Alix Boillot – L’Éternité (2), 2024 ; Lacrymatoires, 2024

In her sculptures and performances, Alix Boillot treats water, a common and universal good, as a bonding agent, an element that facilitates relationships. Working with rain, snow or ice, which she combines with other materials, she seeks simplicity of gesture, uneventfulness and sobriety of form, in order to highlight the intangible and the ephemeral. Her work is poetic; it involves rituals of giving and communion, a bonding of nature, humans and the sacred.

Alix Boillot’s work explores water in its human and emotional form — tears, salty drops secreted by the lacrimal glands. Carved from rock salt stones, the artist’s flasks are reminiscent of the “lachrymatories” found in Roman necropolises, so named because of the sodium deposits they contained: they would have collected the tears of bereaved loved ones. Placed near the altar, the pearls are reminiscent of oysters: in Greek mythology, they were the tears of the gods, deposited with the dew. We now know that a pearl appears in reaction to a wound or an intrusion: this definition could be that of a tear. All that remains of the tears is the salt, in the shape of a pearl. These pearls can be seen again on the scale of a necklace, worn by the singer of the performance L’Éternité (1): as she sings Jeff Buckley’s Grace, a song said to have been a premonition of its author’s drowning, she lets her tears well up, on the banks of the Rhône.

For the Lyon Biennale, Alix Boillot is in residence in the towns of Givors, Sainte-Colombe and Saint-Romain-en-Gal, all situated on the banks of the Rhône. She is working with local residents and users, in partnership with a Third Place environment called La Ventil’, and 11th grade technical and Industrial science students from the Lycée Aragon-Picasso in Givors. She exhibits her work at La Maison du Fleuve in Givors and at the Musée gallo-romain in Saint-Romain-en-Gal.

12 October 2024, 5pm – L’Éternité (1), performance with Leslie Carmine, Place Antonin-Poncet pier, Lyon