In conversation: Amalia Laurent

Amalia Laurent is an artist who lives and works between Paris and Nîmes. Her work explores themes such as topography, geography and cartography, both real and phantasmagorical. She is currently working on a PhD dissertation on the links between architecture and processional practices at the EHESS (1). Questioning how imagination enables human beings to create spaces, Amalia Laurent works with various dyeing techniques she has developed. Through multiple layers of color, formed by dozens of chromatic superimpositions, she gives depth to two-dimensional surfaces, calling on our imagination to create both physical and emotional spaces.

(1)  École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales : School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

Performance Loro-loroning atunggal, Unifier ce qui est double in March 2023 at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Photography by Charlotte Robin.

Madeleine Riousse: How and when did you start dyeing?

Amalia Laurent: I studied printmaking, such as screen-printing, engraving, and lithography. I started my practice at the Arts Decoratifs in Strasbourg in graphic design. That was my focus there. I went into graphic communications thinking that I would find work because I didn't understand what being an artist was, I didn't understand what that mean. I only stayed three years for my BA, for personal reasons, and I took a year off because I couldn't find an internship. So during that year, I went to Indonesia to learn how to dye. That is  how I got into batik. Batik is a technique of printing on fabric, through dyeing, when you coat surfaces with wax it blocks the pores of the fabric, so the dye doesn't get in. Where there's wax, after you boil it to remove it, it stays white. I learned with an artist called Mas Tatang who trained me for several months. I lived with him. Itt was great. You know, they are intergenerational families in Indonesia. So I was with the grandmother, and the grandfather, and there was a rice field next door… After that, I decided to leave France to continue my Masters and try a school specialized in printing because it was the only thing I knew how to do. I went into Printmaking at the Royal College in London.

I thought, why not continue with a bit of dyeing on the side as I focused on printing during my Masters. Hence, in parallel with school I participate in a bi-annual residency initiated by Sylvain de Barbeyrac where there was a majority of musicians. I had my little studio and I did dyeing on dyeing on dyeing on dyeing. I developed these two practices in parallel using a fabric called tarlatan, which is the fabric used to rub ink on metal plates in etching. I started working with this material because it was hanging all around our studios and workshops at school, it's quite stiff and after a while it becomes more supple. That's how I began to wonder, whether in printmaking, silkscreen, or batik, about the way to mark surface. It's very particular, you draw something and you section, but what happens if the liquid sections itself? That's how dyeing became the main character of my practice. I try to use a variety of random techniques to see how the dye reacts to itself and how it can create patterns within itself. When you are delimiting the liquid dyes with itself you somehow create territories inside the surface, and it is very linked with the way Indonesia uses motives and colors ; in fact, there are over 500 ethnies composing those islands. As a result, there are different ways of speaking, dressing, cooking, and playing the Gamelan, etc. In the fabric, each pattern corresponds to a way of thinking or seeing their environment and you can tell where people come from by the way they dress. Fabric is only an example because in everyday life you can understand people's origin also with food or music. This leads to the question: How to represent a landscape, a territory on a limited surface? I started to ask myself how I could draw a territory without pre-establishing its lines. That is how I start my reflection: take this medium as a map and understand how the image represented on it developed. More and more the scale of my work began to be larger and set in the space itself.

MR: Your relationship with Indonesia is also reflected in the Gamelan music that you practice yourself. Can you tell me a bit more about it?

AL: I love the Gamelan! It became an important part of my artistic practice, whereas before it was more of a hobby. I started when I was in England. There were courses at the Southbank Centre, and when I started playing in London, it was so funny because, in reality, I just wanted to listen to the sounds as I didn't have them at home anymore. Moreover, it is very rare to hear Gamelan, concerts aren't as many as I wish. And here, by taking lessons, I was able to have access to it every week. And that's how I became kind of addicted to it. Above all, what's interesting about the Gamelan is that it's an instrument made up of several instruments – gongs, metallophones, inverted gongs – and you have a minimum of 15 musicians playing. That many musicians already show how gigantic this instrument must be, so the musical space is already represented by the instrument itself, and when we play, we're swimming inside the music. In Indonesia, living with territories and spaces is omnipresent, even in our contemporary world. The Gamelan also allows the dead to come back and enjoy the space as we do while playing. That particular material, which is sound, which could bring the living society and the ancestors fascinated me. For my degree show at the Royal College, I tried to analyze this mechanism together. 

Thick wind in the corridor, 2023.Château de la Motte-Tilly, Aube, France.In situ installation. Two pieces of 5,00 x 5,00 m. Dyes, fruits, pigments, bark, cotton. Curator Valérie Arconati.Images © Amalia Laurent.

MR: Can you tell me a bit more about the idea behind this project?

