Qhen Barbara Iweins decided, in 2017, to make an inventory of the objects concealed in her house in Uccle, in the suburbs of Brussels, “it was above all to take stock of [s]for life,” she said. “A neurotic collector, I had been aware of accumulating things compulsively since my adolescence. I realized this during my successive moves (eleven to date). Each time, the days of packing up everything I own felt like hell. The day after a divorce which led me to leave Amsterdam to return to my native country, I decided that I really had to confront this problem by scrutinizing, one by one, the objects that I have been carrying around since so many years”, explains the Belgian photographer.
Five years later, at the end of whole days (“it sometimes happened to me to devote to this task more than fifteen hours in a row”, she admits), the artist has finally completed this inventory. It can be summed up in one figure: 12,795. That is the number of objects that she has identified and photographed in the logic of a catalog raisonné. “Katalog” is also both the title of the exhibition* that she is presenting until September 25 at the Photosynthèses gallery as part of the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles and that of the book** that she is publishing at the Delpire & co editions, at the beginning of summer.
Inheritance
“It’s a bit crazy to think that a life can be summed up statistically, but that’s the way it is,” smiles this tall blonde born in 1974. She explains her approach candidly. “I thought at the start that this work would lead me to reflect on the phenomenon of overconsumption that strikes us all. At the end, I rather realize that I conducted a form of therapy, a bit like the one recommended by Marie Kondo in her books inviting us to tidy up our interior. »
The visual artist now thinks she has figured out the reason why she never wanted to throw anything away at home. “It is probably linked to a very old anxiety: that of becoming homeless one day. Unconsciously, it is as if this overabundance of objects played the role of a shield. I feel less deprived surrounded by all these things,” she admits, suddenly very serious. Her parents dreamed of her as a diplomat, and it was towards the theater that Barbara Iweins first turned, on leaving the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Communications (HIECS) and a year in the United States in the early 1990s. 2000.
READ ALSOThe (Belgian) aristocracy as you’ve never seen it before!
She began her film career with the organizing committee of the Brussels film festival, then, after getting married, moved to the Netherlands. It was there that she took up photography in 2008, making two series of portraits. The first, entitled “At the corner of my street”, immortalizes passers-by in his neighborhood. “Since I didn’t have a wide-angle lens yet and wanted to photograph people up close, I took two shots: one of the upper body (from the head to the waist), the other of the bottom (in showing only the legs). These images gave rise to a game where we had to find the photos that matched each other, ”she says.
The mystery of identity
Its second series responds to the same binary rhythm. Entitled “7AM-7PM”, it is made up of a set of portraits of strangers working in pairs: two shots taken twelve hours apart. “I wanted to delve into a simple question: are we really the same person in the morning and in the evening? she justifies. In view of the sometimes very different faces displayed, upon waking up and later in the day, his models… it is possible to doubt it.
READ ALSOThe five must-see photo exhibitions at the Rencontres d’Arles
In 2010, she will continue this exploration of the duality of identities by asking dozens of men and women to pose first from the front and then from the back for a set entitled “Recto/verso”. Two other series will follow where she will invite friends to be photographed taking their bath: naked for the “Bath” series or covered in soggy clothes that mold their shapes in an erotic way for the “Silk” set.New chapter
With the “Katalog” project, Barbara Iweins sets herself a new challenge: to create her self-portrait through the objects that accompany her on a daily basis. She had originally planned to ask the journalist Sophie Fontanel to open her dressing room for her to take inventory. She quickly gave it up, on the advice of Emmanuelle Kouchner, who accompanied her in this project. The photographer ended up turning the lens over to her own wardrobe, but also her library and, soon, her kitchen drawers. “I continued obsessively until I took a picture of each of the toys belonging to my three children: Julia, 16, June, 13 and Pieter, 11,” she breathes.
Staging and image, without filter or prior selection, all the things that fill his home allows him to revisit his personal history. Short biographical notes thus evoke a succession of memories as precise as they are decisive in his career: childhood images that suddenly spring up as nested in a fetish object, traumatic experiences of separation or mourning that are irremediably associated with others, preserved like relics.
Between Sophie Calle, Christophe Boltanski and Georges Perec
Barbara Iweins’ approach is irresistibly reminiscent of that of Sophie Calle, but also of Christian Boltanski, two artists to whom she feels very close. His project is also part of a revisited form of “attempt to exhaust a place”, led by the writer Georges Perec. Which, in an article published in 1982 in the journal the human raceevoked the need to carry out this kind of assessment, at regular intervals of his life.
READ ALSOAt the Musée d’Orsay, the ghosts of Sophie Calle
This text, entitled “Penser/classer”, gives a better understanding of Perec’s work, but also probably of Barbara Iweins’ project. It reads thus: “There are in every enumeration two contradictory temptations; the first is to list everything, the second to forget something all the same; the first would like to definitively close the question, the second leaves it open; between the exhaustive and the incomplete, the enumeration thus seems to me to be, before any thought (and before any classification), the very mark of this need to name and to unite without which the world (“life”) would remain without benchmarks: there are different things that are nevertheless somewhat the same; they can be assembled in series within which it will be possible to distinguish them. There’s something exhilarating and terrifying all at once about the idea that nothing in the world is unique enough to not fit into a list. »
READ ALSORencontres d’Arles – Women in the breach
Note that Barbara Iweins is not content to list the objects of her house. It has also undertaken to sort them very rigorously (by size, by color, by origin, by frequency of use, etc.). The database thus created allows it to make unexpected comparisons. A way to put order in his existence, as in ours. So much do we identify with it. Vertigo of taxonomy!
*Exhibition at the Photosynthesis galleryuntil September 25, from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Address: 12, rue de Vernon (Arles).
**Catalogtexts and photos by Barbara Iweins, Delpire & co editions, 368 pages, €42.