Les Navettes

I decided from 2009-2010 to work on Shuttles. These are small dry cakes, belonging to a set of anthropomorphic pastries, typical of Marseille, metaphorically representing a vulva. The form and all the symbolism relating to the Shuttles: femininity, fertility both in connection with the Catholic religion and with ancient pagan rites gave me the idea of ​​telling women's stories in this form. They constitute a set of objects made in various techniques, textile sculptures, photomontage, papier-mâché, assembly, knitting, folded papers, using various materials from fur, lace, insects, feathers, beads, fabrics; the technique will serve the purpose. References are sometimes religious ex voto for the MLFSOM Shuttle or semi-votive for the Bridal Shuttle globe. They often refer to the world of collecting, hunting trophies from the Navette Mille e tre , entomology boxes from the Navette Bijoux de famille , Philis , Phoebe.

After several decades of listening to the difficulties and sufferings of women, of collecting stories of life's trials, a solid feminism has taken root and reporting on it through an artistic approach has become necessary for me. The impossibility of access to the practice of art for women over the centuries and the social weight weighing on them have contributed to stifling women's voices.

“Through the shuttles, Edith Laplane reinvents an individual mythology, the translation of a personal experience (…) where the obscurity concealed for so long reclaims its rights. Without litany or lament, the shuttles come from the speaking of women in art, it is a language in motion, adjusted, risky and cutting. Excluded from discourse (a question so persistent even today) the feminine is a reduced or negative unknown, except to put on the habit of Madonna, goddess, saint, or sinner, except to be forever "a creature" like the witches, the spellcasters, and other infernal chatterboxes that art cannot see in painting. Like the American artist Nancy Spero, whose work is based on rage and the cry, at war against virility, draws a phallic tongue and sticks it in the mouths of her characters. The body is the place of the unnameable. Something beats when the rest is silent. These are the works of women rooted in reality, upheavals, fractures and revolutions.

These irresistible shuttles impose themselves as thought of the first world. They shine above the waves and the sun of Marseille. Everything is mixed up: innocence and carnage, memory and present, derision and unreason. Men and women stand on two differently perilous shores that burn their lips and sharpen their fangs with the desire to warn of what sets bodies ablaze. For Edith Laplane, care does not replace the embrace. For every anger that arises, for every word of love that is spoken, there is the call of the mother, the call of nature in the sea older than life. »
Elisabeth Chambon Chief Heritage Curator