Le Geste exilé
Pascale Houbin
Mediator - Eric Foucault, Eternal Network
Supporters - Fondation de France ; Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso ; Ville de Rennes
Rennes, Ille-et-Vilaine, France, En cours
The context
The aim of the Travesías association is to establish, from Brittany, an international network for the reception of creation and exchanges for artists, theoreticians and writers.
Having gradually built up a network of long-standing immigrant women in Brittany, Travesías has been working since 2010 on the stories of some of them. Her intention is to create a work of art around the issue of transmission from grandmothers to their grandchildren. Some of them immigrated to Brittany in the 1960s and 1980s to follow their husbands, to escape political repression or by personal choice, and many of them are now grandmothers, cut off from their roots. Their children were raised in another culture. What can they pass on to their grandchildren as memories of their own childhood? Their situation also reflects what happened in Brittany: the break with the language that prevented Breton grandparents from communicating with their grandchildren.
Thinking that an artist would be able to bring out these memories, the patrons contacted Eternal Network, an accredited mediator of the Fondation de France for the New Patrons Action, to support them in their project. Eternal Network offered them the opportunity to work with choreographer Pascale Houbin, who, for the past twenty years, has put sign language at the heart of her approach, transforming the gesture beyond words.
The commission
Faced with the potential language barrier between elders and children, Pascale Houbin proposed to make a film on the transmission of gestures, vectors of cultures, traditions, know-how, but also simply of daily actions.
"The common thread of the project is in the moving body and more particularly in the hands, knowing that a movement like doing, re-producing, giving... is materialized in one's own hands. The Exiled Gesture will be a poetic testimony to this infinite unfolding of everyday gestures - gestures that, fully inhabited by adults, will be transmitted to children ; gestures that, rich in humanity, allow access to a relational space. " (Excerpt from Pascale Houbin's note of intent, October 2012)