A small part of Anna Sand's world
04 | 07 | 15
Videos, prints, digital images, installations…
Curator: Anthony Lenoir
“I’ve never had the opportunity to meet Anna Sand in person. I’ve come across some of her prints, seen some archived material and read one or two articles, but never had access to her playground. So I’ve always had to make do with the fragments that she reveals; those small pieces of a story that wants to be fictive, multi-faceted and - most of all - never-ending.
Nowadays, who can boast of having met Anna Sand? She lives on the other side of her mirror, only letting herself be seen through the prism of her photographs, videos, installations; all those things that give substance to her meanderings. As with any good novel, you never really know the narrator. You just take what they give and extrapolate.
So when the director of the Flaine Art Centre called to tell me that Anna Sand had been in contact to designate me as the one to pass on her message, I didn’t hesitate.
Since then, I’ve been waiting in front of the mirror.
I’m not alone; others have been summoned. Together, we should be able to explore the corners of her mind and open up the resort to all the possibilities that are offered behind the scenes.”
Anthony Lenoir, May 2015
“Anna Sand isn’t my birth name. My grandmothers were called Marguerite Sand and Anna Vandam. One married an architect, the other a sculptor. They lived in very different worlds from one another. As a child, I went from one place to the other; a link between two very feminine universes.
Anna walked discreetly across the workshop, which was bathed in light beneath the glass roof. The smell of clay transported us to a damp forest, where statues in her image erased the traces that time had wrought upon her face. Curved lines on volumes of clay took us from one body to another. The palms of my hands still carry the colour and the substance of soft, malleable clay.
Marguerite would spend her time relaxing in her multi-coloured garden full of subtle odours. Behind the windows, we could see numerous drawing tables that only just reached the height of my young eyes. I looked at the drawings with their straight, black lines without ever really understanding what they represented.
Through architecture and sculpting - the twin universes of Anna and of Marguerite Sand - I discovered alignment, volumes, profiles and curves. Above all, I discovered two very different environments, and two grandmothers, each with their own softness and mystery.
One of them would take me to the theatre and to concerts, the other would guide me along the bottom of the garden to talk to the trees and pick hazelnuts. I have kept a little part of them inside me and perhaps stolen part of their identity. They would surely forgive me…”
Geneviève Holvoet / Flaine July 2015