Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz will present their solo exhibition You Ask Me To Not Give Up Up Up at the Abbatiale de Bellelay, a heritage site 70km away from Basel. For this new project, designed specifically for the scale and extraordinary echo of the Baroque church, the artists launch a speaker, which spreads its sounds and lyrics from the steep slopes of a roller coaster.
For their exhibition You Ask Me To Not Give Up Up Up, the artist duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz created a vast installation in the shape of a roller coaster. The winding path followed by the wooden structure topped by steel rails skilfully plays with the obstacles posed by the site’s architecture, winding between the church’s columns, passing through a narrow door and rising to fly over the central alter. Its loops suspended in the air subtly trace a response to the vault and other features of the Baroque church. But plainly the roller coaster is meant to bring to mind not so much a sacred space as an amusement park. For these two artists this shape informs the content of their installation, where an adrenalin-driven mix of joy and fear evoke the afflictions of our time and their historical roots.
A loudspeaker mounted on a cart moves along the rails. It climbs laboriously uphill, hesitates for a moment at the top, and then plunges downward at a dizzying pace commanded by the force of gravity. These movements, with their abrupt turns and precipitous ups and downs, can’t help but recall recent political events. In their work, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz always feature, whether directly or more abstractly, people, voices and historical events that offer a counter-narrative to the current assault on our freedom to choose our gender, sexual orientation and life style. Their installation’s highs and lows in fact reflect the progress and setbacks along the path of this emancipatory vision, especially now with the rise far-right politics.
Tossed about by these turbulences, the loudspeaker broadcasts a sound work composed by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz in collaboration with the artist Colin Self. This partnership, which began last year during a residency at La Becque, in La Tour-de-Peilz, is typical of the duo’s practice, which most often involves working with queer performers. Colin Self’s voice makes the loudspeaker come alive, as if it were a person riding the roller coaster. The elegiac song fills the church’s solemn space with a sense of sadness and commemoration. The site’s powerful echoes multiply this singular voice and transforms it into a grand choir as many other voices merge, perhaps those of the people in the audience with their own surging emotions mingling with those of the past that haunt Bellelay. Swelling louder and louder with these persistent reverberations the song is transformed and takes on a life of its own, just as with every twist and turn the roller coaster car acquires a new kind of agency enabling it to deal with the vicissitudes of its path.
Far from sinking into the passive despair that often affects emancipatory movements after suffering defeats, this exhibition seeks to make us aware of history’s subtle upward spiral and the confidence that comes from the dauntless and irrepressible repetition of resistance. It also celebrates the pleasure of coming together and remaining together, of reliving the joy of speed and the thrills of crazy swerves and dizzying descents. This joy nourishes us and gives us superpowers so that we can act again and again, always ready to take a new turn.
