Claire Ebendinger is a French artist working in Halle, Germany. Her practice draws inspiration from the manipulation of objects found in play. She is eager to reconcile her work with the act of play, while considering the seriousness that’s built in, throughout education. As a result, her work oscillates between creating spontaneously and following rules.

Find Claire’s works on her website and Instagram.

I was very impressed by the location and the history of the building. It seemed to have had a very strong influence on the demographic and economic life of the village. For this reason, I wanted to develop a body of plastic research that would reflect the site specificity.

I first got acquainted with the objects stored on site, hoping they would reveal some clues about the past of the building. I trusted that the object’s materiality and aesthetic would help me get closer to understanding life at the fish factory. I collected a sample of objects from various materials and sizes and started organizing formal interactions between them. The impression that I got while interacting with them was playful though melancholic, like often when working with remnants of a time that has gone.

In parallel, I photographed the way certain objects had been arranged in the landfill behind the harbour in Seyðisfjörður, a neighbouring Fjörd. In their own industrial aesthetics, they follow a certain composition archetype –an object on a pedestal–, making them sculptures . I feel inspired by the way stacking objects onto each other affiliates a long-lasting fine art ideal with play.

There is a true poetry to industrial objects, which I explored through scanning and photocopying.

I applied this playful gesture of stacking to the various gears that used to set the conveyor belts in motion back when the factory was still processing fish. I wanted to see how a seemingly naïve and childlike gesture would impact the roughness of the material.

As stacking can go two-dimensionally I experimented with monotypes, using the fish conveyor belts as printing plates. By adding different layers, one obtains a richness of patterns that is reminiscent of fish scales.

I liked to consider the similarity of movement between a fish conveyor belt and a printing press, and in a way, activating the conveyors in a movement that was already ”known to them”. I played around with the narrative that I too was processing fish. The manual press and the printing process itself was very labor-intensive and repetitive, which brought me at least metaphorically a little closer to the original working life at the fish factory.

I explored the idea of producing fish skin with different means of printing and drawing, adding to press-print, type-writing and drawing.

At the fish factory I found a safe, friendly and supportive environment where I could simply experiment and play around different media. I heartily thank the other residents whose presence was incredibly stimulating, as well as the team from the Fish Factory, who always welcomed with enthusiasm and helpfulness my various questions and requests. I am very grateful for this month among great people, in what felt like a huge playground, surrounded by mountains and Fjörds.

Alexandre Barbé is a sculptor. He defines his work protocol in a few words : “I pay attention to off-the-path-found-places histories; I seek the extraordinary in what was thrown on scrapheap. If I want a story to be told louder, then I think of an intervention.”

In Stöðvarfjörður he wrote : “1: Odd pieces of drift wood present a journey : in its final shape he carries its wounds, in its unknown drawing I guess a far origin. 2: Birds eat berries then poo pink on white lichens. 3: Dry branches lay in a field hundreds of meters away from trees or houses. 4: A cylindrical building with no floor became a trash can. Corrosion turned its content into a monochrome, and the space made it a perfect circle.”

His work is not about photography, all the pictures are archives.

For some years now, Alba Suau’s work has focused on the experience of entering the painting; of allowing oneself to be enveloped, absorbed by it. These spaces of isolation are not places of passage, but on the contrary, places to stop and stay; they are spaces marked by slowness, by contemplation. It is a question of creating a meditative state and plunging into the pigments.

So many aspects that are shared by Stöðvarfjörður itself.

For this residency, their objective was – in addition to working on their own projects – to collaborate together. Their interventions in the landscape are the result of thinking in an empathic and attentive way : to try looking as the other would, and to only use the space and its already present components,

Laminaria hyperborea, 2022 Intervention.
Laminaria Hyperborea.

Krækiber, 2022
Intervention in the landscape. Crowberries and water.
Fish Factory, Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland.

Un bateau à la mer, 2022.
By Alexandre Barbé from an Alba Suau’s drawing. Intervention.
Drift wood.

Antioxydant, 2022.
By Alexandre Barbé Intervention.
Wood and crowberries.

Moyen non-rond, 2022.

By Alexandre Barbé. Intervention.

Drift wood.

THE RESCUE PROJECT

“It’s about love, it’s always about love…”

Main actor of my work, doctor for myself, creation has always been a therapeutic journey towards the healing of my deepest wounds.

Visual artist by training, I have always had at heart to be at the initiative of all of my artistic pieces, realisings all of my works alone. Mixing at the same time, performance, dance, video art, sound and images.

In this new project, it was about mourning an old relationship through physical exhaustion through dance, thus blurring the tenacity of my feelings from my mind:
 

Repetition as a loss of meaning towards oblivion…

However, when I arrived in Iceland, I realised that this mourning was already done but that the wound was perhaps deeper than estimated.

The project then took on a new dimension, it’s no longer about him but about me.

Far from myself for a long time, it was time for me to reclaim this body so manhandled, mistreated so hated for so many years.

The gaze of others as a weapon of destruction. Instagram killed me. The rescue project was born.

Tainted by my recurring disillusions, my escape to Iceland then proved inevitable as an imminent need to focus again on the beauty of the world.

To sublimate oneself in contact with the sublime itself.

Beneficial solitude, healing trance, improvisations choreographed by the beating of my heart, survival blanket as a caress on my internal lesions.

Find the light where the sun no longer sets…