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Stéphanie Smalbeen: Unsee/ Dé-Voir

 

EFFACER – REVELER / ERASE – REVEAL

AJOUTER – RETIRER / ADD – WITHDRAW

ALTERER – RESISTER / DAMAGE – RESIST

 

Stéphanie Smalbeen, Jusqu’où l’on peut ne pas voir/ How far can’t you see, graphite drawing on A5 paper, 2019, Amiens (France).

 

Stéphanie Smalbeen, Réchauffement/ Warming, drawing, transfer with candle soot, traces of flames and burns on A5 paper, 2019, Amiens (France).

 

The drawings above address citizenship using an image of migrants at sea and an image of a plant whose lines were transferred with candle soot to evoke global warming. The graphic manipulation of the image by concealment and erasure point to a failure of perception, an altered vision that is nevertheless copiously fed by the constant flux of online information.

 

 

Stray citizen Smalbeen
Stéphanie Smalbeen is an artist and an associate lecturer at the UFR des Arts of the Picardie Jules Verne University, Amiens where she teaches contemporary drawing practices. I cannot understand citizenship as locked-in or reserved, I prefer its wide dispersion into a particular attention to being in the world, to what surrounds us, to landscapes. Losing oneself, wandering and drifting are as many modes of observation that exclude district lines, border stasis and hasty definitions. With drawing lines that cover up, erase, alter, damage, I evoke an uncertain citizenship, whose stakes are rendered through the visibility of loss.