Hans-Ulrich Obrist Archive Chapter 3: Agnès Varda
A day without seeing a tree is a waste of a day
Adel Abdessemed
Nairy Baghramian
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Douglas Gordon
Katharina Grosse
JR
Annette Messager
Laure Prouvost
Agnès Varda
01.07.2023—2024
Co-curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Senior Advisor), Arthur Fouray (Archivist and Curator) in close collaboration with Rosalie Varda
LUMA Arles
Living Archives Programme
Arles, France
https://www.luma.org/en/arles/our-program/event/agnes-varda-un-jour-sans-voir-un-arbre-est-un-jour-perdu
Production
Luz Gyalui, Head of Production
Barbara Blanc, Head Registrar and Conservator
Alice Cattelat, Architect and Production Manager
Nicolas Pène, Preparator
Laura Majan, Registrar
Laure Breton, Administration Manager
François Mallinjod, Audiovisual Supervisor
Jihye Kim, Assistant Conservator
Juliette Kernin, Assistant Producer
Graphic design: Christine Denamur, Lead Graphic Designer
Thanks to Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy
Thanks to Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris
With the assistance of Shérine El Sayed Taih, documentalist, and Jules Martin, archivist for Ciné-Tamaris
Ciné-Tamaris
Elvire Dolgorouky, Head of Productions Eric Leprêtre, Administration Stanislas Biessy, Distribution Manager, Léna Cervoni, Assistant
Céline Miquelis, production and installation of film cabins and models
Joséphine Wister Faure, manufacture of the Lady Potato Costume
Produced by LUMA Foundation
Agnès Varda, June 2013
At the heart of the third chapter of Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s archive at LUMA Arles lies his encounter with Agnès Varda (1928-2019). As a filmmaker, feminist, and pioneering artist, she played a central role in the French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In her own words, Varda’s artistic trajectory spans three distinct but interconnected lives as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist.
The exhibition highlights Obrist’s crucial role in introducing Varda to the art world. In 1991, he travelled to Paris for a residency at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Jouy-en-Josas, invited by Jean de Loisy and Marie-Claude Beaud. Over a three-month stay, Obrist visited over 300 artist studios, averaging five per day, where he met Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who spoke at length about Agnès Varda and the scope of her work between fiction and documentary. From that moment on, he nurtured the dream of meeting her.
After half a century of cinema, Utopia Station opened the door for Agnès Varda to explore new possibilities for engaging with multiscreen displays of moving images, multisensory experiences, and tactile elements. She continually experimented with exhibitions throughout the last 15 years of her life, as is evident in some of the unique works loaned by Rosalie Varda, Mathieu Demy, and Ciné-Tamaris. The starting point of her first major solo exhibition, L’ Île et Elle [The Island and Her], at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 2006, was the island of Noirmoutier that she discovered thanks to Jacques Demy. Varda introduced her now iconic cinema shacks. Each shack, whose structure is made of film reels, corresponds to a film she made. The last hut she built during her lifetime, My Shack of Cinema : The Greenhouse of Le Bonheur in 2018, is on display in the Archives Gallery at LUMA Arles.
Her spirit continues to inspire artists who crossed her path, as well as those who share her thirst for freedom, adventure, curiosity, and audacity. A vibrant testimony is provided by the eight posters created especially for this exhibition by Adel Abdessemed, Nairy Baghramian, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Katharina Grosse, JR, Annette Messager, and Laure Prouvost. Her thoughts, forever, exalt the beauty of life’s simple things: ‘A day without seeing a tree is a waste of a day.’
