Didier Morelli: La maison à jouer de S.L. ( S.L.’s Play House)

April 20th — May 27th, 2023

Opening: Avril 20th at 5:30 pm

Project Description:

Didier Morelli’s multi-disciplinary practice includes performance, print media, video, installation, and site-specific durational actions. La maison à jouer de S.L., is an immersive installation that revisits Suzanne Leblanc’s solo exhibition, La maison à penser de L.W, first presented at Skol in 1999. Since then, the work has been stored in his father, the artist François Morelli’s, studio. In March 2020, Didier moved back to live in this space that had been his childhood home, after ten years abroad. The project was initiated through a conversation with Leblanc, who gave Didier the permission to work with the original exhibition material. Didier transforms Leblanc’s oeuvre into a new and portable architectural configuration, a constantly shifting installation and a mutable stage for different theoretical interventions.

In her original 1999 installation, Leblanc created a series of 55 panels invested with prose, that expanded Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy into a sensuous, reflective, and incantatory fiction. With each individual panel physically representing a different room of the house the famed philosopher designed for his sister Margaret, Leblanc built a new and portable architectural configuration.

A series of questions will be posed through Didier’s re-presentation of the installation. The artist aims to reconfigure and rethink the living, embodied archive which is housed in the studio where he now lives, by drawing into conversation the modular sculptural work by Leblanc, François, and his wife, Arièle Dionne-Krosnick. The private space of the studio is literally turned inside out, with Wittgenstein’s language-games serving as an entry point into a playful deconstruction of text, sculpture, childhood, architecture, and sport (soccer/football).

Engaging academic and artistic collaborators including Leblanc, Morelli, and Dionne-Krosnick, who all agreed to play essential collaborative roles as artists, thinkers, and writers, the project looks to rethink the traditional concept of theory and the archive as a static, monumental, motionless, entity. Praxis, poetics, and biography come to the fore, rethinking the rules of the game in order to distort original meaning and create anew.

Photo : Didier Morelli