Pour toujours et toujours
2025 | Glassbox-Sud, Montpellier, FR
« It’s generally through a series of small steps that Myriam Jacob-Allard envisions the mechanics of a story. Bit by bit, people, things and gestures take shape to form the outlines of counternarratives reflecting that which was said and that which remains to be seen, sketching out funny and sad family stories through fragments that are copied, isolated, repeated or superimposed — basically cut-and-paste. […]
The ”in the case of a film” notes of Myriam Jacob-Allard are reconstructions of excerpts gathered from vampire movies and embodied by the women who make up the artist’s family. Mother, sister, niece — each protagonist chosen from this imposed community is a threat to the narrative and sym-bolic structure: the nuclear, patriarchal western family with its obsession with legacy, its deadly desire for eternity. In Myriam’s films, there are no fathers — no men at all. No pred-ators or prey. Immortality becomes a question of transmission, not contamination, a collective project on a black background.
And then there’s the blue: a vain attempt to organize the drip lines of the collected memories of a middle-class family from Abitibi-Témiscamingue. A band-aid job with plenty of facsimiles, an inventory of tchotchkes (some absurd, some gloomy), an exercise in fill-in-the-blanks. These acts of mimicking, of cutting out and recomposing are inevitably awkward, but they reflect the awareness that it’s impossible to bring back what is gone, as well as the conviction that it’s still worth trying.
Annie Ernaux has said that the important thing in her writing is to “descend into the depths of reality, to achieve that realness that that is so hard to achieve, to go back in time, back to black.” Beyond the scopic drive triggered by Myriam’s domestic display of animated sculptures, her physical representations are also based in a movement, a back-and-forth between what has been and what remains.
Pour toujours et toujours doesn’t mean much in the language I share with Myriam. It’s a clumsy translation, or perhaps a dilemma: to live or let die. » — Ugo Ballara [Translated from the French by Ellen Warkentin]
Technical collaborator for the kinetic sculptures: Orlando Helfer Rabaça
Technical collaborator for the prototypes: Peter Fleming · Paul Griffiths
Les immortelles: lip sync: Alice Larouche · Émilie Jacob-Allard · Myriam Jacob-Allard · Claire Jacob. sound and image editor: Myriam Jacob- Allard. editor adviser: Michel Giroux. image : Simon Plouffe · Myriam Jacob-Allard. visuels effects: Myriam Jacob- Allard · Simon Beaupré · Charles Marchand Geoffroy · Lauzon. animation : Myriam Jacob-Allard. sound mixer: Bruno Bélanger. colonist: Sylvain Cossette.
For their support in the making of this project, the artist would like to thank: Alice Gervais, Claire Jacob, Émilie Jacob- Allard, Alice Larouche, Simon Plouffe, Denis Allard, Hubert Larouche, Nicholas Larouche, Michel Giroux, Antonia Hernández, Jean-Philippe Thibault, Anne Golden, Monique Moumblow, Joël Morin-Ben Abdallah, Geoffroy Lauzon, China Wood, Bob Wood, France Choinière, Emma Roufs, Peter Fleming, Paul Griffiths, Sebastiaan Verhees, Louison Gallego, Johanna Perez, Marion Lisch, Ugo Ballara et toute l’équipe de Glassbox, le cinéma Utopia, le Künstlerhaus Bethanien, le Conseil des arts du Canada, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, PRIM.
Photos credits: Cédrick Eymenier