Arlette Varda, named in honour of the city of Arles, where she was conceived, was born on May 30, 1928, in Ixelles, Brussels. With a Greek father and a French mother, this cultural blend profoundly influenced her personal and creative life. At 18, she swapped her given name, Arlette, for Agnès. In 1940, war compelled her family to flee Belgium and take refuge in Sète, where she spent her adolescence aboard a boat anchored in the port. Starting in 1951, she made her home on rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. A few years later, she met the actor Antoine Bourseiller, with whom she had a relationship. On May 28, 1958, she gave birth to their daughter, Rosalie Varda and decides to raise Rosalie on her own. Later, she married filmmaker Jacques Demy (who died in 1990), raising with him Rosalie Varda-Demy and their son, future actor and director Mathieu Demy.
Agnès Varda passed away at home on March 29, 2019, at the age of 90, after a battle with cancer, surrounded by her family, collaborators, friends, and cats. Her passing prompted many tributes from significant figures in global cinema, including Martin Scorsese. A public homage was paid in her honour on April 2, 2019, at the Cinémathèque française, attended by her family, close friends, and numerous celebrities, including Catherine Deneuve, Sandrine Bonnaire, Dany Boon, and JR.
At 19, Varda moves to Paris and studies art history at the École du Louvre and starts learning photography at the École de Vaugirard. In 1949, she earned her professional photographer’s diploma. She began her career as the official photographer for the Avignon Festival in 1948 and the TNP, Théâtre national populaire, where she documented the beginnings of Jean Vilar and the iconic career of Gérard Philipe. Her neighbours and models included artists Calder, Brassaï, Hantaï, Germaine Richier, Valentine Schlegel, and more. In her courtyard on rue Daguerre, she organised the first exhibition of her photographs in June 1954, inviting close friends. The photos were affixed to fibreboard panels and attached to the walls and windows with small wooden battens, as she did not want any frames. Her lens captured both ordinary people and her era’s personalities during photojournalism trips to China, Cuba, or even for the magazine Réalités in Portugal, and Germany.
In 1954, with no prior training, Agnès Varda founded Tamaris Films, a cooperative that would become Ciné-Tamaris. Inspired by the structure of William Faulkner’s Wild Palms, she directed her first feature-length film, La Pointe Courte, in Sète (Hérault) in the summer of 1954, propelling her to the cinematic scene’s forefront. The film, considered ‘free and pure’ by André Bazin, brought a breath of fresh air to French cinema. In 1961, she directed Cléo from 5 to 7, selected for the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival. In 1967, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy moved to Los Angeles. In San Francisco, she made a short film about her uncle Jean Varda, Uncle Yanco, and with the help of engaged students, made the activist documentary Black Panthers (1968). This documentary, filmed in Oakland, captured a crucial moment of Black activism in the United States, allowing her to document key figures of the movement, such as Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale. In Los Angeles, she filmed Lions Love (... and Lies) in 1969, featuring the authors of the musical “Hair,” Rado and Ragni, and the Factory muse, Viva. Varda made the cover of the issue of Andy Warhol’s first Interview magazine. She developed a close friendship with Jim Morrison, whom she knew until his death in Paris.
She directed over fourty films, among them Le Bonheur (1965), One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), Vagabond (1985). She paid tribute to Jacques Demy with several films, particularly Jacquot de Nantes, a recounting of his childhood. With her company Ciné-Tamaris, she regained the rights to and restored all of Demy’s films. She received numerous honorary awards, including a Honorary César in 2001, the 2009 Henri-Langlois Prize, the 2013 Leopard of Honour, and the 2015 Cannes Festival’s Palme d’honneur. In 2017, she received an Honorary Award Oscar for her entire career.
