Piscine Municipale

French Norway-based artist Lorie Ballage's exhibition project, Piscine Municipale, transforms the gallery space into a fictional simulation of a public swimming pool. The inherent antagonism of the element—water being colourless, odourless, tasteless and, essentially, ungraspable—carries a heterogeneity that makes it complex, intricately simple, and universally fluid: Water can be thought of as both a life-giving material substance and the substance on which the most fundamental myths and other cultural expressions are based. Water, in short, always and necessarily evokes powerful contexts, which is linked to the human endeavour to understand, transport, and control it. Ballage's installation, consisting of dysfunctional ceramic sculptures together with chlorine-soaked air, saturated nautical colours, and an auditory narrative, creates a poetic (perhaps slightly unsettling at times) scene that reinforces this age-old fascination with the element of water. However, the aspect that emerges most strongly when viewing the installation is the exploration of absence. This absence lies not only in the complete absence of water, but also in the absence of other bodies. And this, in conjunction with the objects denying their usual qualities and the stylized architecture, creates a confrontation with the expectation of spaces having water as their focal point. In its original form, the environment of the urban swimming pool that Ballage recreates is often associated with personal nostalgia and collective memory originating in the leisure activities of childhood. In this case, however, the artist offers a rather intimate and solitary experience. By reconstructing a community pool setting devoid of the usual cacophony of sounds, movements, and interactions, her interpretation becomes a place of individual introspection where the audience is left alone with their sensory impressions, memories, and imaginings. The deliberate inclusion of a sensory cue in the form of the smell of chlorine—a pungent, synthetic feature of modern mass water manipulation—highlights the aforementioned paradox: Although the water itself is devoid of odour, chlorine has become an inseparable part of the public image of swimming pools, signalling cleanliness, regulation, and control. The audio component then further layers this dynamic. In a space where visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli are mostly prominent, the narrator's voice offers a grounding presence that blurs the boundaries between the internal monologue and the external environment. Public swimming pools, as places where water is contained, regulated, and experienced by the community, represent a departure from the unrestricted and elemental nature of water in nature. Although Gaston Bachelard condemns public pools in Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, he does so precisely because of the impossibility of experiencing this space alone (1983, p. 168). For him, water figures as a medium of dreaming, embodying fluidity, transformation, and the unconscious; it has the unique ability to evoke in us the imaginative experience of new space and new images as they are born, and thus to re-experience being itself. However, by removing the actual water from the pool, Ballage's installation reconfiguration prompts us to consider how water, even in its most controlled forms, retains the ability to evoke a space for material imagination, and asks whether it is possible for a space of this type, even in the physical absence of water, to function precisely as a site for imagination. The artist's installation also aptly points to the tension between “H2O” and “living water” in modern society. As a site symbolizing urban planning and technical rigid administration, the urban pool exemplifies the reduction of water to a managed resource—a space of regulation, disinfection, and control, characterized by rules and systems designed to control the nature of water, resulting in the loss of its symbolic richness and spiritual significance. The artist's exhibition project accentuates these contradictions by stripping the environment of its original functions and activities. The saturated playful ceramic objects and sterile tile surfaces create a tension between handmade and standardized, between the pool as a place of joy, play, and imagination and the domain of the biopolitical systems of modernity. Piscine Municipale, however, with its aesthetic abstraction and sensory provocations, turns the direction of interpretation towards the “water of dreams”, which Ivan Illich says is lost in modernity: “H2O and water have become opposites: H2O is a social creation of modern times, a resource that is scarce and that calls for technical management. It is an observed fluid that has lost the ability to mirror the water of dreams. The city child has no opportunities to come in touch with living water. Water can no longer be observed; it can only be imagined, by reflecting on an occasional drop or a humble puddle.” (H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, 1986, epub, p. 64) And perhaps Piscine Municipale can be seen as a space for imagining the deeper and intangible meanings of water; a commentary on the symbolic relationship between humans and nature, oscillating between absence and presence, individual bodily experience and collective identity, imagination and technocracy; an exploration of how meanings of water are constructed, contested, and preserved in a world increasingly defined by its utilitarian manipulation and commodification. Lorie Ballage (b. 1994 in Paris) holds an MFA from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design and a BFA from the Art Academy of Dundee. Her projects often feature immersive installations challenging viewers to reflect on human interactions with the natural world and the ways in which we manipulate it. As such, her artistic practice primarily explores the poetic and unpredictable dynamics of water, using ceramics to express themes of fragility and resilience within fictional narratives. These works embody both delicacy and strength, reflecting the inherent vulnerabilities of ceramic processes alongside the dynamic forces of water. She has exhibited at, among others, Carl Berner Projektrom, Bergen Kunsthall, KRAFT, Kunstnernes Hus, Studio 17, Kunstgarasjen and the Mark Rothko Art Center in Latvia. She is based in Bergen, Norway.