Published by sun/sun editions, The Rustle between the Walls is a new example of the magic that can arise from the meeting between two visual languages. That of Clara Chichin et Sabatina Leccia was permitted by the scholarship Transverse 2022which encourages the decompartmentalization of photographic practice by bringing it into dialogue with an artist from another discipline.
Clara Chichin is a photographer and is interested in our relationship to nature, landscape and its representation. It is also a subject that touches Sabatina Leccia, an artist whose practice lies on the border between art and craftsmanship. She embroiders her drawings to create “landscapes or interior maps”. The Rustle between the Walls was born from their common desire to explore nature in an urban environment. Both from Montreuille, they turned towards a historic place in the city: the peach walls.
When they were drawn up in the 17th century, these plots were a real innovation. Their walls of earth and flint regulate the temperature, making it possible to grow a southern fruit in the Paris region: peaches. If the arrival of the railway and the various urbanization projects took over a large part of the land, part of it was classified and still resists today. It constitutes a 35-hectare green lung for eastern Paris as well as a rich heritage to be preserved.
Under a delicately handcrafted washi paper cover, the book opens with an aerial view of the peach walls, whose sinuosities recall the veins of a leaf. Sabatina Leccia and Clara Chichin plunged into this labyrinth, where they wandered regularly to soak up the richness of its history while observing natural life taking its course, « le slow pace you alive » that they decided to adopt: “We wanted to be in another rhythm, a rhythm ou we have the right to dream, without immediately worrying about production or productivity. We wanted to let the experience of these walks infuse us, of observing the metamorphosis of the landscape. »
Throughout their walks, the two artists get to know the place. One by its device, the other by samples which will be used for example to create pigments. Then comes the meeting of their practice, the development of the image sometimes on textile, the work of color… a whole process which also evolves with nature « There is a relationship to the texture and transformation of images which evolves according to the seasons.” Day after day and page after page, the garden is transformed. The reworked, dyed, sewn, embroidered, perforated images give rise to a poetic and sensory cartography in which nature oscillates between reality and an imaginary world, a transcended, mutating vision, also echoing the multiple metamorphoses that History has imposed on this place.
The Rustle between the Walls is a work imbued with rare poetry whose sensory power comes as a remedy to the “crisis of sensitivity” of our contemporary world that the art historian Estelle Zhong Mengal compares with the ecological crisis when she writes that the modernity has mutilated our relationship with the sensitive world. For Clara Chichin and Sabatina Leccia, the political message is a poetic message. If this slow stroll in nature is a means of “reweaving the sensitive between humans and the living” it is also an invitation to dream, the dream as the last refuge, as the last place of resistance.
The Noise Between the Walls — Clara Chichin and Sabatina Leccia
Published by sun/sun éditions
17 x 22 cm
112 pages
papier Arena Ivory Bulk 90g
impression offset
70 images quadri
+ 8 inserts printed in risography Swiss binding
cover printed in risography
ISBN : 979-10-95233-52-7
Available online and in all good bookstores.
Collector
15 limited editions,
handmade washi paper cover by the Atelier papetier printed in risography by the Atelier du Palais, vegetable dyeing made by Ludovic de Valon, stitching of the covers by Sabatina Leccia, manual binding by the Dédale Dedans workshop.
Special edition 170 copies
Handmade washi paper cover by the Atelier papetier and printed in risography.
This project was the winner of the Transverse Grant awarded by ADAGP and Freelens. Clara Chichin benefited from a writing assistance grant from the Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region. The book received the support of the Occitanie Region.
