Corbeau

Part memoir, part tableau, Cor­beau is a mul­ti-laye­red nar­ra­ti­ve col­la­ge tra­cing life and death in the rural farm on which Swiss artist Anne Golaz grew up. Made over a twel­ve-year peri­od and brid­ging three genera­ti­ons, the three-part book wea­ves tog­e­ther pho­to­graphs, video stills and drawings, with texts by the aut­hor, screen­wri­ter and play­w­right, Antoi­ne Jac­coud, as well as the artist’s own wri­tings. Jac­coud recon­structs tran­scripts of con­ver­sa­ti­ons bet­ween fami­ly mem­bers and memo­ries recoun­ted by the artist in order to help to build this intri­ca­te sto­ry of sto­ries into a dra­ma­ta­lo­gi­cal work. The prot­ago­nist of Cor­beau is a young man seen in each chap­ter duti­ful­ly working on the farm. Gra­du­al­ly, howe­ver, his sen­se of duty appears to be instil­led with doubt – one that infu­ses the ent­i­re book.
Explo­ring the­mes of time, life, desti­ny and death, Cor­beau which takes its tit­le from an enig­ma­tic poem by Edgar All­an Poe elu­des a chro­no­lo­gi­cal order to pic­tu­re a place in which the future is only remi­nis­cent of the past. And whe­re desti­ny is shaped in the clai­re-obscu­res nooks of child­hood. In the artist’s words, the nar­ra­ti­ve con­struc­tion exists ‘in a vacu­um’, which tel­lin­g­ly offers a frame­work for both sup­port and dest­ruc­tion. It is wit­hin such a cir­cum­scri­bed space that mixed fee­lings towards heri­ta­ge arise.