A French Dispatch
A French Dispatch
Paris, Childhood and Erasmia Kadinopoulou’s Until Light Slaps for Flâneuse 2
🖼 Read Alycia Gaunt in conversation with Savannah Harris here 🖼
🍝 Read Gabrielle Sicam on Bukowski and Bourdain here🍝
⛰ Exhibition Views from Jumping Off a Mountain Sideways here ⛰
Recently, I spent a week in Paris. It treated me kindly. I went to galleries and rot in cafes and caught lots of good music. I met new faces and loved all of them. I ate hand-pulled noodles. I encountered Gauloises cigarettes with the same childish fervour that Bella Baxter had for pastel de nata. I watched the Euros in an English pub and cried with everyone else.
For six nights, I leaned into the individualist fantasy of doing things on my own time. I woke up late, ate and moved when I felt like it; I chipped away the slivers of social responsibility. I found that, when left with this time alone, I spent most of it reading. I escaped into After 8 Books for a good few hours. I nosed around other indies looking for a copy of Extraits du corps, by the favourite poet of an old hookup—this mission (and memory) was abandoned fairly quickly. Instead I held onto a yellowed copy of The North China Lover that I had found in a Croydon train station.
On my last night, I caught the 4K restoration of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas at Le Luoxor, cried again, and spent my last few hours walking around the area and breathing in the death of the day. It carried the same contemplative weight as The North China Lover. Both clothed themselves in plain-speak, carried the lilt of innocence around their narratives of ruination and muddy adolescences.
I felt more naive in this city than any other I had been alone in. I leaned a lot on looking clueless. One of my diary entries reads out of the mouth of Blanche DuBois: I have had to rely on a lot of kindness here. Childish joy gives way to childish detachment, and with it, childish loneliness. I wanted to go places to leave memories there, unload their weight. But I was looking for new heaviness, new connection. One night, I got locked out of my flat; it took three old neighbours, lots of gentle scolding, and a bottle of homemade lock lubricant to pry the door open. I left wanting coincidence to tie me down.
One afternoon I went to Petrine, in the 10th arrondissement, to see Erasmia Kadinopoulou’s Until Light Slaps. The exhibition worked around three wood-and-metal structures: the plexiglass pair Sunrise, Sunset and the standalone Birdhouse. The latter incorporated clocks into its interior, which could be perceived through the concentric magnifying glass. Alongside the structures were photographs of a room in Kadinopoulou’s family home; It’s the sun I seek, when it sets on the sea., a book of her cyanotypes and poetry; an accompanying text also written by the artist.
While clearly pulling from an established life, heightened by the deft and particular arrangement of the person living it, Until Light Slaps extends beyond the personal. This was what struck me most, how it worked nimbly with the external parameters of the narratives it had laid out. Light streaming in and off of the plexiglass, gallery goers stepping in with their own lives: these aspects worked with and were brought into the site. Though the works collectively articulated a transient sense of place, the space itself brought out a further metatextual aspect in line with Kadinopoulou’s exploration of change.
I thought, for a while after, about the untitled photographs, the dark wooden wardrobes of her family, the inflections of longtime use and of history. Again the concept of own time. As if there is only ever, solely, own time. From the glimpses we are allowed, mediated through sun and blue, we can make a suggestion of the shape of Kadinopoulou’s life. While looking through one of the glass eyes of the Birdhouse, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection contorting to get the right view. By the time the drips of narrative coalesce, until they slap, I realise that I have already entered a more collective history.
Image Credit:
Image 1: https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/erasmia-kadinopoulou-petrine-paris-2024/
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