Delphine Wibaux Works in Marseille, France wibaux.del@gmail.com

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Delphine Wibaux26 bd des dames13002 MarseilleMail : wibaux.del@gmail.com

RESIDENCIES

2019 - L’envers des pentes, Vallonpierre shelter, Valgaudemar2018 - Création en cours, transmission and creation residency with Atelier bbbbbMedicis, Corsica2016 - 2018 - Artist in residence (Marseille Municipal Art Studios), Todèl duo, eeeeePlace de Lorette, Marseille 2017 - Residency at the Rucka Arts Center, Cesis, Latvia2015 - Artist in residence, Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux 2014 - Foreign Voices, Todèl duo, Cadarcet

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2019 - Tbilisi Art Fair #2, Georgia oooo -Lumière habitée, Carte blanche to Jean-Christophe Bailly, Bains ,,,,,,,,,,,, kkkkkkkdouches, Marseillejjjjjjjjjjjk- Rêvez #3, Mémoires sauvées du vent, Collection Lambert, Avignon2018 - Territories / Variation, Atelier Medicis, Paris2017 - Inventors of Adventures, curated by Gaël Charbau, La Friche, Marseille k - Dissolving Space, Harvesting Light Traces, Todèl duo, installation and dddd performance, National Ballet of Marseille - Looking up at what seemed to be a void, Todèl duo, le CRIC, Nîmes 2016 - In your bag, le Terrible, Paris 2015 - Yes to all, Galerie Treize, Paris - Biennial of Young Artists, Mulhouse - 法国, Suzhou Art Center, China

EDUCATION

2014 - Master of Fine Arts, summa caum laude, E.S.A.D.M.M, Marseille2012 - Bachelor of Fine Arts, with distinction, E.S.A.D.M.M, Marseille

Tel : 0676590105Born : 01/03/1991Website : delphinewibaux.fr Research : 43n-54e.tumblr.com

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2018 - Tbilisi Art Fair #1, green house, Georgia - Invited artist, Art-o-rama Showroom, Marseille2017 - Lunar Absorptions, Diurnal Migrations / Laureate of the Galleries nnnnn Prize, Art-O-Rama Showroom, Marseille - Hot Spots, Todèl duo, Le papillon, Nîmes 2016 - Absorptions for a Vestige, Centre d’art Léger, Port de Bouc 2015 - Before Words, Todèl duo, Hors Les Murs Gallery, Marseille

SATELLITE AND COMPLEMENTARY PRACTICES

Duo work : http://todel.tumblr.com

WORKSHOPS2018 - Between White Gold and Sansouïre, Luma Foundation, Arles2015 - Cure on the field, Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-eaux

PUBLICATION2018 - Monograph about my work, Art-o-rama publishing

SEMINAR2019 -To see time coming, an invitation by Jean-Christophe Bailly that will speaks with Jean-Luc Nancy, Jeu de Paume, Paris

Born in 1991, Delphine Wibaux lives and works in Marseille. She graduated from the Marseille School of Fine Arts in 2014 and works both alone and as part of a duo known as Todèl. She delicately brings together images, sculptures, experimental sounds and stories which are intrinsically related. She works on «captations», recordings primarily made in nature, which open our senses to otherwise nearly invisible, inaudible occurrences. Her research lies at the rich and complex border between scientific, poetic and phenomenological approaches. These captations are meticulous attempts to relocate an image or sound captured from the landscape to areas that are in constant erosion. They suggest a way to establish a tenuous link between the infinity of the universe and the most mundane resources of the Earth.

Work in progress in the studioPorcelain, limestone

Song

Installation set up during a residency in Suzhou, China, 2015

Stone tablets from the Song Dynasty steeped in fresh porcelain clay. The ancient scripts, engraved in the first century AD, tell the story of the “sky, earth, people and city”. The reverse imprint translates the city’s traditions into ancient characters.

Imprinting of clay in the Confucius Temple, Suzhou

View of an installation at the Suzhou Art Center in ChinaTablet used to created this piece. Porcelain clay, iron

Imprint created at the Confucius Temple, 22 x 22 x 78 cm, 2015

Flexible witnesses 2014

Landscape fragments, signs of territories are brought out for those who who walk through the installation. Witness images of rigid human constructions or of more flexible growths : strata of moments are laid down on the stones. These fleeting moments are infused directly on stones or on ceramic skins whose shades bring the light temporarily out of phase - the transition from a season to the next.

