Lightning Strikes and Other Queer Reveries
In a philosophical essay, Sarah Matia Pasqualetti, a doctoral student in Aesthetics at the Sorbonne School of Arts, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, discusses the work of Marie-Luce Nadal through a poetic exploration of lightning.
Marie-Luce Nadal is an artist-researcher interested in the impermanence of certain ephemeral and/or atmospheric materials: clouds, fog, smoke, steam, wind, breath, dust... With these substances, the artist establishes a relationship that lies between scientific research and the unveiling of a poetic, spiritual world. Her cultural references are linked to the land where she grew up, Perpignan, and to ancestral practices inherited from the agricultural knowledge of her family tradition. For example, in the performance Faire pleurer les nuages (2015-2022), the artist draws on her family culture of meteorological manipulation and cloud seeding (a form of weather modification that involves adding various substances to clouds in order to influence precipitation). Picking up on her grandfather's battle with the sky, Nadal says she "wants to make the clouds cry and search for their emotions."
Situated between divine and terrestrial forces, her works, like lightning, link heaven and earth. In particular, Nadal questions the notion of atmosphere, both from a physical and psychological point of view, focusing on the incorporeal materialities that make up a sensitive atmosphere. Following a poetic-scientific approach to meteors, the artist built La Fabrique du Vaporeux n°1 (2015): a machine that captures and then reproduces extracts of clouds. Nadal speaks of wine-like annual seals of cloud extracts, as each has its own qualities. Following harvesting, the artist can "sculpt" and interact with the cloud, which nevertheless never ceases to change.
"Is it really about clouds?” Marie-Luce Nadal says her works can be read through "several lines of perception," opening up a metaphorical and poetic field. This is how, in her devices, the real and the imaginary are blended. Finally, through her capture collections (which enable these materials to be preserved for longer), she establishes a different kind of relationship with these materials, one that extends over different temporalities, notably longer and more dilated than ordinary perception.
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