Days
in Gagarine (work in progress)
A
set of 40 texts and photographs 30x35 cm, lambda prints on Dibond plate + two
watercolours + a photograph of the cosmonaut Youri Gagarine and one of his
speeches transferred onto wallpaper
Robert
Milin discovered the Gagarine district of Ivry sur Seine in the spring of 2017.
He came for several stays over a year since, to meet inhabitants, visit local
shops and associations in this neighbourhood
of the 1960s landlocked in the Ivry city centre and subject to a partial
demolition programme for urban renewal.
He
took notes of interviews with inhabitants, then took silver photographs of
residents and places with a medium format camera requiring some time to
approach people and arrange the settings. He also collected speeches by
administrative experts about the neighbourhood as well as documents and
photographs from Municipal Archives.
This
artwork now comprises a corpus including silver prints of photographs taken by
himself but also text-snippets of conversations printed on the same argentic
paper. These excerpts come from inhabitants’ words and expert reports on urban
development.
He
formally standardized them by choosing to make 40 silver prints on Dibond
plate, all of the same size and on the same paper. He decided to display them
by sets of 4 or 6 pieces as like several points of view on questions
related to Gagarine neighbourhood.
A
giant photograph and an excerpt from Youri Gagarine’s speech transferred on a
huge wallpaper, but also two watercolours like drawn up notes punctuate the
photographic and textual display, widening the gaze between realism, utopia and
poetry.
Robert
Milin & Delphine Suchecki, January 2019
_________________________________________________
Saint-Carré
is 27 years old
Robert
Milin, set of 45 photographs and a text (printed on Dibond plate), 2019
Saint-Carré is a
hamlet in the village of Lanvellec in Côtes d’Armor. There's
a small bar–grocery, granite
houses around the chapel, barns, a village square, tractors passing.
In 1991, I went to
see the mayor to propose to him that I carry out an artwork in situ in this hamlet
of Saint-Carré. He agreed. I spent some time with the locals: talking,
explaining, drinking coffee with them.
I borrowed family pictures from them, those that appeared to
me to reveal not the village history but my idea of a community put in crisis
by modernity. These photographs, I transposed
them, cropping them just a little, silkscreening them on enamelled steel panels
or on porcelain plates.
Volunteer residents helped me to install all of it on barn
doors, walls, on a shed, along a path, in a courtyard, on a departmental road,
in the grass close to a spring.
The work is not on the photographs
but in the relationship between the photographs, the people, and the place. This permanent installation is in motion,
sometimes people shift the photographs. It has been going on for 28 years.
Robert Milin, March, 2019
____________________________________________________
Garden
with Inhabitants is 15 years old
Robert
Milin, a set of 35 photographs (lambda
prints on Dibond plate)
For
the past fifteen years, Garden with Inhabitants has been working and
continues to do so. Robert Milin comes here on a regular basis. He can also
stay away for long months, nevertheless everything continues to go on. When
creating this project, Milin did not particularly seek to create a social bond
although, in essence, this aspect has always been present through the forms of
participation.
It
turns out that a kind of community has been formed here, in this garden at the
foot of Palais de Tokyo. The various people being part of the project interact.
They are not locked into an individual relation to their own plot.
Desired
by Milin from the very beginning, there is first of all the sharing of tools,
with these wooden shacks designed, contructed, furnished, and painted together
during common actions. Little by little,
rituals have been put in place. There are of course the regulatory General
Assemblies but also, every year in January « la galette du Jardin »
[“the Garden galette”], in June « the Garden barbecue », and at the
beginning of December «the Christmas meal».
It
is therefore necessary to analyse the set of 35 photographs not as the record
of what has happened but rather as a look at what has been built, day after
day, for the last fifteen years through a work in constant motion.
From
the first watercolour sketch made in 2001, photographs and videos have
accumulated. Here, of course, there is a selection and a kind of editing in the
presentation of this panel. It is simply trying to account for this process,
both permanent and in constant motion, which gives life to this work.
Delphine
Suchecki Milin, March, 2018
____________________________________________________
Jafer (2018)
Jafer, sound work, 59 min, 2018
« O sing Ulysses. Sing your travels.
Tell where you have been. Tell what you have seen. And tell a story of a man
who never wanted to leave his home. Who was happy and lived among the people he
knew and spoke their language. Sing how then he was thrown out into the
world ».
Jonas Mekas
opens his « diary film » Lost Lost
Lost with these words, he uses present tense to talk about his experience
of exile.
