Zefiro Torna
solo exhibition
3 June 2017 - 2 September 2017
Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle

The exhibition developed through Vasiljeva’s extended stays in the port city of Brest, where the atmosphere of docks and maritime architecture gradually entered the installation.

Brest holds a particular resonance within the project, shaped in part by Vasiljeva’s own background—growing up in a port town as the daughter of a docker—and by her longstanding affinity with the writings and life of Jean Genet, whose literary landscapes often circle around ports and marginal geographies. The city’s position at the far western edge of France, together with its maritime culture and transient populations, lends it a slightly mythological tone, as if it existed somewhere between a harbour and an ending.

At Passerelle Vasiljeva constructs a scenographic stage environment, populated by paraphernalia belonging to a few archaic Querelle-like figures. The exhibition gathers half domestic, half imaginary objects, uncertain materials and fragments of theatrical debris.
These elements appear in a series of sculptures assembled from stainless steel, textiles, rubber ceramics, hand-made mirrors, wood and modified found objects — forming a layered field of references, that opens a dense network of associations.

To accompany the exhibition, Vasiljeva invited the educational department of Passerelle to participate in the development of the installation allowing additional gestures and contributions to enter the evolving environment..

photos by Aurélien Mole