EXO Mattresses
With the series Exo Mattresses (2014-2015), Iseult Labote focuses on the theme of the mattress.
These mattresses faithfully bear witness to a divide between an established, often happy, past and a drifting migration.
In 2016, Iseult Labote discovered by chance the Berlin exhibition “Metro Mattresses” by artist Ed Ruscha and was enthusiastic about the resonance of their respective research. They were both working on the same subject. But unlike Ed Ruscha, Iseult Labote does not focus on the dreamlike symbolism of the mattress. In her photographs, the neutrality of the mattress object is lost, allowing a glimpse of human activity. The experience of exile. The object, thus distorted, refers to the material and emotional reality of a fragile situation. The mattress is the trace of human occupation and displacement. It’s an intimate and personal object. It’s linked to the history of the person who occupies it. Moving a mattress from one place to another allows you to populate a space, to claim a space for yourself. It thus becomes a precious and indispensable object, a personal territory with ephemeral boundaries. It becomes your own boundary.
Cyrielle Vignacourt, art historian
« Je suis le saint, en prière sur la terrasse,
– comme les bêtes pacifiques paissent
jusqu’à la mer de Palestine. »
Arthur Rimbaud
There was a first biblical Exodus where an entire people was guided by a pillar of cloud, by day to indicate the route, and by night in the form of a pillar of fire to illuminate their path. This tribe could thus continue its march day and night in a tireless quest for the Promised Land.
Throughout human history, possession being an incurable part of the human being, men have never ceased to drive out other men, and the need to leave has never ceased to be a factor in the challenge of survival.
There are internal exiles where, for the sake of the soul’s survival, we displace into our moral intimacy what was most precious within us, to preserve the energy that flows through our veins and to reactivate ourselves again and again in place of the heart and its beating.
At a time when immigration has become a major global issue, also bringing to the surface even the most basic nationalist positions, Iseult Labote has paradoxically chosen to address the theme of exodus an eminently static, yet mobile, object that nonetheless perfectly signifies domesticity, however basic. An object that all women and men need for their basic daily comfort: the mattress, an essential device for the necessity of sleep.
An object found in highly differentiated versions, from the palace to the shack, and in its extreme version, in the presence of the cardboard flattened on the sidewalk by the migrant in his wanderings. The notion of exodus, it goes without saying, is linked to the idea of displacement and territory, Iseult Labote only keeps to signify and suggest it metaphorically the humility of a trace of rest finally gained, the remainder of a layer, a humble subject magnified here in photographic excellence, as if to encourage us to better see and feel the courage that certain exiles needed, sometimes defying suffering, deprivation and humiliation to finally gain a little rest, elementary peace and indispensable serenity.
Joseph-Charles Farine (Easter 2016)
