I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands | Artwork I

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. 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. (…) A wooden and straw bench completes the installation. The seat is classic and the backrest adopts forms of clothing nested with each other, like the shadows of people who would have sat on the bench. It is cut in two pieces and leaves in the middle an empty space for a missing male figure. A piece of blue ceramic with the footprint of two bare feet is placed in front of this lost seat, on a square wooden pedestal. 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. The bench seems to be preparing to receive family members, ready to gather around a missing figure like an absent grandfather. Its absence, symbolized by the lost seat, does not avoid to imagine a physical body, in the clothes drawn on the wall or the traces in the ceramic of the floor. The person evaporated in the center of the family seems to have disappeared, dropping a book on a disproportionate scale that leads to their loss.

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. Bank, family portrait. Missing a form in the center, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Blaise Adilon

Jenny Feal, I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands. Bank, family portrait. Missing a form in the center, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Blandine Soulage

Jenny Feal, I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands. Bank, family portrait. Installation detail, missing shape, wood, mud, straw, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Mac Lyon

Jenny Feal, I think your verses are flowers that fill lands and lands. Bank, family portrait. Installation detail, footprint of two bare feet on the floor, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and the Lyon Biennial 2019. © Mac Lyon

With the invaluable support of: Artesylve, Buchet Ponsoye Endowment Fund, Dohyang Lee Gallery, Thibault Poutrel Endowment Fund, Brownstone Foundation, Mr. Frédéric Lorin, Mr. Gilles Blanckaert-Alizée, Mr. Roger Herrera Gutierrez, ARTICHOK Association, Bookseller and Michel Descours Gallery. With the assistance of: Artesylve, Rotin Filé, Establishment Corne & Cie, Center Gallieni Villeurbanne. With the help of: Passerelles Buissonnières Association