Wunderkammer: Clara Thomine

Every week, AGENDA goes in search of the sound & vision of Brussels. This week we play dead leaves falling with the wondrous Clara Thomine.

Hush now… This is it. Tread very lightly, and don’t make a sound. This is where you catch a landscape painter in the act. While you make pictures, the guide’s voice whispers: “He reproduces reality. Capturing a slice of it, just like that. To put it in his kitchen, for example. Or something like that. You see? He captures the real life that surrounds him, in order to use it as he wishes.”

No, you’re not witnessing the birth of a work of art – or you are, just not the way you think. Clara Thomine’s video La vraie vie – which is part of her first solo show “you are lucky (like me)” at c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e – is a daft but oh so enticing, playful piece, showing the artist walking through the spectacular, life-size scenery of Loxx Miniatur Welten in Berlin. The genius with the brush you had the pleasure of encountering, is a model, not about to finish his artwork any time soon. This isn’t real, and yet it is. Or it has become.

At first sight, Clara Thomine’s utterly delightful work (videos, objects, installations) treats the relationship between fiction and reality. At first sight, because however overpowering the interplay in that relationship might be, it leans on a set of binary codes that we use to help us get through the day. It is precisely that binary that art can help to break open. “I delegate an enormous amount to the present and to reality, I count on things as they are already. I cannot work on a blank page, I have nothing to say. To me, reality is like raw material. By literally integrating myself into it as a ‘character’, I manipulate that raw material. In doing that, am I producing a fiction or a different reality? Is it real or fake? I don’t think that really matters. I want to use that blurry boundary between fiction and reality – presuming it exists – to imagine and achieve other forms of thinking. What interests me is the ability seriously to disrupt and change reality through irony and antiphrasis… Perhaps I am mostly engaged in defining the framework more clearly. And that can often result in something new; the installation of a third level. You might consider what I do as adding subtitles, an offbeat commentary.”

A sincere insincerity
The lightness and humour with which Clara Thomine gives you the ambiguous feeling of being hoodwinked in broad daylight and at the same time gaining in the process; the way in which she uses improvisation to pave a natural, direct way through her complex, interrelated (meta-)stories – holding up a mirror and, like Alice, going further, through the looking glass –; and the disarming, sincere insincerity with which she creates her own paradigm, are all part of the captivating nature of her work. “I hope people don’t just watch my films. I want to elicit something, as well as emanate and stimulate energy. To have an impact on the present and on people. Everything I do in reality becomes real. In contrast to literature, for example, performative auto-fiction is not speculation or imagination, but genuine action. That creates a certain responsibility, because you gain something, you add something, but as a result there is also something that does not take place. Maybe that’s the thing: I want to empower people to act. You do that every day anyway. Everybody is an actor in the film of life. [Laughs] Maybe I will start a school, a movement, that sends people across the world to make films. To ultimately cover the whole planet.”

For the time being, however, Clara Thomine’s movement has only one single member and it is managed from Brussels, where she occupies part of the ground floor (with her desk and computer) and cellar (where she casts her plaster objects) of a town house in Elsene/Ixelles. “I moved here four years ago to start my Master’s in video, installation, and performance at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) and I am still here. I make quite a lot of work both when I am in residence and when I travel. Brussels is the perfect place to be based. I stay here so that I can leave from here.” It was only at the ERG that Clara Thomine started filming herself. Her training at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Nancy was “a technical Eldorado”. “I learned everything there, from software and moulding to video and silkscreens, etc. When I started at the ERG, there was nothing left. That emptiness was very fruitful in searching for what I really wanted. I was forced to specialise my work. The pragmatic approach here helped me to focus on my strengths. In France we often had to start with a difficulty, as though that would be revealing of something dark, deep down within us. But I am not a tortured artist, I am a joyful artist.”

[video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks96zyIAU5Q]

“Performance is synonymous with sincerity, hurting yourself, employing your body. What I do, is the opposite. I improvise to the camera, wearing my wig and princess costume, just chatting about what I am doing. I can only play – a slightly exaggerated version of – myself. My performance is closely aligned to the social game that we all play, shifting registers.”

Amazement and humour are two lines that characterise this game and lead straight to the heart of Clara Thomine’s work. “I am dyslexic, which means that I have no access to texts. Gradually I discovered that I understand things much better when I told stories about and tried to empathise with them. That gives me the impression that the power of fiction is very real to me. Empathy opens new ways of thinking. Humour also makes you transgress the boundaries of the possible: you can imagine how a falling leaf feels – it doesn’t hurt at all [laughs] – or, like at the expo, how animals look at our world. That opens perspectives. I am not a committed artist, I’m not defending any particular idea. It is more an attitude to things and to life in general. My commitment resides in a certain ethics of creation, a very sincere generosity.”

BOROUGH: Elsene/Ixelles
EXHIBITION: “you are lucky (like me)”: > 16/1, c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e, c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e.com
INFO: www.clarathomine.com