American areas, just as France later carried out its tests in Algeria and French Polynesia. There is a sense of declaration, that things that are starting to take shape that will be felt in Europe in the future. I feel a bit like the US is the spearhead of the Global North.
The transformation of the landscape through human activity and construction is a central element of your work. This concern is reflected in the work you have carried out at Villa Medici in Rome and in Hong Kong (with the film Off Power, 2021). What is the reason for this? What attracts you to urban environments?
I grew up in Seine-Saint-Denis and I have always felt the industrial pull of territory in my own body. Specifically, I think I am interested in the relationships of dominance that can be read, in the margins, in the landscape, in the territory, and how you see that one landscape is subordinated, exploited and used by another. For example, New Jersey is the engine room of New York, Seine-Saint-Denis is an industrial laboratory, Hong Kong is the same. I try to find a political reading of the landscape, to see what buildings, architecture and infrastructure stand for in political terms.
Do you have any new installation or research ideas that you are ready to share with us?
I am thinking about a new project in Chicago that will ask different questions around Enrico Fermi, the person who created the first nuclear reactor. This project is really about the pursuit of nuclear power having working on the nuclear bomb, when Enrico Fermi carried out the first chain reaction in 1942 that opened the doors to nuclear power, but also the possibility of a nuclear bomb. Around such questions, on the issues of sculpture, of historical representations, I want to see how sculpture, particularly the works by Henry Moore at the University of Chicago, can also be a political vector.
In 2022, Théodora Barat was laureate of the Etant donnés programme. Coordinated by Institut français-Paris, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and FACE Foundation, the Etant donnés programme supports projects of artistic cooperation between the United States and France.