draft: a seminar series on research in progress in French and Francophone Studies in Australia

Presented by the Department of French and Francophone Studies

Louise Bourgeois and the Bièvre: archiving Paris’s lost river

Dr Léa Vuong (Department of French and Francophone Studies, University of Sydney)

Abstract

This presentation is to discuss a research article in preparation on the work of French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). The article argues that the work of Louise Bourgeois functions as an archival repository of the Bièvre, Paris’s underground river. The Bièvre was Paris’s second natural waterway until it was buried under the city and its surrounding suburbs, in a long process that started in the late 18^th century and ended in the mid-20^th century. Since its disappearance, urban projects to unearth the river have consistently surfaced: the most recent was endorsed by the City of Paris in 2020 and promises to ‘cool and regreen’ the dense and polluted city by reclaiming its forgotten waterway. The Bièvre is a key theme for Louise Bourgeois, whose work often features the river that flowed beside her childhood home, sustaining her parents’ tapestry repair business. The article confronts her personal and cultural archives on the river with recent and current urban projects of daylighting — opening up and restoring — the Bièvre, and their perception of the river as a lost bucolic site in the city. It establishes Bourgeois’s work as host of multi-disciplinary and inter-arts encounters between artists and writers associated with the Bièvre, including Watteau, Hugo, Huysmans, Redon, and Atget. It also discusses how Bourgeois’s oeuvre records anonymous practices and everyday experiences through photographic, oral, and written archives; and how the artist’s work rethinks traditional divides between text and image, canon and margin, archive and artwork, art and community.

About the speaker

Dr Léa Vuong is Lecturer in French studies at The University of Sydney. Prior to joining USYD in 2018, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester. She is the author of a monograph on contemporary French writer Pascal Quignard (Legenda, 2016). Her current research is focused on word and image interactions in modern and contemporary French and Francophone culture. She is currently working on a monograph on the artist Louise Bourgeois’s writings. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of Word & Image (38.1, 2022) devoted to the artist’s archival documents

For more information, contact: Associate Professor Michelle Royer – michelle.royer@sydney.edu.au

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