In 2022, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, by Chantal Akerman (Brussels, 1950-Paris, 2015), was chosen as the best film of all time according to the canonical survey carried out by the Sight magazine
This last facet, the most unknown of his work, is now the subject of an intimate and beautiful exhibition at the Virreina, Encarar la imatge, which brings together seven video installations of the fifteen he signed throughout his life. "We have a permanent need to understand, because the world is becoming something very complicated, very hard, but I think we have to transform this demand and start allowing ourselves the fact of simply feeling. From this will come the reflection", points out Claire Atherton, the curator of the exhibition and Akerman's close collaborator for decades, both in the editing of his films and in the installations for museums.
"The human species is very mysterious, so is life, and art is the only place where we can respect the mystery", continues Atherton, who invites you to wander through the works without trying to decode them. "You have to live them. His works are vital, because they move us and take us to many places", he says. In the center he has placed a video installation from 2004 with a strange title, Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide (Walking by your shoelaces in an empty refrigerator). On a tulle screen are projected the words written in a diary by the filmmaker's grandmother, who died in Auschwitz with the rest of her family, from which only Akerman's mother was saved. "I am a woman!, therefore I cannot...", she writes in Polish at the age of 15. On the other side, Akerman and his mother talk about the newspaper, to which they both added their own words.
Akerman believed that movies that drag you in and make you forget even yourself are stealing your time. It is not what he wanted for his work, full of life, from the extraordinary everyday to the most painful aspects. We see her again, this time lying in bed, eating an apple in La Chambre (2012), made, like a good part of the works exhibited here, from the 1972 film of the same title.
"Chantal always sought to free herself from the linearity of the narrative, and the installations allowed her to do just that," says the director of La Virreina, Valentín Roma. She was convinced that everything about a world can never be explained, since there is no single truth, only experiences can be shared, and that idea led her to fragmentation.
An example is Je tu il elle, the installation, created in 2007 from a black and white film about the last moments of adolescence of a fluid young woman (herself) who is about to enter in adulthood.
Facing the image, which will be on the billboard until April 14, also includes one of the most celebrated works of Documenta 11, Une voix dans le désert, a large screen in the Arizona desert where he projected the end of documentary De l'autre côté, about the disappearance of migrants at the border, with different images depending on the side from which it was viewed, which faded with the arrival of daylight.
