Atlas de nostalgie — Group show

“Nostos” means return; nostalgia is the ache of return.

François Chalifour's writing practice serves as the common thread that unites the artists of the exhibition Atlas de nostalgie [Atlas of Nostalgia]. The three curators - Richard Gagnier, Jonathan Demers and François Chalifour - find themselves in both familiar and new territory. They have chosen to articulate the exhibition around a narrative geography subdivided into three spaces (topos) linked by the theme of nostalgia: the eternal return; the clues of nostalgia; the quest, the journey, the adventure.

Through its constant anticipation of return, Nostalgia contains the remedy for its ailment, the return itself, even if indefinitely deferred. Eternal return concerns everything related to the very essence of nostalgia: the place of origin coordinated with the time of absence. It's also about departures constantly postponed, crossings always thwarted, and arrivals long delayed. The island is a paradigm of this original topos: Ithaca, this arid, rough, isolated land, is for Ulysses a kingdom of gentleness and peace.

At first glance, nostalgia is a spatial, geographical concept. It implies the physical distance separating the wandering soul from its place of origin, the object of a persistent desire. Obvious figures of nostalgia would be exiles, emigrants and travellers.

Yet there is no distance without time. Physical distance implies the unfolding of time. And time gnaws, erodes and flattens. This is why clues to nostalgia are scattered like recurring symptoms* revealing a latent operative force. Seeing a ruin, for example, points unmistakably to the temple that precedes it.

The ruin serves merely as a conceptual model for nostalgia since it lies somewhere on the axis that separates the temple from its eventual ashes. Ruin can thus be the sign of definitive obliteration engendering melancholy, but it can, on the other hand, appear as the blueprint for a temple to be built, or rebuilt.

In between, there is inevitably the quest, the journey, the adventure. There can be no nostalgia without departure. You have to leave your country, land and loved ones for nostalgia to take hold. Wandering is the imperative condition for nostalgia. In this sense, it provokes a desire to return, leading to a quest for origins, a necessary voyage and the adventures that follow. Once the raft is built, all that remains is to leave the island, cross the sea and brave the storms.

*Aby Warburg, 1896 - 1929

— François Chalifour