The Travelers
(Maastricht / Boschstraat 107)
Pauline Bastard (1982, France) has an amusing way of dealing with cliché images. In the video Travelers she uses sent postcards that she found at flea markets. The postcards stereotypically show idyllic landscapes, beach scenes and historical cityscapes. The texts the senders once wrote on the backside are rendered as subtitles to the images. These occasionally quite personal messages were originally not addressed to us and as such give the images a different dimension. There is something voyeuristic to reading the line: ‘I hope you will feel better when you receive this card’. Usually though the tone is light. Unwillingly the viewer is confronted with the histories of sender and receiver, which makes that these banal postcards take on extra meaning. The presented postcards are the epitome of life itself.
Every work by Pauline Bastard is a quest for what is not directly perceivable. Each little fold, each unevenness or text bears an identity of their own. Bastard is looking for ways to give the viewer access to the idiosyncrasy of what is a seemingly stereotypical landscape, meant to please the observer.