To start
Jafer with an excerpt of the Odyssey
means both to root this work of art in one of the founding stories about exile
and to remember Jonas Mekas’ work, another rooting in one of the most beautiful
contemporary experimental film about uprooting.
In 2014,
various meetings led Robert Milin to a social
café, located on the ground floor of young migrants’ and old immigrants’
shelter, in the parisian suburb. Conversations started and so did the desire to
make a work of art.
For three
years, Robert Milin continued these meetings, occasionally standing back to
read Michel Agier or Marc Bernardot’s remakable books. Then, he went back to
this shelter’s corridors, halls, bedrooms, stairs.
He also
accompanied djaffer and the others to cafes, markets, shops, for a cup of tea
or coffee or just a conversation at their place.
Little
by little, he recorded many sounds found in these places making an
impressionist sound work of art with story fragments, songs, administrative
rules readings, Homer’s Odyssey excerpts mingled in.
Delphine
Suchecki, March, 2018
_________________________________________________
Silences, Portrait of volunteers working in the city of Nanterre (2017)
Silences, Portrait of volunteers working in the city of Nanterre, video (2017)
Invited for an artist residency by the city of Nanterre, Robert
Milin met many people working in social or associative world. He decided to make a group portrait with video and sound.
Militants appear one after the other sitting behind a table in front of the
camera. A voice-over is superimposed over images, she adresses sentences collected during
previous meetings with these « people-models ».
__________________________________
I was young, I was fourteen, I was a shepherd (2017)
I was young, I was fourteen, I was a shepherd, video and sound
work, 30 min, 2017
During his artist residency
in Nanterre, Robert Milin spent some time in Kinkéliba, a « social café »
located on the ground floor of a migrants’ shelter. He met migrants there, some
having been there since the sixties, others newly arrived. He collected sounds,
words, songs and pictures from them. This work speaks to us of the usual and of
the exile.
_______________________________________________
Bring me back my little dress (2016)
Bring me back my little dress, photographs silkscreened on enamelled sheet metal, 2016, Ecoles Régionales de la santé, Toulouse
- “When you come back, bring
my yellow dress, the one I was wearing in La Rochelle.» [1]
Arletty is hospitalized.
For the day she leaves hospital, she wants her husband to bring her yellow
dress, the one she wore in La Rochelle. Yellow and embossed with memories. In
Toulouse, Robert Milin has installed six enamelled sheet metal panels in the corridors of the
regional school of health for a black jacket, a green scarf, a flowered shirt,
for velvet, viscose or silk, for stripes, patterns and colours as yellow
dresses.
With the assistance of
Christine Cuq[2], he
has spent a few days at the Purpan university hospital in Toulouse. As is the
case for all his works, the project is a to and from between an idea, a
reality, meetings, and experiments. He focused on the idea of the
patient[3]
as an object of care. He met caretakers and patients at the university hospital
and presented his project to them.
In the rooms where patients are so often just sick bodies, two small niches remain where
the personality of each one can be seen: the bathroom where a small bottle of
perfume, a bracelet, a comb, a jewel, or a razor are stored, and the wardrobe where some clothes are hanging waiting for the
return home.
Several realities are
juxtaposed, each one having their own experience of the situation. The doctor,
the nurse, the auxiliary nurse, the midwife, the administrative staff, the patient.
In this relation, many elements are
objectified through analyses, measurements, comparisons but the control of all
that is restricted to physicians who concentrate on the disease, the wound.
Nothing or noone comes to measure fear, pain, joy, loneliness, decency.
Through these images, Robert
Milin wanted to restore a presence, a certain visibility to all these people.
To forget the medical objectivity and its protocols and rock towards the
patients’ subjectivity. He did not want
to photograph faces or bodies directly, he chose to work on these shirts, these
jackets, these dresses, these scarves, these trousers.
These clothes are
presentations of oneself: I feel beautiful, I feel handsome, I feel
comfortable, I feel strong… These are also memories of a dress worn in La
Rochelle, of a shirt received for Christmas, a sweater bought in Siam street.
Thus, Robert Milin started taking photographs of clothes in the
wardrobes for everything they embody: subjective feelings, choices, one’s lived
experience. Not wanting to stick to the pattern or the colour alone, he kept a
certain context. The framing erases the medical context but presents a piece of
clothing on standby: on a hanger or
a half-opened door.
Delphine Suchecki
Patient adj.
from the Lat. patior i.e. to suffer, endued with patience, calm
under affliction.
