Raphaële Bezin
A room of one's own - Installation - 2016
présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 18
Installation
It’s a 20-square-meter film. Wearing a virtual reality headset, the spectator enters a small room full of furniture extracted from film decors.
There is no one here and yet the place is inhabited, as the walls, curtains and carpets all show. In the headphones is the continuous murmur of dwelling, and occasional sound events. A whole cosmos is contained in this space which is subtly transformed, unbeknownst to the spectator who, seated in the center of the room, does not walk around but can gaze in every direction. This calm place could be the “room of one’s own” that, for Virginia Woolf, was essential for all women who want to write. It is “a quiet room or a sound-proof room.” These intimate spaces are built around solitude and admit of no external interruptions. And if this virtual room is invisible to anyone not wearing the headset, they can still enter, cross or leave it.
Their presence uncovers a second décor intrinsically linked to the first. What the presence of the Other reveals breaks the power that sustained the fiction constructed up to that point by this room.
Raphaële Bezin
Raphaële Bezin was born in Paris in 1987. After a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France), she went to the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris Cergy where she obtained her DNSEP degree. There, she discovered the playback principal and shot a series of films reenacted from various audio recordings. This re-appropriation feature which is characteristic of her work is mainly applied to the field of cinema, sometimes conveying whole areas of it’s history. Her work has been presented in exhibitions on the themes of reuse and the confusion between reality and fiction, in venues such as the Palais de Tokyo, the MAC/VAL, Le BAL, the CAIRN Centre d’Art. She currently lives and works in Paris and Lille.
Remerciements
Thanks to Cyril Teste, Daniel Dobbels and Madeleine Van Doren for their advice, William Hazel, Homero Gonzalez and Benjamin Vedrenne for their work, Massimiliano Simbula Christopher Gregorio, Sébastien Cabour, Cyprien Quairiat William Libersat for their expertise and thanks to Andrés Padilla Domene and my parents for their constant support.