From the year 2000 and the film The Gleaners and I, Varda experimented with a digital camera, a tool that brought her closer to the people she filmed. This marked the beginning of her third life, straddling art and documentary. She took her first steps as a ‘visual artist’ (an English term she preferred over ‘artiste plasticienne’ in French) in 2003 during the 50th Venice Art Biennale. Her installations were exhibited at several Venice and Lyon Biennales, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, and the Martine Aboucaya Gallery in Paris, among others. Numerous exhibitions were dedicated to her, including Je me souviens de Vilar en Avignon [I Remember Vilar in Avignon, 2007], a retrospective at the LUX national stage in Valence (2013), and Agnès Varda in Californialand at LACMA in Los Angeles (2013). Since 2010, her works have been regularly presented at the Nathalie Obadia Gallery in Paris and Brussels. Her artistic work synthesises her photography, cinema, video, and space practices. Simultaneously, she directed several other documentaries, including The Beaches of Agnès (2008), a filmed autobiography that recounts her life and work, winning the César for Best Documentary Film in 2009. In 2011, she created a five-episode series, Agnès Varda: From Here to There, broadcast on Arte, where she describes her travels around the world to present her films and converses with her artist friends, including Miquel Barceló, Christian Boltanski, Chris Marker, Annette Messager, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. In 2017, she co-directed Faces Places with artist JR and and documented her work as a filmmaker in her last documentary that, takes the title of her eponymous book published in French in 1994, Varda by Agnès, in 2019.
Annette Messager was close to Agnès Varda until the end of her days, as evidenced by the two drawings with acrostic text presented in the exhibition, one declaring ‘Artist Watcher,’ the other ‘Adventurer Genius Navel-gazing Encroaching Serene’ and her Portrait of Agnès Varda, an infinity sign adorned with the famous bowl cut that Varda sported since she was 19, which later became two-tone. Between these two drawings, she chose to display her work Doigt d’honneur-utérus 2 [Middle Finger-uterus 2, 2019]. Annette Messager is friends with Hans-Ulrich Obrist since his adolescence. It was through her and Christian Boltanski that he was able to meet Varda. They did their market shopping together rue Daguerre and thus saw each other very often. In Agnès Varda: From Here to There, Agnès Varda filmed Annette Messager during a lunch in her courtyard with Christian Boltanski, then filmed her in her studio in Malakoff and in her exhibition, Les Messagers [The Messengers], at the Centre Pompidou in 2007.
In the cinematic and artistic universe of Agnès Varda, the most mundane and modest vegetable, the potato, has acquired significant prominence and meaning. Her enthusiasm for potatoes was revealed in her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I. The film dealt with gleaning, the act of recovering, collecting, recycling, and giving new life to discarded objects and food, reflecting Varda’s own process of capturing moments of life. While exploring the Beauce region, Varda was fascinated with heart-shaped potatoes left at the edge of fields due to their unusual shape. This fondness for the tuber developed into a sort of obsession. Intrigued by their ability to age and sprout anew, she began to film them with delight and observe their transformation. These discarded potatoes were brought home, examined, and stored in the cellar and the open air. Already in 1953, Varda had photographed a heart-shaped potato, a print of which, from 1954, is exhibited in LUMA Arles. This potato was several decades ahead of those from the film The Gleaners and I and Patatutopia, and especially from her series of eleven digital photographs of Potato Hearts (2003).
The iconic work Patatutopia has been exhibited in a dozen countries on three continents since its first presentation. From The Gleaners and I and Patatutopia up to her last days, Varda was surprised to have received thousands of heart-shaped potatoes gleaned, sent, and brought by fans. Her last work, Les Mains complices [Partnering Hands], surrounds with these heart-shaped potatoes the intertwined hands of couples Agnès Varda was friend with, the utopia of hope, love, and life.
Utopia Station is a long-term project, co-organised by Molly Nesbit, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, which invites over 150 artists and thinkers to come together and contemplate within a project shaped like a station bound for utopia. It has developed through cycles of lectures, notably at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, and also two exhibitions, the first at the 50th Venice Biennale, Dreams and Conflicts – The Viewer’s Dictatorship, directed by Francesco Bonami, and also in 2004 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, then directed by Chris Dercon.
During a debate in 1964, Ernst Bloch defended his position on utopia against the criticism of Theodor Adorno. Adorno emphasised that some utopian dreams had been realised but had fallen into a cycle of repetition and boredom. Bloch countered by asserting that if the term ‘utopia’ had lost credibility, as ‘something is missing’. Utopia has historically been a debated concept, with contributions from various voices seeking happiness, freedom, and paradise. Over time, utopia has lost its flame and found itself constrained by fixed perspectives and exhausted efforts.
