Pienso que tus versos son flores que llenan tierras y tierras (I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands)

Materials: wood, straw, jute, mud, water and glass

Variable dimensions

Place: Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon.

Dates: From 18.09.19 to 05.01.2020

Jenny Feal’s facilities translate her personal experience of the Cuban history in poetic forms, sometimes symbolic and sometimes documentary forms, to testify the conditions of existence and the fragility of a daily life conditioned by the political regime of a country caught between Ideology and reality. In order to organize a frozen situation between a fantasy past and a painful exile, Jenny Feal proposes an immersive installation that combines different modes of narration, oscillating between historic narrative and fiction fed by her personal experience and the power of dreams. Aggravated by the land that symbolizes life and death, the walls stained with red mud bear testify an historic, symbolic, political and social violence expressed in the pages of a book that cannot be read, while, here and there, the everyday objects contribute to an enigmatic narrative.

Jenny Feal builds the scene of a crime with discrete clues and tracks, which main actors seem to be death and absence. A recurring element of his work, the book, between a diary and a history book, also reveals historical and social considerations marked by censure and self-censure, the desire of freedom and the need to create an intuitive history without words. Deposited by language, poetry celebrates a freedom expressed in the form of a sensation embodied by a book caught in its fall and pierced by light. Jenny Feal shapes her own landscape, which is not only the one that develops before our eyes, but the one we invent. Poetry of the trail that one leaves in an obstacle, which marks the limits of her freedom, physical or mental.

Matthieu Lelièvre and the curatorial team of the Biennale de Lyon

Jenny Feal’s installation is presented in a single room on the first floor of MAC Lyon. It has three different elements. In the center there is a large open notebook, converted into a tent, whose empty pages are not made of paper, but of jute cloth. The title is “I think your verses are flowers that fill earth and earth.” It is taken from a poem written by the artist.

Focus, context:

The artist maintained an epistolary relationship, composed mainly by poems, with her grandfather, whom she imagined living in the United States. The artist approaches her family history by inviting visitors to walk through this installation. In the center, the book with white pages seems to vomit clay. It represents a notebook of poems written by her grandfather. In this book of poetry and diary, limited by censure and self-censure, the pages are white and tell no story.

Jenny Feal’s installations function as narratives, histories in which she mixes her personal history with Universal History. As the artist’s family has missing pieces, the visitor cannot see all the fresco due to the sliding doors, the pages of the book are white and the story told is incomplete. The wall on the right is rounded, remembering that, regardless of the histories lived by men, the earth keeps on spinning.

An article by Lisa Emprin, mediator at the Lyon Biennale

Jenny Feal, I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands. Poetry book that falls (in fall). Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Blaise Adilon

Jenny Feal, I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands. Poetry book that falls (in fall). Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Blaise Adilon

Jenny Feal, I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands. Poetry book that falls (in fall). Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Sara Alonso

Jenny Feal, I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands. Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Sara Alonso

Installation detail wood, jute, mud, and water. © Blaise Adilon

Jenny Feal, I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands. Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Blandine Soulage

Jenny Feal, I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands. Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Blandine Soulage