Atlas, nébuleuses du Sphinx

This Atlas was first initiated in 2019 by a curatorial project at Vidéographe entitled “Questions adressées au Sphinx.” Surveying the Vidéographe collection, like an alley of Sphinxes, and guided by a perception of the visible apprehended as a mystery, this active commitment to documented wanderings gradually unfolded around open questions, fictional and existential concepts soliciting transdisciplinary encounters, leading to the choral project “Atlas, nébuleuses du Sphinx.”

“Atlas, nébuleuses du Sphinx” is structured around five distinct spaces of constellated images, five nebulae of images testing their attractions, around which satellite works gravitate. Islands of stars map an atlas of dialectical relationships in which different time-spaces meet. But also, polyglot and transdisciplinary discussions to which I have invited some timeless figures of the enigma, some artists of the dark and miraculous matter (ghosts and revenants, dead or alive…). Warburg, Benjamin, and Godard, among others, held my hand during this four-year journey, where one works in a telepathic relationship with another, and beyond the certainties of seeing, allowed us to sense the complexity of their relationships.

Faced with the uncertainty of this challenge, moved by the possible stakes of these dangerous liaisons, I invited the chimerical figure of the Sphinx into the age-old game of these fabulous enigmas.

In this setting in motion of bodies and thought, together we turned the mirror of specular and unsuspected oscillations.

Together, we composed this Atlas, nebulae of the Sphinx.

Straddling heterogeneous, multiple, and eccentric spaces and temporalities, we shook our contemporaneity.

Accompanied by communities of loners, we were the dazzled witnesses of transfigured nights.

Suzan Vachon