However, the need for utopia persists, leading to the creation of Utopia Station – a flexible conceptual and physical structure for contemplation, exchange, and artistic contributions. The Station consisted of a long platform, circular benches, a wall with doors leading to installations, and a suspended roof. It invited visitors to observe, rest, and engage in conversations while presenting artistic works, performances, lectures, and other events. Going beyond the traditional exhibition, Utopia Station incorporated aesthetic elements into a broader social and economic context. The discussion about its place and purpose found resonance in the work of Jacques Rancière, emphasising the interconnection of the arts with broader social activity and its political implications. Philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant also offered a valuable perspective to Utopia Station, that of thinking utopia as trembling.
Agnès Varda’s shacks of cinema embody the intersection between cinema and visual art, two fields where Varda left an indelible mark. These shacks, artistic installations, were designed from the reels of Varda’s films and transformed into three-dimensional structures. By recycling 35 mm film strips, Varda found a way to overcome the obsolescence of these media, which, once converted to digital files, are no longer used for projection in movie theaters. Metaphors for childhood, each shack offers a unique space to relive her films from a different angle, deconstruct film art and question its materiality. Their surfaces are like stained glass composed of thousands of images from her films. Varda offers a spatial and non- linear reinterpretation of her feature films, giving them new life as shacks of light.
In 2006, Hervé Chandès invited Agnès Varda to design a major exhibition, L’Île et Elle [The Island and Her], at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. On Boulevard Raspail, not far from the famous rue Daguerre, she installed her first cinema shack, My Shack of Failure, made from the reels of her film Les Créatures (1966), which was a commercial failure. My Shack of Failure is formed from one copie of the film on 9 reels, which, once unrolled, stretch over more than 3,500 metres. After a second exhibition of My Shack of Failure, renamed My Shack of Failure Turned into My Shack of Cinema at the 10th Lyon Biennale in 2009, Varda designed her second shack, dedicated to the movie Lions Love (... and Lies) (1969), which uses two reels of the film, exhibited at LACMA during her retrospective Agnès in Californialand in 2013.
In 2018, Agnès Varda unveiled for the first time at the Nathalie Obadia Gallery in Paris My Shack of Cinema: The Greenhouse of Le Bonheur, dedicated to her first colour film from 1965, which scandalised audiences at its release by dealing with the complexities of love and prefiguring the social revolutions of the 60s. This shack, which evokes the colours of Impressionist paintings, and Van Gogh’s sunflowers, is at the centre of the exhibition of the third chapter of Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s archive at LUMA Arles. It comprises approximately 2,500 metres of 35 mm celluloid strips and presents in its centre the sunflowers that appear in the credits of the film Le Bonheur.
They demonstrate how Varda explored the limits of the cinematic medium while showing her commitment to sustainability and recycling. These shacks are not just an ecological gesture but also a meditation on cinema itself. By inviting the viewer into a space built from film reels, Varda encourages reflection on the ephemeral and fragile nature of the cinematic medium. The work of art then becomes a place of memory, reflecting the history of cinema and Varda’s own career. Posthumously, The Tent from Vagabond was realised in 2022.
Released in 1965, Le Bonheur is an audacious and avant-garde film by Agnès Varda that ignited scandals and significant censorship upon its debut (it was banned for those under eighteen). The film raises moral questions by exploring adultery, not only without judgment but also as a source of added joy and love. François, a carpenter, is content with his marital life with his wife Thérèse and their two children until he falls in love with Émilie, a young post office employee. François experiences no guilt or moral conflict about his adultery; on the contrary, he sees love as an entity that does not subtract but multiplies. Jean-Claude Drouot portrays François alongside his real-life family, his wife and his two young children, which adds an extra layer of authenticity and intimacy to the film.
