Les Eclipsées Zoé Vayssières

About

Magazzino Gallery of Palazzo Contarini Polignac in Venice has
invited the French artist Zoé Vayssières to take over its exhibition
space from 19 February to 13 March 2022. The Eclipsed is
a site-specific installation that reveals the names of women
who have been eclipsed from history and from our memories.
A proponent of narrative art, Zoé Vayssières uses a minimalist
vocabulary that dialogues with the site and extends her research
into disappearance, remaining traces and the passing of time.
An immersive exhibition with a deeply poetic resonance

Les Eclipsées is a journey in three stages

1. Threads, 2022
Nine vertical ropes stretching from floor to ceiling (5 metres high) intersect in a tangle
of lianas across the space. On each rope – which include red ones and a white vaporetto
rope – there are small copper plates engraved with the names of 100 women
who have been eclipsed by history. One rope is dedicated to Venetian and Italian women
such as Gaspara Stampa, one of the greatest poets of the Renaissance and one
of the few women to be published in Gallimard’s Poetry catalogue. These sequences
of women intersect like a network.

2. Keys, 2022
A seven-metre wave unfolds on one of the Magazzino’s patinated brick walls.
Like a score of destiny, it is composed of 20 piano keys (both ivory and ebony),
engraved with the dates that mark key moments in the history of female
emancipation (from 450 BCE to 1980).

3. Folds, 2022
Three copper plate sculptures (the longest of which is 3.80 m long x 1 m wide)
crumpled and hung from the ceiling, reveal in their folds and creases the names
of the women from Lines of the Eclipsed, the list drawn up by the archivist and
palaeographer Caroline Becker, and the Declaration of the Rights of Women
and the Female Citizen, written by Olympe de Gouges in 1791.
A work that takes the form of a memoir.