Installation viewPorcelain clay, sandstone, limestone, pigments

Variable dimensions2014

Installation viewPorcelain clay, sandstone, limestone, pigmentsVariable dimensions2014

Installation view at J1 Museum, MarseilleDetail, people reading in my installation

Esmaphorasễma phóros Sign that carries

Installation for Art-o-rama 2018, guest artist

March 2018 - I settled down in Ile-Rousse for a few months. From the island’s semaphore, I heard towards different observation posts, communication channels and recording areas from landscape, human activites and landscape measurements. My discoveries result in writings, images and meeting with one of eyes of the land, « guardian of a sentry room».*

The horizon is turned upside down, the sky shifts. For this exhibition at J1, what I propose is a watchroom where the local landscape echoes these island captations, day after day, sometimes laid fresh and alive on paper, sometimes anchored in procelain.

* name he calls himself

Installation view at J1 Museum, MarseilleDetail, people reading in my installation Installation views and details

Porcelain, writings, wood, Absorptions (vegetal alive pictures)

Plots of timeTbilisi Art Fair, Georgia, 2018

An exploration about space through fragments of memories disseminated into this botanical Garden. Absorptions on papier, Flexible witnesses on porcelain, made from picture collected during my last travels in Asia and Corsica.

Installation view in the botanical Garden, GeorgiaFlexible witness (stone from Corsica)2018

Flexible witness, Gres, pigments , stone2018

Solargraphs for a docile spring

Here : Installation in the studio, then set up in Michel Journiac gallery in Paris for the exhibition Mémoire de forme, curated by Petite surface collectif, 2019

On these images called “Solargraphs” we can discover luminous burn marks appeared after long exposures to the sun, between one day and eight months. The rhythm of the sun’s path is impregnated on the photosensitive paper. A peripheral vision of the sky, a displacing of the urban landscape and of natural elements.

Installation view

Solargraphs2019

Intermediate memory for eight skylightsInstallation proposed at Art-Cade gallery in Marseille for the exhibition Occupied Light, a collaboration with Ismaïl Bahri and Todèl curated by Jean-Christophe Bailly, 2019

The architecture of the place is metamorphosed for the exhibition. The skylights in the ceiling are made visible by obscuring the canopy. The dormers are completely open on the roof, permeable to the outside environment. When entering the corridor, a mirror suspended in the middle with a blue image, as appearing from inside the mirror attracts the eye and leads our attention to the ceiling. There, a succession of images are aligned, vertebral column of the place. Each image is a moment captured just after a fire that occurred a few years earlier in the pine forest of Marseille. These images, membranes permeable to the weather retract, swell, become volumes on their own rhythms, over the months, heat and rain. We walk in the place, perhaps in the basement of the forest or in a submarine.

With Ismaïl and Tom, we share space, so many gestures tempted towards the light, to make it come, to make it happen. «Light goes through us, we live in her» writes Jean Christophe Bailly. He continues: «The sum of what touches us, we call it nature,» said Novalis. It is therefore the «nature» that we listen to, but also as a filter, the city, forgetful, forgotten. And there, close by is La Plaine, with what happens there, with those who are prevented from passing. There too, grains, grains of scattered existence.»

Installation views and details : pictures at the top represent what is happening in the installation insidePictures at the bottom represent what is happening outside on the roof

Second halt, solar joltsPort de Bouc Art Center2018

The Todèl duo and Kevin Cardesa collaborated for this exhibition and created a common installation : the radio heliograph for solar filaments. This piece can be discovered in the duo’s portfolio. I also exhibited some of most recent personal research : Solar Witnesses, imprints of an expedition that took place in Guelma (Algeria) in 1905 in order to observe the temporary occultation of our Star. On the wall, some texts : weather reports and scientific observations of rare plants’ behaviour during the eclipse. On the ground, another Solar Witness, created from an engraving of a sunspot. This ceramic piece comes to life every day that is radiant enough, at around 2pm, when the sun illuminates and reveals it.