________________________________________________
Joggers and gardeners (2015)
Joggers and gardeners, Robert Milin, 2015, drawing, video
In
2015, invited to Brussels by Iselp, Robert Milin worked in the Royal Park. He
met gardeners in the park’s aisles but also in their staff room for a soup or a
coffee. Thus, among them, he began
drawing things of their daily life: a woolen hat, a pick, a wheelbarrow… Then, he installed a camera in an aisle to
film all joggers arriving in large groups during lunch time.
-------------------------------------
A Soup in Autumn (2015)
A Soup in Autumn, Robert Milin, 2015, video, 4 min 18 sec
As an artist in residence invited by La Cuisine, Robert
Milin asked eleven inhabitants from Tarn and Garonne to take part in his group
portrait A Soup in Autumn. Continuing his idea of the “assisted
portrait”, the artist wanted that these inhabitants perform their own role as
with ewe breeders in Quercy before or with the French Railway Network
Controllers, two of his previous works. He filmed them eating their soup at
their table at home. What interests Robert Milin is a thought on loneliness in
the group through the daily and repetitive act of eating the meal, but also, at
the same time, the body postures, gestures, clothing, the objects, sounds of
the bodies, of the places, all these examples of a specific era and of different
living spaces but unified through editing video shots and sounds. It is also
the idea of a group portrait where people appear in their singularity.
Delphine Suchecki
__________________________________________________
Talk to animals (2014)
Talk to animals, 2014, sound work, 37 min 29 sec, Collection du CNAP
More information here: Talk to animals
_____________________________________________________________________________
Portrait of Dr Colin and his children (2012)
Video excerpt
Portrait of Dr Colin and his children, Video, 2011
Dr. Colin asked me to make his
portrait with his two children. I
wanted to exceed the mere physical
representation and put the
individual struggling with an
activity that I would have previously
thought. After spending time with them, I chose the moment of the meal, when
the family gathers. Here Dr. Colin eats salad
at the table, with his two children.
I chose a neutral black background,
I installed my small
studio in their dining room,
I gave little indication, the
image is made in static
shots.
____________________________________________________________________________
Jeremy felt like becoming invisible (2010)
The first image shows a soil covered with little white
papers in front of a factory. The sound of a motor appears ans disturbs this
first image evokating a previous gathering. Here it would be like an
« after » with no body left but only those papers in a jumble.
Reactivated by a king of breath the white papers come back to the life and
« fly » away. A machine, helped by the wind, blows them against a
thick white wire netting. It appears that each sheet of paper contains a
sentence like : I’m afraid of walking in the city center of my little town
where I know everybody ; Jeremy felt like becoming invisible…
Robert Milin collected these sentences when he met people suffering in
their work or suffering not having a job… Despite intolerable situation theses
words become banal with no visibility in our everyday life. Inevitable,
unescapable.
_________________________________________________
A lark from Poland (2011)
Sound sculpture, 2011
A
Lark from Poland
Invited to live in the Saint-Remy
quarter of Saint-Denis, (Paris suburb), during the time of his
artistic residence, Robert Milin chose, initially, to work on the landscape. He
does not approach this type of art history through depiction but through
evocation: a landscape without an image, but with some thoughts and words.
A
Lark from Poland
is a sculpture, a physical and sound volume, where we are invited to enter into.
It is hosted in a room of the apartment-residence, where the artist lives.
Located in the second bedroom,
on the right, behind the curtain, the sculpture looks like a shelter made up of
corrugated paperboard rolls. The space is tough with its materials somewhat
rustic, but at the same time also warm by its ability to wrap us. The construction
is based on a form of light and a precise « do-it-yourself ». Like a
careful handyman, Robert Milin avoids an esthetics too smooth and glitzy, as
well as the disgrace of a too rough do-it-yourself.
Behind the curtain, we find
ourselves in another place. The corrugated paperboard rolls, the burlap and the
deep carpet, create a new closed space and isolates us for the time of
the durartion of A Lark from
Poland.
The art work does not give any position of externality to the public. Here
again, like often before, Robert Milin work is not meant to be contemplated.
In the hollow of the shelter,
voices, and words, unfold, follow one another, and are
complementary. These voices, are those of the inhabitants met during
those several months in the Saint-Remy quarter. In these words, a whole world,
at the same time real and abstract, lies
and reveals itself, taking us far away sometimes.
From Norman orchard fruits to
the flight of a lark, all these images and thoughts are personal and yet so
similar in their healing ability restored. From a new physical space we fall
into a poetic space. It is sparsely inhabited, if they are not fleeting
feelings leaving everything open to our imagination.
Delphine Suchecki
________________________________________________
En Face (2010)
Eight photographs silkscreened on enamelled sheet metal, 255 X 127 cm
