Céline Huyghebaert

Language is the main medium of Céline Huyghebaert’s art practice. In it, writing combines with visual and formal exploration, as artistic creation meshes with theoretical research. This leads her to an approach to text that takes into account factors like its interaction with the wall, the page, sound and space, as well as—depending on the format—the various time constraints inherent to its reception. All her projects revolve around the notions of unarchived documents, creation as collaboration, and literature.

Céline’s two main projects during Le Chantier were continuations of this research on writing as a medium. In the studio, she explored several digital and analogue techniques to make imprints of pages collected from various books, mainly using relief printing to reveal the negative space around text—as if the original page was a photograph, and the goffering an inverted trace that allowed for a different reading of its content.

The artist also conducted interviews with fellow residents that subverted the traditional format by focusing on the status of works that were still in the making. How can we discuss what has yet to become, or what will ultimately never be? What is the value of these works? What is the difference between success and failure when it comes to a work of art?

The aim of this project is to create acoustic texts in which the artist is transformed into a fictional character, and the residency itself into a fictional space.

Images : Camille Lamy & Céline Huyghebaert