Hélène Bertin

Hélène Bertin (France, 1989) claims to have a “deliberately bastardized approach” as both artist and researcher. She lives in Cucuron (Vaucluse) and develops her practice by forging links and engaging in working adventures with passionate people, always activating the notion of otherness. Rejecting any disciplinary reading, she approaches gesture and material as strategies for bringing practices together. In her exhibitions, this interweaving of different object typologies and postures creates a collective narrative. In her books, she focuses on marginal personalities to convey parallel stories. For Hélène Bertin, the sensitive relationship between living and working is played out in cooperation between the “realms” of each individual. It was her encounter with the practice of artist Valentine Schlegel that forged this vision of art – to whom she dedicated a bio-monographic book in 2017, radically renewing the gaze on this artist.

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