Marie-Ève Levasseur

braceresses (une symbiose avec l’invisible)
04.06–05.06.2023
Room 1

Have another little libation for all those brewsters, and another one, and another. They haven’t been praised in quite some time. Libation as the source of life, like water that leaks, flows, and bends. These brewsters are behind every sip of beer you’ve ever drank in your life, and have been for over 5000 years. Here, Marie-Ève Levasseur presents a symbiosis with the invisible, from the names erased by history to the non-human activity of yeasts and their fermentation. Their voice is that of witches, priestesses, and other women, like ghostly relics, as in their real and immemorial name: alewife, braceresse, brewster, braciatrix.

Although breweress is a feminine noun, oddly enough, my word processing software keeps underlining it as a typographical error. In the olden days, as incredibly resourceful medicine women, they were purveyors of potable beverages and inexorable care. In an era when medicine as we know it was non-existent and water was undrinkable, the beneficial effects of fermentation were like magic, the invisible taking effect over time. Witches, then.

This exhibition implores us to raise a glass in honor of the goddess Ninkasi — the mother of fertility, remedies, and beer — or maybe the goddess Tenenet, or Mbaba-Mwana-Waresa. Like a gathering or a pagan ritual, objects, artworks, friends and other onlookers mix and mingle like a brew, a fermentation, a quasi-alchemy. The goal is stated: an exhibition, an opening, an assembly of people around the artist’s work, but the route has not been set. We must decode the next steps, as they come, just like Levasseur has deciphered the ancient Hymn to Ninkasi.

Art is therefore concocted like a beer mash. In it are elements from the past: from the artist’s sweat in your beer to perhaps the first ever recipe, all of it infused in an ageless ritual — drinking in good company. Moreover, this mash brings together the digital and the material in a single space: Centre CLARK. The cohabitation between the two allows us to tune into the non-human, like hoping for a still-nameless sensibility. A sensibility that seems to decentre humans in favour of everything that is related — visible or not —  to machines, the digital, beer, gathering, spirituality, women. Your spirit becomes lighter — laughing, crying, and merriment come more easily. Like a diabolical affliction, your beer is taking effect.

— stvn girard (translation by Jo-Anne Balcean)