08 Jun Stephanie Gervais
Residency Program November 2022
Stephanie investigates how her mother tongue –English– structures, contaminates and affects situated experiences and the possibility of exchange in an environment of artists from different parts of the world. English includes and excludes. Gervais experiences the corporality of one language or another, how they modulate the gestures and the closeness with which they are performed.
She had the idea of holding a strike in which she would not speak her language for a week, applying it not only to her day by day in Blanca but to all parts of her life (family, friends). She didn’t want to extend it to allow herself some time to connect with whom English is the only common language. The experience had a great impact on her work and she had incorporated it into her writing. This is an investigation that she wants to repeat on other occasions in different ways, and with a more extended time frame.
The two processes –painting and writing- affect each other in a way that she has yet to understand.
The pictorial work generated in Banca is the continuation of a project that she has been developing for the last two years. Both in her texts and in her painting, she seeks ways to reflect the fractures and transformations in collective, intimate and personal processes. The choice, on this occasion, of the small format made up of smaller parts, not only facilitates its subsequent transport, but also emphasises the content of the proposal.
Stephanie also finds a parallel between the stone that surrounds her in her current workspace – its unexpected flow and fragility – with the topic she is addressing.
