The broom, the spoon and her shoes
2025 | Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, DE
« In The broom, the spoon and her shoes, Myriam Jacob-Allard braids cultural, personal, and film-historical references into an arresting reflection on matrilineal inheritance, transformation, and the experience of time through video and installation. The diptych, Les immortelles, is a four-part video collage combining abstract imagery and found vampire film audio and tells of a daughter bitten by her vampire mother, symbolizing the melancholic inheritance of identity and emotional burden. The kinetic sculptures represent, for their part, a spectral installation: a loose collection of papier-mâché objects—a hands, a broom, an iron, cowboy boots—that perform a series of simple, mechanical movements. Driven by small motors, they seem like the animated remnants of domestic routines. The objects move around, apparently aimlessly, within an area suggesting the floor-plan of an apartment. People are absent; only their traces remain. One side shows the disappearance of the body, the other its eternal return. In both cases, the questions are of presence and absence, action and stasis, the weight of inherited histories. » — Maximilian Rauschenbach
« In her work, vampirism becomes a poetic counter-narrative, a way of thinking about continuity through contagion rather than possession. Rejecting the pursuit of individual immortality, she imagines survival as an exchange of gestures, habits and stories across generations. Bloodlines are reclaimed as matrilineal, passed through mothers, daughters, grandmothers and nieces. Motherhood is explored as a transformative, irreversible threshold, likened to being bitten, after which the perception of the self gives way to the dawn of the collective. The discovery that this contamination works both ways, however, reminds us that the individual self has less disintegrated than it has revealed itself to have been a fiction all along. » — Eve Rogers [Berlin Art Link]
Technical collaborator for the kinetic sculptures: Orlando Helfer Rabaça
Collaborator for the exhibition installation: Simon Plouffe
Collaborator for the scenography: Ugo Ballara
For their support in this project, the artist would like to thanks: 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, li-chen Kuo, Paul Griffiths, PRIM, the team of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, the Conseil des arts du Canada and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.