View of the mirror that reflects light downCeramic piece on the ground, side and front viewPhoto credit: Julien Lamarre

View of the mirror that reflects light downCeramic piece on the ground, side and front viewPhoto credit: Julien Lamarre Photo credit : Julien Lamarre

Lunar absorption, installation for crescent moon2015 Exposure, absorption, revelation, transformation. Lunar phases that I observed are revealed on paper thanks to photosensitive plant juice harvested outside, which reacts to sunlight. The exposure of the papers to the sun gradually reveals details. This light is the only revealing, and then transforming, factor. Plant juice isn’t still: absorptions will change with time, as they’re sensitive to atmosphere and exhibition contexts.

View of an installation of the Absorptions in an abandoned lime factory, detail of the lunar phasesSlacked lime, black base, photosensitive solution ch.155 x 63 x 21 cm 2015

View of an installation of the Absorptions in an abandoned lime factory, detail of the lunar phases.Slacked lime, black base, photosensitive solution ch.155 x 63 x 21 cm , 11 x 13 cm each picture2015

Detail of the AbsorptionsSunwear can be observed on the picture on the right.Once revealed, the upper part of the image has been covered from the sun during one month,whereas the bottom part was left totally exposed to the sun.Series of twelve phases.

Lunar Absorptions - diurnal migrations -Laureate of Art-o-rama showroom, 2017

I began in 2014 a serie while in residence at the Parc Saint-Léger, entitled «Lunar Absorptions». Using a telescope, I photographed the moon every night the sky was clear. The images, printed on tracing paper, revealed my «Absorptions», obtained through the light of the sun and the photosensitive emulsion I concocted from roots gathered in the park. Because no fixer is used, the photographs are carefully kept in a lightproof box. Since March 21 2017, spring Equinoxe, I have re-exposed my prints to light in her studio in Marseille, taking one image out of the box on the 21st of each month. The series displayed at Art-o-rama unveils the transformation of these images «eroded» by the sunlight. A text written in parallel with the process, somewhere between fiction and working note, accompanies the installation. The writing retraces the work of a chimera working on a construction that is exposed at night to the moon’s rays and protected during the day from the sun’s rays until one day it vanishes entirely, withered by the light of our star.

Detail of the AbsorptionsSunwear can be observed on the picture on the right.Once revealed, the upper part of the image has been covered from the sun during one month,whereas the bottom part was left totally exposed to the sun.Series of twelve phases.

Installation view in the Art-o-Rama showroom, MarseilleOn the wall : fresh MoonsOn the ground : worn Moons at restOn the base : short story2017

«Shadow Pouch, unit 11

I record from this shadow pouch. I turn it towards absorbent screens, on which involuntary images emerge. First, obscurity moves, progresses, raises a huge wave that comes back to me. I put it through a perceptual sieve. Speck by speck, upon contact, night consumes itself until dawn.»

Lunar absorptions, diurnal migrationsAbove : excerpt from the NovellaOn the ground : worn Moons at restOn the wall : fresh Moons2017

Lunar absorptions, diurnal migrationsOn the base : short storyOn the ground : worn Moons at restOn the wall : fresh Moons2017

Lunar Score, second variation2014

This installation in the Luminy forest prolongs the short story. It reintroduces elements from the story into physical space : leather pieces, clarified by moonlight every night, are here exposed to sunlight in a hanging frame.

Installation viewLeather, iron, moonlight absorbed during some months

Installation viewLeather, iron, moonlight absorbed during some months

Transformation of an Absorption with the left part burned by the Sunhttp://www.rucka.lv/en/in-septemberoctober-rucka-is-hosting-young-french-artist-delphine-wibaux/

- RECHERCHE-

3ème étape du projet Résidence à Cesis Lettonie, automne 2017Deux images vivantes réalisées sur place

Collective Study of living pictures : the Absorptions- Project connecting plants, light, memory and anthropology, 2016-2021 -

Participants observe/study the changes in the Absorption that I gave them in a creative perspective. This creative perspective can mean the use of words, sounds, performance, or other devices … but not photography, in order to look for an other media/language/writing.

The first two steps of the project took place in France, China and Portugal with participants with an artistic background. The third step took place during a residency in Latvia, with biologists. Step four happened in a residency in Corsica, in remote areas and with youths who aren’t connected with the art world.

The last step will take place in an arid area with isolated people or hermits. With each step, the artist moves a bit more away from the art world, in order to grasp other ways of doing and of thinking. This study can be seen as something between a survey and an enigma. It’s about the missing part, about erosion, about what we see. What changed within ourselves and around us, in several parts of the earth, in each brain, solar resources and temporalities of transformation. The sun has an impact both on us and on the Absorption. Exploring this passage, relationship, connexion.