AL: The performance was called All Are Waiting But To Be Alive / Tous n'attendent que d'être vivant / Sedoyo Nenggo Kesang Malih. Through three voices speaking English, French and Javanese at the same time, the performers were reading a poem I wrote which spoke about the way of expanding space. I worked on how to sound tenfold but also on our personal space which becomes a community and on how the dead could potentially get access to it while the performers were speaking all together, but it was incomprehensible. In fact, the idea was, while doing these overlapping voices — sort of a polyphony, which is more of a plural homophony while talking about Gamelan — does space really expand? Do we manage to bring back the dead? Actually, a funny action by the public appeared at the end ; in the Javanese Gamelan ancestors can enjoy the space created by music when there is almost no music..., almost silence, but the instruments continue to vibrate. There's this constant vibration, you can't hear music anymore but it's not completely silent. Except when the performance ended, people applauded and left, whereas it was at this moment that everything should normally be revealed. So I said to myself, this is a complete failure!

MR: Did you try to continue the project?

AL: After I graduated, I went back to France and started doing nothing but dyeing, just for my technique, because I had to develop it. It's a very long process, it stinks, it's wet all the time, and it takes a long time to dry, so you need to develop a technique. You need organization and a protocol that I didn't have at all at the time. It's getting a little better now, but I'm still perfecting it. Then, two years ago, the Mondes Nouveaux competition came out in partnership with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux. That's when I said to myself, I need to continue this performance I did for my master, and I feel it has to be at la Sainte-Chapelle de Paris. 

MR: Was there any particular reason why you chose the Sainte Chapelle in particular?

AL: There were a lot of reasons, very personal reasons and it’s also a place that fascinates me, for many reasons, its beauty of course and it being an extremely political place. Saint Louis wanted to demonstrate the hegemony of France and Paris by buying important relics that would be housed inside the chapel especially built for the occasion. To do this, he spent a crazy amount of money: the entire budget of France in one year! We're talking about economic and political strategies, and I think the Sainte-Chapelle is a good example of that. Because it's still an architectural gem. We have created a radiant Gothic architecture that belongs only to the king, and we are also going to create a new music, polyphony. This had not yet been done in Europe, so Saint Louis paid composers to make it possible and spread it throughout European culture. It fascinates me to see the extent to which architectural strategies can, even today, a thousand years later, have the same repercussions when you look at it more closely. It’s also important to understand that this is architecture designed to raise one’s voice as high as possible. One can feel it, one can hear it, it's full of mathematical theories that allow the sound and the voice to glide along the walls as efficiently as possible

I thought, that is crazy interesting, it would be great to see if what I'd tried in London could work. I wanted to see and experiment with the fact that if we do a different procession but with the same codes, does it actually work and inflate the space? 

MR: This performance was a real group effort, and I know that is something you're particularly concerned about. Can you tell me how it all came about?

AL: I worked with a composer called Christophe Moure and a choreographer called Kadek Puspasari, who are in my Gamelan organization. We worked together on how to make this procession effective, in particular by creating instruments largely inspired by an instrument called the gendèr, which is an instrument with two mallets, soft, very very soft, you can hardly hear it, and which is a metaphor in the traditional Javanese Gamelan for the voice. So we made four of them in Indonesia, each with its specific characteristics, in pairs, so that there's a constant vibration between them while striking the same notes at the same time. It gets to that state I was talking about ; being at the limit of silence. For the choreography, the idea was to dance behind the hanging fabric as if it was some-kind of a mask. Behind those fabrics, the dancers were performing a mix between traditional Javanese steps, which have great meaning, and traditional theater with masks as the three dancers (a Javanese, a Greek and a Japanese) had a special relationship with those objects.

So, in short, we worked on it for a year and a half. It was intense, frankly, I've rarely experienced anything so difficult in my life. But in the end, we came up with this almost meditative performance, a very all-encompassing thing with lots of gong. A lot of vibrations, all the time. I mean, it's something, you feel like you're in a bubble. To go back to those instruments, we made them transportable as normally they're not because of their weight. The aim was to reproduce the processional movement of bells in the chapel. So there was also this idea of how to reproduce the movement of sound in processions. And of course to pay homage to the Gamelan, the perfect example of space in sound. You don't hear Gamelan in concert halls. It's in the street, in rice paddies, in front of post offices, everyone has access to it, and it's played all the time. So it's a relationship with space that I wanted to bring back to the center by using the codes of the procession.

MR: This relationship between space, architecture, and procession was the subject of your master’s thesis at EHESS. Can you tell me a little more about how your research feeds into your practice and vice versa?

