{"id":9033,"date":"2021-02-22T14:00:12","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T13:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artinterview.com\/interviews\/evi-keller\/"},"modified":"2021-03-20T10:34:23","modified_gmt":"2021-03-20T09:34:23","slug":"evi-keller","status":"publish","type":"interview","link":"https:\/\/artinterview.com\/en\/interviews\/evi-keller\/","title":{"rendered":"Evi Keller"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Fanny Revault<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Like the goddess Persephone, Demeter\u2019s daughter, who had to go through darkness to be reborn in the Spring light, Evi Keller reconnects with the buried memory of materials to lead her work towards light. Mati\u00e8re-Lumi\u00e8re<\/em> is the only title she gives to her work, that unfolds in various media: sculpture, painting, photography, video, sound, and performance. Like an alchemist, the artist transmutes and sublimates a vibrant material and engraves a spiritual dimension into it, thereby creating an embodied, immediate relationship with and to her work that surrounds us like a living skin. From then on, her work, the very place of epiphanic apparitions, opens us up to an “other” dimension and connects us to a “living cosmos,” to use the phrase of anthropologist Edgar Morin. Her process subtly puts into play body and spirit in an echo of the perpetually moving world…<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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You started your artistic career with photography. How did it influence your creative work?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Learning about photography was very important for my development. From the age of thirteen on I \u00a0started to look at the world through the glass of this little box. I learned to capture and embody light on a very thin layer. This practice not only taught me a certain technical mastery, inasmuch as the verb “to photograph” means “to draw with light,” but it also and above all nourished me, and catalyzed in me an acute sensitivity to the manifestation of light on all scales… in its physical and spiritual dimensions. To truly encounter light, it had to develop within me in its entirety. I think Mati\u00e8re-Lumi\u00e8re<\/em> would not exist in its current form if I had not been taught photography.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

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Was there any particular photographic experience that was formative for you?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

My contact, over many years, with transforming, frozen lakes that I photographed was a key experience for me. It is a magical transition of matter, when water goes from liquid to solid, from solid to liquid, from liquid to ether, and makes a majestic world appear in the reflecting light. Feeling deeply peaceful, I sensed that the universe had placed within us, in a subtle form, the equivalent of everything we can find outside us, and that it was crucial to connect with these changes of the universal cycle on every level.<\/p>\n

The awareness of this transformation process that resonates deeply within us took root in me and guided me naturally towards creating \u201cMati\u00e8re<\/em>-L<\/em>umi\u00e8re<\/em>.\u201d The photographic series and the video Towards the Light – Silent Transformations<\/em> both testify to this quasi-mystical revelation. They form the matrix and the true cradle of my work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

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What are the other links between photography and Mati\u00e8re-Lumi\u00e8re<\/em>?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I\u2019d like to start by saying that the Mati\u00e8re-Lumi\u00e8re<\/em> works do not always have a direct link with photography or video. However, no matter what the work is, I can always compare the Mati\u00e8re-Lumi\u00e8re<\/em> phenomenon to the lamination of photographic film, which is similar to the superimposition of translucent layers of veils, and to that of photographic shots of my audiovisual works, as in the video Towards the Light – Silent Transformations.<\/em><\/p>\n

The experience of the image appearing on the silver print after its \u201cencounter\u201d with light manifests itself in the creative process, or in the ritual of developing negative films. In order for the encounter \u00a0between matter and light to materialize and breathe on this thin, almost immaterial and transparent layer, it was necessary to be very careful, and ensure that the alchemical liquid be cradled in a gentle and regular movement, in a well-defined space-time and temperature.<\/p>\n

In fact, this way of dealing with light can be found in all my works. It is indeed what happened in the 2019 Nuit Blanche performance, where light co-created apparitions interacting with the work and with audience members, as well as in my recent work, a new cycle entitled St\u00e8les (Stelae)<\/em>, the writing of fossilized light, of fossilized memory.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n