Absorptions are made with local photosensitive vegetal emulsions revealed by the sun, then worn out by its light. Each Absorption represents the picture of the “place that makes the soul feel lighter” of the previous participant. I walk with every candidate to his/her chosen place when this place is reachable.

At the end of the five steps, when each study will be done, when each Absorption will have become a pale yellow monochrome, I will collect the empty pictures and all the proposals, to prepare an exhibition project with these materials.

T e x t w r i t t e n b y J e a n - C h r i s t o p h e B a i l l y , 2 0 1 8

An art of slow and secret experiments, nocturnal for the most part, a fine science of depositions and extractions, a constantly maintained relationship with the nature and materiality of all that we can touch or see – that is how the work undertaken by Delphine Wibaux has appeared for several years now, a work that, given its scope, will endlessly draw on its own resources, like a series of experimental protocols renewing themselves repeatedly. At the root of this work, and perhaps already as a first summary, is a text written in 2013, Partition lunaire, in which the actions actually carried out by the artist are described as the gestures of a nocturnal quest with the characteristics of a fictional narrative – a sort of logbook that would move the reality of the studio towards the forest and the night, the narrator living inside a tree and only coming out between dusk and dawn. The fairy-tale dimension that permeates the entire text also irradiates the works, but the concern for the material qualification of the things and lights encountered is never abandoned. Moreover, it is the fairy-tale form or the fictionalisation that establishes the materiality and does it justice. The moon is the guarantor of this installation of the world and in the world: the enigmatic seal that haloes the actions is not a supplement, it is part of them, it underpins them.

“Shining by night with borrowed light, wandering round the earth” – that is how the moon comes in Parmenides’ poem (from the farthermost reaches of what makes us what we are) and that is how it illuminates Partition lunaire and the actions described in it. The light from elsewhere arrives here, where we gather it. It is not as strong as that of the sun, it does not burn, but it acts gently, palely, and it is this action that Wibaux examines and collects. For her, it is not a question of trapping, but of recording, of collecting traces. What is gathered in this way, is the way in which the light emitted by the moon affects a given surface. Here the production of these surfaces comes into play, that is, an entire alchemy of preparation, intended to make them photosensitive: sensitive to the pale light whose intermittences and rhythms are spread out over the twenty-nine nights of the lunar cycle. The means of obtaining these surfaces are varied and secret: mainly blends and decoctions of plants. With what they reveal about patient, attentive workmanship as well as with what results as an image, we are very close to the climate of the invention of photography, notably Hippolyte Bayard’s tests as collected in his notebooks. One might say that with her various recording experiments, Wibaux undertakes almost photographic work, but without camera or pinhole – this time, the camera is the continuous light performance of the universe. One could conceive of photography in general as the interposing of a surface in a flux, but this time the surface is in the open air and the exposure time is very long or, strictly speaking, there really is no exposure, only the action of time - and it is continuous. The universe infuses.

The image thus obtained - by exposing the surfaces to direct light – pertains to what the Greeks called acheiropoietic images, made without hands, and this method, which is that of reflections and shadows, is that of an evolution. The exposure time of the sensitive surfaces developed by Wibaux are not only long (several months sometimes), but the results are often not fixed so that there is a continuity between what appears and what fades: the still image is as if subject to a very slow cross dissolve (a transformation that is “slower than the passage of a cloud but quicker than the formation of a wrinkle”) that links it to its future – to its erasure. What comes is, at the same time, what goes. Wibaux speaks of “living images”: there is no longer an image, but a passage, a trail. The idea that an the image is a trail and, as such, a vestige; is where Wibaux’s experiments lead us, be it through the fictionalisations of Partition lunaire or through staging them in ever varying ways, in spaces that they transfigure. I say “experiments” and not “works” as what imposes itself is precisely something that does not impose itself and that functions rather like a suggestion – a pause. What we see, whether via surfaces or volumes, is the very opposite of what is framed, put on a plinth, fixed; these are chips, fragments, offcuts; and hence it is within networks that the ‘seen’ is presented, presents itself, in the present of an action that is continuous. Take the way twenty-nine pieces of leather are hung from threads and exposed to the night in the fairy-tale forest that the trees of Luminy become… Or the laying of fragments or shards on the ground - her Témoins souples, strips of images placed on rocks or potsherds, presented along with underwater archaeological fragments.