AL: I use it both to understand the space in which I'm going to work . The only difference is that in humanities I am rigorous, almost mathematical and in my art practice I am very instinctive ; You don't ask yourself any questions, you don't think about what's going on behind it, why it's there. As a result, my research is something I'm fond of, more of a passion that I always wanted to try, but I ended up being an artist! After coming back from London, I said to myself go and try ; if you're not destined to do humanities then you'll not be accepted. So that's how I got into research. And on the other hand, there's my art practice, which is completely instinctive and sensitive. Of course many references are nourishing, but I prefer not to over share as the viewer can perceive things by themself. So yes, there is a fundamental difference between those two practices and they're nourishing each other. But inevitably, my artworks are more performative, therefore emotional ; dyeing is physical, it's heavy, it’s wet, and you’re soaking, and re-soaking fabrics in colors…

A Glimpse Of A White Wall Through A Brick Wall, 2022. Château de Jolimont, Brussels, Belgium.3,00 m x 1,40 m. Dyes, fruits, cotton, pigments. Curator Leonore Larrera from the exhibition Home is Where She Haunt Is. Images © Fabien Silvestre-Suzor.

MR: What projects are you working on at the moment?

AL: For my Master’s thesis, I worked on Catherine Basset's research, who worked for the past twenty years on tantric philosophy especially in Gamelan music. She did a brilliant work on making a parallel between mandala forms and Gamelan scores. You can find it on the Paris Philharmonie website, it is very stunning. This anthropologist and two others in America and South Asia, did evoke the idea of Borobudur — an ancient Buddhist monument from the 9th century in Java — as a musical partition. It wasn't really detailed and more complicated than it seemed, but it was probably a good example on how procession and architecture influences one another. That's how I ended up digging into this subject. If there is music inscribed in stone, how do we go about revealing it? As passersby, priests, monks, and so on, when we walk around, what do we hear? As researches are very rare in this area, I had to introduce oral Indonesian philosophy, the rare manuscripts that are still readable, decompose all bas-reliefs that encompasses the monument and had the chance to visit two times the temple with experts from the Balai Konservasi Borobudur and then through a symposium organized by Princeton. It was a marvelous experience but the research field in Indonesia is very complicated. I will not enter into details, but imagine; this country is composed of over 500 ethnies, situated over many islands as large as Europe and with the same national discourse. That's complicated! 

The methodology for my research is inspired by Middle Age historical anthropology in Europe. I agree it seems very out of the blue, but the way of thinking, called analogy, is very similar to Javanese philosophy. Of course it is completely different in the operating mode, but the way medievalists are pushing forward the significance of every single object and thought during this period allowed me to question even more what Borobudur could express at that time. It helped me a lot to develop my analysis and I fell in love with the Middle Ages. As a result of this dissertation, I wrote my first article!

For my thesis, I came back to my real obsession: the link between architecture and procession, how architecture guides processions, and how, in return, processions change the way we look at — for example a group of people hearing music that doesn't exist or seeing buildings being requalified by imagination. How is it possible for hundreds of people doing this to see the same thing? As I am going to Italy for an art residency at la Villa Medicis, I kind of oriented my general question on the city of Rome. The crazy thing about Rome, is that it's a city that was built for processions. So, on the scale of a city, we're no longer working on a monument, which was exactly what I was looking for! For my PhD, I want to work on a city or a village — an organized block of people and space. To take this spatial object, with its organization, rhythm and shape, as a producer of space itself. The idea is to find a procession from the middle age which is still acted nowadays I also want to analyze the impact on the contemporary perception, how it happens, how it's perceived, whether there is a sound impact with the changes in materials, the arrival of glass, large façades, concrete, etc.., and what that provokes. And above all, wouldn't the procession have changed in its appearance without changing its meaning? Or on the contrary, it kept the identical gesture but what it designates is contrasting? Maybe Rome will be the nest of my double life (research and art)! 

I am very glad to have this residency, as I will be immersed both in my research and in my art practice… The art project I want to initiate in Rome lies around the musical instrument called angklung, which is a rectangular and light bamboo object which has two moving modules for one note. Compared with Gamelan it is meant for processions. This gives rise to monumental performances as one instrument is for one person! Imagine 200 people in the street shaking simultaneously their own angklung! That's where I see that collective efficiency is sometimes also difficult to achieve. When it comes to music, we listen, see and feel the collective efficiency. If something doesn't sound right, when the melody is messy, the procession is not efficient.

Photo of rehearsals at the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, February 2023. Photographs by Charlotte Robin.

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Credits for Loro-loroning atunggal, Unifier ce qui est double

Composer: Christophe Moure

Gendèr: Thomas Garcia, Théo Mérigeau, Hsiao-Yun Tseng, Christophe Moure

Vocals: Estelle Micheau, Christophe Moure

Gong: Amalia Laurent

Choreographer: Kadek Puspasari

Dance: Efi Farmaki, Yoko Sobue, Kadek Puspasari

Project coordinator: Amalia Laurent

Co-editors and project managers: Rémi Guezodje, Leonore Larrera

Graphic designer: Alyssia Lou

Photographer: Charlotte Robin

Publishing house: H2L2

Sound engineer: Sylvain de Barbeyrac

Director: Rémi Besse

Gamelan maker: Eko Widodo

Translations of written songs: Katarina Mellyna, Partu Sukarto, Herdiniar Laurent

Author of written songs: Amalia Laurent