Hélène Bertin

Hélène Bertin (France, 1989) claims a “deliberately bastardised approach”, which she deploys both as an artist and researcher. She lives in Cucuron (France) and develops her practice by forging bonds and engaging in working adventures with passionate people, always activating the notion of otherness.

Contrary to any disciplinary reading, she approaches gesture and matter as strategies for bringing practices together. In her exhibitions, this enmeshing of different types of objects and postures creates a collective narrative. In her books, she focuses on marginal personalities to transport the reader and convey parallel stories. For Hélène Bertin, the sensitive relationship to the facts of living and working is played out in the cooperation between the “kingdoms” of each person. It was her encounter with the practice of the artist Valentine Schlegel that forged this vision of art. She dedicated a bio-monographic book to the latter in 2017, radically renewing the conception of this artist.

At the French Academy in Rome, Hélène Bertin is developing a project devoted to the figure of the hunter-gatherer, around which three approaches are articulated: the collection of the gestures of the gatherers in the Roman countryside, the participant observation of the Tammurriata – a traditional dance of Campania – as an attempt to liberate the gesture, as well as her own collection of materials for future sculptures. While foraging may once have been associated with a way of life based on the harvesting of readily available natural resources, it now takes on an archaic, unconventional, anarchic dimension and constitutes a tenacious resistance to progress. Foraging can thus be a survival practice, a challenge, like the ultimate game.

 

Photo portrait © Daniele Molajoli
Video portrait © Laurent Perreau pour l’Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis