Sylvie Blocher

One of France's most outstanding multimedia artists, Sylvie Blocher produces video and film installation pieces which explore the concepts of otherness, representation and art's political responsibility. Sylvie Blocher's work encourages different ways of viewing and understanding the world. In 1995 the Pompidou Centre held a major exhibition of her work and she has since exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and at galleries in Canada and the USA. She has recently been part of the group show Heaven at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool.

Sylvie Blocher's work.

The CERN. They show us the way. The particle acceleration tunnel, which runs under the whole region, is like a poetic concept, all the more mysterious because the acceleration taking place in it is invisible. The real making the invisible... I imagine a tunnel linking our bodies together to accelerate our feelings... Come to think of it, bombs are accelerated particles, aren't they?

12 December 2000
Dear Grace
I've just found your message on my answering machine: 'Please send me as quickly as possible 400 words for the Signatures of the Invisible project'. The next message tells me that the artist Chen Zhen has died. The pain is enormous. The death of people I'm fond of reminds me how much I miss my mother. After her death I saw her everywhere. She would follow me about or sit down beside me hour after hour. Nobody could see her apart from me. I would talk to her, but she never talked back. I remember something that happened one night, just before dawn, when I was sleeping in her room at my grandparents' house. She was sitting beside me, and staring at me so hard that it woke me up. To control my feelings and deal with the pain of her silence, I suggested we watch the daybreak together. Through the window we saw the garden gradually appear, then the barn, then my grandmother attaching a bird she'd trapped during the night to the gate. Since her only child had died, she would diligently kill a bird every day.

That was the last time I saw her. All of a sudden, as she walked in front of the mirror, her face had become detached from her body, overlaid on mine, forming one and the same gaze with my flesh. And for a long, long time I became invisible to myself.

January 2001

I'm at the CERN. Physicists come in front of my camera. They tell me that smallness is infinitely beautiful. But silence isn't the invisible, the invisible isn't nothingness, nothingness isn't an inert matter, an inert matter isn't death, death isn't the invisible, and god isn't always in heaven...

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