Hélène Baril was born in the French Alps, but grew up by the sea, the same part of Brittany frequented by the great filmmaker/biologist Jean Painlevé, who among other things, practiced filming under the sea. After getting an MA in literature, Hélène quit her job teaching French to study art. Moving to Finland, she began a career painting houses, purposely confusing the work of fine arts and decoration. Recently, she’s been developing a “tale” involving racecars. In 2011, she created Orlandus Gallery, inspired by a fictional Finnish painter and racing car driver from the early 1800s. The artist also served as inspiration for SBK, an experimental collaborative Hélène founded in 2012, which uses a car for meetings, projects, and as a working tool. Constructing its name and logo after Shell Oil, SBK is “an allegorical and poetic initiative,” whose sphere of operation touches literature, geography, economy, environmentalism, and popular psychology. In 2013 she started a collaboration with anthropologist Michael Taussig in what they call their Sea Theater. Hélène’s work is a fairy tale aimed at confusing real and fictional worlds, or simply encountering the one into the other.


www.sbkland.com (racing car tale)

30.1.14

Beauty

When we see a beautiful thing, our own importance is diminished: ‘It is not that we cease to stand at the centre of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the centre of our own world. We willingly cede the ground to the thing that stands before us.’


This is from one of Elaine Scarry's books. 
Beauty also gets you (close) to justice she says.

Now. Up to us - US = WE WHO SEE BEAUTY-  not to cede the ground to the thing that stands before us though. Depends on what that thing is also, for sure. Or maybe it is just about "not to cede the ground".










25.1.14

Circonvolut


"The great goal so long sought had finally been achieved: that of making Paris an object of luxury and curiosity, rather than of use - a ville d'exposition, a display city placed under glass,... an object of admiration and envy to foreigners, unbearable for its inhabitants."

Victor Fournel, Paris nouveau et Paris futur, 1868, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Paris Arcades, Dream City and Dream House








24.1.14

Don't forget emotional life



As a friend of mine reminded me, we are not products. Why do you show yourself as an image, as a product? Why do you avoid, forget your beautiful vulnerability, wrote a special friend of mine. Why do you play the game of business?
you=we=us