Pauline Julier | A Single Universe

Is a cosmos a landscape without panorama? That is, a landscape without any possibility to reduce it to the encompassing view of a panorama? This intuition leads my reading of Pauline Julier’s artistic cosmos in the major retrospective of her works at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, A Single Universe (curated by Céline Eidenbelz). A single universe is the exact space we are in, not a space that we can encompass – for we should be placed in a further universe in order to encompass the former one. Pauline Julier’s artworks revolve around the truth of entanglement in any knowledge relationship, which is at the core of the reflections of contemporary science and anthropology. This is probably why science and anthropology are favourite companions of Julier’s artistic quest, which is composed of research, texts, documents and poetic creations in the form of moving images and sculptures.

I see the multi-mediality of her work from the point of view of film, a relevant medium for her, also in the exhibition in Aarau. This perspective allows seeing how Julier unfolds the elements of film along the path of the exhibition with a discourse that makes text, sound, light, three-dimensionality and images perceptible as such. It is an “open” discourse that exhibits its grammar, a discourse made of ellipses. Through moments of intensity and pauses, Julier builds a dramaturgy of sounds and lights that are equally entangled within the spaces of the Kunsthaus. The form of the exhibition thus allows us to experience the cracks in the universe; they speak for its singularity. Catastrophes and accidents – and relevant details or anecdotes – qualify the openness of our universe or, at least, of our relationship to it.

Thanks to the many collaborations, with both scientists and artists, A Single Universe defends a holistic credo through which themes as extractivism or the more-than-human perspective are explored in all their complexity, beyond easy moral divides between bad and good stances.

Together with Emilian Gür, we were able to meet Pauline Julier in her atelier in Geneva and discuss her exhibition with her, the themes of her art works, and her practice as filmmaker between cinema and the exhibition space.

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More on Pauline Julier’s films: La disparition des Aïtus, Way Beyond, Cercate Ortensia, Follow the Water