Sabrina Soyer, at Parc Saint Léger for a residency from March to May 2014, was invited to propose an Extramural project in conjunction with the Loire Museum and the Collège René Cassin in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire.

Inside her work, Soyer uses writing, photography, three-dimensional work and video to create installations. Throughout her residency at Parc Saint Léger, Soyer produced a number of audio pieces, sorts of introspective monologs in which she attempts to describe and go back over the different spaces she has lived in and the books that have remained with her despite all the moves, “refuge books” that made the transition in the face of an endlessly “disrupted” present possible. Reading as a way of inhabiting the space of the book and taking over the space around it with a stable, horizontal (prone) presence is the starting point of Soyer’s practice. The piece of writing that has played a central role in her research during her residency is J.K. Huysmans’s Against the Grain. Inside this novel the narrator, Jean Des Esseintes, is himself an addictive reader, having chosen to live “at a remove” from the society of his day and age in order to devote himself to reading and arranging the décor that makes up his living environment.

Following the research and audio pieces she did at Pougues-les-Eaux (e.g., Parler à Pougues:   https://soundcloud.com/parler-pougues), the artist created a series of three vocal performances at the Loire Museum during which she contrasted her two practices, writing and the spoken word. These performances are akin to a kind of public psychoanalysis in which she tries to plunge her audience into a breathless state. For her show at Collège Cassin entitled “One realizes that this creation has no limit,” the artist intends to take over the school’s gallery, setting up an imposing architecture there to transform the space into the décor of a room.

Along with this project, the three troisième year classes (fourteen to fifteen year olds) of the Collège René Cassin took part in a workshop at the Loire Museum that focused on the notions of objects, words and personal space. An appreciation of the workshop will be on view at the school for the duration of the artist’s show.