Rianna Jade Parker in Conversation With Laure Prouvost
Turner Prize winning conceptual artist Laure Prouvost talks to critic and curator Rianna Jade Parker on the eve of her October commission ‘No More Front Tears’ launching for CIRCA 2022. Connecting over Zoom – with Laure in her studio in Antwerp, Brussels and Rianna in Kingston, Jamaica – they discuss the medium of public art, migration memories and Laure’s enduring fascination with the octopus.
Rianna Jade Parker: With your new video work No More Front Tears for CIRCA, do you feel like you’re responding to a personal or global situation?
Laure Prouvost: It’s a bit of both, I mean, the screen, the scale and the size and the directness of it. I wanted something that could be as direct as it’s meant to be. I didn’t want to subvert what it’s made for. But to use it as a billboard, as propaganda, as adverts in the way advertising does. And this video, the whole thing talks a lot about migrations, movement, human, nonhuman, other than humans. You know, all this could be seen personally or much more global of course. It’s about birds and also the way we use the planet and the struggle of animal life to move. But also human life. I’ve moved, mostly in Europe, so I’m not a big migrator but I feel like, still each time you have to root yourself again. Root yourself or find your history, your connection to a place. And so I think it’s always an on-off feeling of feeling connected and then disconnected. I think it’s all about these emotions. But I experience it much softer, I think people with dramatic migrations are very different. But still, I think from one perspective, you can feel empathy. You can still feel empathy and desire, empathy and desire. And I think, so having Brexit, the whole story of Britain sending migrants to run. All this sort of extreme politics, I must wake you up as well as an artist. Try to, if you have a chance, have your voice heard a bit, take the opportunity.
