Installation /

Watercolor, Metal, Wood, Cardboard, Concrete

165 x 305 cm.

Toninstallation (stereo loudspeakers, mp3 player)

Ich spreche ein bisschen deutsch (I speak a little german) is a 2-channel sound installation. It questions Foreigners’ uncomfortable situation facing the difficulties of learning a new language.

What is happening when we are reduced to minimal communication, with a tight vocabulary and limited grammar. What is happening when we own only partially this essential tool; language is indeed a social vector, a identity indicator, a filter between us and the world, a projection from our interiority… Everyday life suddenly fulls up with misunderstanding, lags and unsaid.

From one single raw materials, sentences collected on language learning web-sides, absurd and poetics conversations have been created. They play with the language’s limits and all the humorist potential it may contain.

Toninstallation / 230 cm.

In situ Installation / Textile dye / 1155 x 270 cm.

Exhibition view, Le Chateau Saint-Louis – Sénégal

A wall surface. A space of expression. Here people often handwrite political messages on walls, paint religious figures, draw kid- like drawings in chalk and graffiti.

On this wall the paint flakes off and an older section is revealed… Underneath, where history is hiding, we can see various patterns, those coming from West African tradition- al dying. The patterns existed long before borders divided what we now know as West African countries. They blend together as traditions and different cultures often do here. They resurface and adorn the building much like a ‘pagne’ is worn for celebrations. Let’s celebrate. Saint-Louis, Senegal, may 2016.

Watercolor on paper 162 X 113,5 cm 

Sound Installation

(plaster – sound system, 2 soundtracks – 13’20 mn) / 492 x 698 cm

Installation view PILAB, Leipzig – Germany

My interest in the city of Riesi came from the viewing of a documentary of Arte Channel. It was a series about the cities in decay, and Riesi was supposed to be fa- mous for her many empty houses, then my personal curiosity and the lack of informations about this city pushed me to go there myself. Once there I wanted to visit those empty houses, which was not so easy de- spite local help. So I looked at the facade, the wall, the stones. There is a great con- fusion between the houses who are falling into ruin and those which are never been inhabited because the construction never reached an ending. The brick, the stones, the mortar piece are visible, the layer of painting goes aways, or was never done. A cycle appears, man can see from where come things and where they end, a pile of rocks. Pebbles. Man feels the origine of the houses’ stones. I didn’t sea a dead town, I saw some laud stones.

The work consists of 368 plasterboards, that I cast myself, which together form a plaster tiles. From the opening day of the exhibition, it starts to be destroy piece by piece by visitors walking on it. In so doing, the breaking creates some cracking sound which comes into contact with the sound of the piece itself. The sound piece of the work is composed of two different soundtracks, played simultaneously at two corners of the room, thus creating an immersive sound environment. The sound composition had been made with records of friction actions on different construction materials, such as concrete, Siporex panels, dry mortar… including the plasterboard used for the floor installation. The ensemble explores the identity and materiality of the city of Riesi in Sicily.

( Plis, 2015 Watercolor on paper 113 X 84 cm – Epigé ne  se 2015 sheet- fan)

Exhibition view La Vallé e- Bruxelles Belgium

Untitled #6, #1, #2 (Mindhouse serie)

Watercolors on paper 170 x 115 cm

Sound Installation concrete block, sound system 250 x 185 x 25 cm

Ils revenaient, ils seraient partis, (They were coming back, they would have left) is a wall of cinderblocks, from which 3 voices emerge, that are whispering stories of habitant. These are voices of three characters of a closed-hearing, trapped both by the house and by the stories that they twaddle piece by piece, in an uncertain space and time. The obsessional psychology of the lock-up dwellers, is highlighted by the repetitive aspect of the narration. This sound piece invites the visitor to position themselves as a peeping-tom, spying on those ordinary and grim secrets.

Thermoforming sculptures

These sculptures come from an old-fashion habit, that consists in covering the pieces of furniture with a white sheet, in order to protect them from the dust, when the house was going to be unoccupied for a while. It is a sign, the one of an absence/presence, an in-between in the temporality of living somewhere.

*1986 in Caen, France

http://base.ddab.org/laurette-le-gall