JEANNE BLOCH
Jeanne Bloch explores the materiality of light through embodied practices. Her work echoes the early time of photography and film. Inheriting from figures such as Loïe Fueller or Nan Hoover, she creates interactive installations, visual art and performances through art based research protocols.
Jeanne’s work explores how light pollution impacts human imagination.
She suggests that darkness is the activator of our being in the world and as such must be protected from the dangers of indoor and outdoor light pollution. The omniscience of light in our lives erase the dark zones of our interiors and tend to illuminate all spaces whether they are intimate or public spaces, metaphorical or physical, modifying the experience of the passage between inside and outside.
The destruction of the soil of our imaginations – like sitting in a dark living room - is concomitant to the emergence of X-Rays technologies, the tools that allow doctors to look inside our bodies. When Modern Architecture limited the dark corners that fostered our inner connection --which means the possibility to be the subject of ourselves-- at the same time, our inner bodies became objects of observation.
Jeanne proposes to extend the definition of light pollution to surveillance society. Indeed, light pollution is not limited to our exposure to light: being seen or watching extends today to our digital experiences. Today, many more parts of our individualities have turned from subject to object: our moves in public spaces, our internal physiological movements such as our heart beat and our non physical movements like our emotions, are all objects of observation, they are all useful data to be monetized by others.
What would be a world where we would all be subjects? What would be a world without a focal point and which conceives of light as a relational material? These are the questions Jeanne raises with diverse audiences in art and non-art places, online or in real life and inviting the public to engage with her work all along her creation process.
©Jeanne Bloch / Contemporary Hope In progress - 2024