There is nothing gratuitous about this exchange between an artistic production and something found – what is at stake and is shown, demonstrated even, is the passage of time and it is the gestures through which this passage may be rendered present. We have our senses available, that’s no mean feat (and the Partition lunaire text can also be read as a detailed catalogue of our perceptual abilities), but the tools that Wibaux makes are like refiners of percept that augment and enrich our relationship with the perceptible. In their inventive technical diversity, they cover an expanse that goes from the oldest gestures (such as cooking and decoction) to the use of sophisticated methods from the natural sciences. The result of this broad range is a reinforced, refined, hypersensitive listening. The goal is not simply to obtain a superior quality of definition but, through it, to make our lives more real, more ‘lifelike’. In a world of widespread instrumentalisation, occupations such as the slow production of these spectral moonlight reflections, or the baking of pigment-soaked ceramic fragments to see how they evolve, are clearly escapes, ways out. And what we see are traces of these escapes, the living signs of this recourse restricted to the materiality of the phenomenal world.

This world is both that of an infinite dispersion of occurrences and that of ceaseless exchanges between the infinitesimal and the immense. Vibrations, trembling, projections, erasures and metamorphoses. The texture (of the material, of the light) is the vehicle of these movements, which are like the emotions of nature. Sometimes the evening light projects onto the walls the shadows of branches and leaves that the

wind lightly shakes, and every time it is like a slow-motion film whose hold is considerable… It is towards such phenomena that Wibaux turns, recreating them. For example, take the hanging piece of glass whose projected image trembles when trains pass (one of the pieces form the “resonance laboratory” installed in the Friche de la Belle de Mai in the context of a joint project with Tom Rider). In truth, as the attention paid to such a tiny movement demonstrates, these experiments and installations are heading towards a choreography of sorts: nothing well-ordered, of course, but a series of signs, an apprenticeship of a slow kinematics that we should perhaps learn to attune ourselves to – the time to see, to see coming, and to listen.

We remember the gesture Gilles Deleuze used to mime “to be on the lookout”, which was, according to him, the animal; Wibaux’s works make one think of such lively attentiveness, of such tense vivacity: to be on the lookout, to be attentive, to hear and make heard the tiniest folds, the tiniest unfoldings. I talk of animals and think of the alert thread – that is its name – by which certain garden spiders are connected to their webs and which alerts them to anything that could happen. The alarm, the attention to signs, to sudden movements, to discrepancies is also what comprised the life of the small animal in “The Burrow”, the short story by Kafka that it is impossible not to think about when reading Partition lunaire, the difference being that the recess of this underground world also becomes a sort of observatory in Wibaux’s narrative; in its case, the night sky constitutes the core (endless and bottomless) of the preoccupation. And this sky, towards which we all too rarely turn our heads, is not only up there, but among us. In frequenting Wibaux’s living images, one of the ideas that comes is that we are in truth already in the sky, immersed in the variation of its lights, exactly like plants are except that we have forgotten this. So, materiel evidence for the imaginary photosynthesis that is thus offered to us exists: the magnetic micrometeorites that Wibaux and Tom Rider gather - real celestial dust that, they remind us, we will walk on every three hundred steps, such is its abundance. The idea of A “perceptual sieve” generating falling dust through movements is here enriched by a celestial extension, and it is not by chance that the material of these grains was associated with the steps of a dancer in the “living installation” entitled Dissoudre le lieu, récolter quelques traces de lumière; nor is it by chance that this dancer, Yoshiko Tanigoshi, comes from a country, Japan, in which the awareness of the telluric is the most acute. The telluric, which may be considered the terrestrial activity par excellence, being a memory of the sky inscribed in the core of the Earth, mineral and sidereal combining in a prolix unity… As we can see, the associations rain down - like the dust. It is all just a matter of attentiveness and collection.

“The sum of that which touches us is called nature,” wrote Novalis at the beginning of The Novices of Sais. Everything indicates that we should return to this definition, and in order to do so we need precise and sensitive indicators and tools. Unburdened from the pathos of the ‘oeuvre’, with freedom and invention, Wibaux’s works are exactly this.

Delphine Wibaux - Summer 2019 -