The periodical point d’ironie was born out of a conversation between agnès b., Christian Boltanski, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist in 1997. Since then, six to eight issues have been published each year, each conceived by an artist who appropriates this medium and brings it to the status of a unique and public work of art. Because of its free access, size, and distribution, point d’ironie is an atypical format distributed sporadically – one hundred thousand copies are spread worldwide in museums, galleries, bookstores, schools, cinemas, and stores, among others. Invented by French writer Alcanter de Brahm in the late 19th century, the point d’ironie [irony mark] is a punctuation mark used at the end of a sentence (like an exclamation point or a question mark) to signal irony. For point d’ironie n°57, in 2015, Agnès Varda had her first public collaboration with JR around the figure of the mail carrier, and more specifically, the mail carrier Jacky Patin, but also took the opportunity to address her passion for Facteur Cheval and her correspondence, with Pierre François, Agathe Cristov, or Alexander Calder.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist wrote in 2020: ‘As an ongoing and open process, my Instagram project not only captures moments of individual expression through the handwritten gesture, but it also celebrates and preserves difference; it is an archive of remembering.’ The Handwriting Project was conceived as a fusion of the analogue and the digital, from the slow composition of the written note to the speed of an Instagram post. This attempt to record, remember, and reaffirm the idiosyncrasy of handwriting began when Ryan Trecartin and Kevin McGarry installed the Instagram app on Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s phone. The overwhelming potential for image propagation in Instagram led him to seek a structure for its use, an idea or a rule of the game in the spirit of Oulipo. While Umberto Eco’s words encouraged him to protect handwriting, Etel Adnan inspired him to celebrate it. During a trip with her, Simone Fattal, and Koo Jeong A in Brittany during the 2012 holiday season, she inspired the Handwriting Project with this poem: ‘Light encounters. The Ocean’s horns – light on light’ Since then, Hans-Ulrich Obrist has published nearly 5,000 handwritten notes.
A celebration of love, Les Mains complices [Partnering Hands] series is the final work of Agnès Varda. A gathering she desired with her family, loved ones, and friends, the work was created on her kitchen table, which she considered her ‘hearth’, on March 3, 2019. Photographed with her phone, this série encapsulates the simplicity and enthusiasm of creation for Agnès Varda. Varda was certain, having spent nine decades on this planet, that only love matters. One of these sessions was also an opportunity was also the setting for the creation of a surrealist collage by Christian Boltanski, Koo Jeong A, JR, Annette Messager, Agnès Varda, and Rosalie Varda for Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s Handwriting Project. In Varda’s words, it is an ‘exhibition of photographs which is a series of conniving and loving hands.’ She adds ‘Couples joined their hands in front of my lens. I surrounded them with a garland of tiny heart-shaped potatoes. Let’s dare to be sentimental.’
From the postcards of his childhood to the artists’ editions of the World Soup (The Kitchen Show) catalogue, the artist postcards of Hotel Carlton Palace: Chambre 763 in 1993, the Do It project (1993-), Take Me (I’m Yours) (1995-), to the artists posters of Utopia Station in 2003 and the artist posters of the IT’S URGENT project produced by LUMA between 2019 and 2020, Hans-Ulrich Obrist has always sought to invite artists to express themselves through media meant for sharing. Following the first chapter of Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s archive dedicated to Édouard Glissant, presented at LUMA Arles in 2021 and then at LUMA Westbau in 2023, for which Valerio Adami, Miquel Barceló, Tosh Basco & Wu Tsang, Daniel Boyd, Patrick Chamoiseau, Tony Cokes, Julien Creuzet, Melvin Edwards, Koo Jeong A, Dozie Kanu & Precious Okoyomon, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Julie Mehretu, Jota Mombaça, The Otolith Group, Philippe Parreno, Raqs Media Collective, Asad Raza, Anri Sala, Sylvie Séma-Glissant paid tribute to the philosopher-poet with unique posters, it was only natural to continue this initiative to honour the career and life of Agnès Varda, while underscoring the close ties between her work and contemporary artistic practices. Close friends, intimates, admirers, Adel Abdessemed, Nairy Baghramian, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Katharina Grosse, JR, Annette Messager, and Laure Prouvost commemorated, each in their own way, the worlds of Agnès Varda.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Arthur Fouray wish to thank Maja Hoffmann for her vision and passion for archives; and extend their gratitude to Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Mustapha Bouhayati, Matthieu Humery, Christophe Danzin, Anna von Brühl, Friedrich von Brühl, and the LUMA Dream Team.
