Lindsay Seers

Born in 1966 in London where she lives and works.

For the festival, Lindsay Seers has created a new video and sound installation inspired by the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, to be shown in the Pilgrims Room and the chapel in the Hôtel Dieu. It's a historical hospital symbolized by the scallop shell of the pilgrims, and whose history, like the history of the Saint Cyprien neighbourhood, has been marked by the foolds, a recurrent pleg on the Garonne river banks. 

Lindsay Seers’ artistic practice is like a poetic and visual investigation into the way the technologies of photography and cinema shape human beings and change the way we look at the world. Lindsay Seers elaborates falsely personal stories punctuated by unlikely narrative devices in which photographic theory mixes with philosophical, psychological and scientific concepts. Her approach to photography is inspired mainly by metaphysical philosophy (Neo-Platonism, Renaissance alchemy and the thought of Henri Bergson) and she treats the medium as a support which generates meaning rather than as a simple document. It thus becomes more productive than descriptive. Seers’ works are all interconnected and develop simultaneously, taking us on multiple journeys. In them we find metaphysical questions and thoughts about perception, symbol and representation, her fascination with heterochromia (when a person has eyes of differing colours) which implies that an alien string of DNA from asubsumed twin has produced this wrongly coloured eye.

The recent pieces (Monocular, 2011 and It has to be this way, 2010) are complex installations. Some, such as Nowhere less now (2012), installed at the Tin Tabernacle in London, are site-specific, made in unlikely spaces. Veritable cabinets of curiosities, these installations are factual and theatrical structures which embody the dual essence of evidence and artefact, and refer us to the architecture of narrative plots.

In the project entitled One if Many, the projection's housing is an architectural strucure based on a confessional. The spheres/screens encased within shift in meaning as the projected imagery re-configures them but principally they stand for the all-seeing eyes from which nothing can be hidden - witnessed in a place where secrets are told and atoned for (the confessional). On the door to the pulpit at Hôtel-Dieu is the symbol of the eye of God, it shows one eye for the one God. God as monocular. His point of view cannot be split into a dual perspective.

Imagery related to the scallop shell is also present in the work due to its relevance to the pilgrimage and also because of the many eyes of the scallop. Its symbolism for the Pilgrimage, the multitude that have traveled this route to Finisterre through time. The film content evolves directly from a search and is only established in the making. This is a specific way of creating a narrative from its own evolution. It involves enactments and performative actions which arise through chance connections on the journey to make the artwork.