LA CHAMELLE BLANCHE

What if Ulysses, returning from his travels, had found only indecipherable shreds, shards, dark and shifting landscapes, splintered vestiges of his past? A disturbing disorder reigns all around, putting eyes and ears in a constant state of expectation, prisoners of these fragments of a reality so gripping, obtuse, impossible to avoid and yet misleading, fleeing and opaque. Viewers of The White She-camel then might then know what it means to be a stranger in the world. They would understand the weight of solitude, the tension of discovery, the desire to retrieve the past, a longing to find a livable place. Few things come to their aid. A truck disappears in the landscape like a ship in the sea. A woman in a flowered dress bathes in a sea of blood. A child watches us with stunned eyes. The carcass of a strange Soviet machine lies abandoned on the ground. In this work, Xavier Christiaens reinvents memory. It’s possible to return to the past in agitated leaps over ghostly visions, declaiming time like a song sung backwards.