First and foremost, we wish to extend a heartfelt thank you to Rosalie Varda, Mathieu Demy, and the family of Agnès Varda; to the team of Ciné-Tamaris, especially Shérine El Sayed Taih and Jules Martin, but also Elvire Dolgorouky, Eric Leprêtre, Stanislas Biessy, Léna Cervoni; to the Nathalie Obadia Gallery, to Nathalie Obadia and her team including Marie Bernard, Agathe Cordoliani, Alizée Gex; as well as the artists who participated in the exhibition: Annette Messager and the Marian Goodman Gallery, Adel Abdessemed and his team including Lisa Rey-Galiay, Nairy Baghramian accompanied by Nicolas Hsiung, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon supported by David Sharp, Katharina Grosse and her collaborators Natalija Martinovic and Kristin Rieber, JR and his studio: Marc Azoulay, Camille Pajot, Marie-Dominique Plumejeau Tapin, and finally Laure Prouvost with the help of Mona Pouillon.
Our special thanks go to Luz Gyalui and the LUMA Arles production team, especially Alice Cattelat, Barbara Blanc, Laura Majan, Juliette Kernin, Jihye Kim; to Dimitri Bruni, Manuel Krebs, and Ludovic Varone of NORM for the layout of Agnès Varda’s Post-it notes; to Amélie Busi and the LUMA Arles communication team, Christine Denamur and Maria Luisa Rojano for the realisation of the exhibition poster and the signage; to Luana Terrasse for coordination and proofreading the texts. Many thanks also to Max Shackleton, Producer, and Lorraine Two Testro, Head of Operations and Planning for Hans-Ulrich Obrist; Céline Miquelis for the installation of the cabins and cinema models; to Christophe Vallaux; to Julia Fabry; to Hervé Chandès, Pierre-Édouard Couton and the team of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain; to the Institut pour la photographie des Hauts- de-France, Lille; to the Serpentine team; to agnès b., Élodie Cazes, William Massey and the team of the Fonds de dotation agnès b.; to Charlotte Horn and Carl Davies of FACT Liverpool; to Alexander S. C. Rower and the Calder Foundation; to Sintagma, and in particular Ana Beatriz Gonçalves, Rosário Valadas Vieira and Renato Barcelos, for the subtitling of archival videos; to Jesus Plaëttner, for the mastering and audio restoration of archival videos; to Gérard Issert, Granon Digital, Paris for the digital prints; to Thibault Verdon and the IDzia team, Marc Rodrigues, Damien Poggiali, Arthur Aigon, Philippe Arnaud, Pascal Picard, for the audiovisual set up; Gilles Pennegaggi and all the exhibition installation teams, in particular Victor Jaget, Mathieu Hengevelt for the hanging, and Xavier Ressegand; Olivier Fisher for the carpentry; Florence Cuschieri and Stephanie Jabir for the condition reports; to the César Workshop for the production of model bases, Œil de Lynx for the wallpaper installation; Atelier SHL for the prints, Acoplast for the signage and label elements; and finally, to all those who have participated in the development of the exhibition, including Claire Charrier, Lucas Jacques-Witz, Koo Jeong A, Adèle Koechlin, Molly Nesbit, Chiara Parisi, Jean-François Raffalli, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Manuella Vaney and Josh Willdigg.
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