Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Marie-Claire Barnet and Shirley Jordan Landscapes are mental states just as mental states are cartographies, both crystallized in each other. Gilles Deleuze1 I always have a way to escape from the business, the job, the tough people; I always have spaces, nowhere spaces where people can just hear themselves, hear silence. Agnès Varda2 In this extended special issue, we draw together studies of established and emerging women artists and filmmakers who play a significant role in French cinema and on the international artistic scene, and whose experimental films, photographs, and art installations have in common an acute sensitivity to space, place, and landscape.3 The underlying thesis of our volume is twofold: first, that women's identities remain intimately and distinctively connected to space and place in ways that expand and challenge preconceived ideas of space and gender; second, that women's explorations of their relation to space increasingly test the boundaries of genres and artistic practices. The timeliness of our endeavour has been confirmed by the recent major exhibition at Paris's Centre Pompidou, Elles (2009-2010), which traced the history of women's seizing and forging the spaces of the art world through the mid-twentieth century to the present day, and which was itself organized according to spatial concepts, singling out domestic space (in Cellules d'habitation), the trope of the private room (in Une chambre à soi), and the fabric and fabrication of space (in Espace cousu) as well as other arenas such as the inside of the body.4 Several of the artists whose work is analysed here—Yto Barrada, Sophie Calle, Valérie Mréjen, Zineb Sedira—were represented in this landmark exhibition. The articles and interviews in our volume explore continuity and change in women's perceptions, experiences, and imaginings of space in a context of postmodern, postfeminist, and postcolonial transformation. They tease out fresh insights on familiar spatial tropes and concepts, exploring new articulations of home and exile, public and private spaces, bodies in and as space, spaces of memory, spaces of mourning and palliation, postcolonial spaces, urban spaces, beaches and islands, emptied spaces, and spaces of confinement, to take a few examples. Several share a diasporic resonance, tracing contemporary spaces of exclusion, emphasizing boundaries, border crossings, [End Page 1] and global/local intersections, or describing the restless ghostliness of places whose inhabitants are haunted by ideas of departure. Others focus differently on the problem of what spaces are available to whom. The shared emphases and echoes that emerge from their arguments make their collective mapping of key spatial tendencies all the more coherent and, we hope, compelling. Throughout, our project has remained focused on a number of key ideas on space. These include the spatial framework proposed by Griselda Pollock for interpreting the works of women artists, a framework that takes account of locations represented in a specific work, of the spatial order within it, and of the physical and psychic spaces of production and reception.5 All the articles collected here probe these interconnected areas of enquiry. Several also pursue the (especially cinematic) connection articulated by François Béguin between landscape and our being in the world.6 Béguin reminds us of the dynamics and synergies generated by landscapes, and of how, as "expressions mouvantes" rather than fixed images or mere decor, they can define our own shifting relationships with the world. He suggests a different and dual way of reconsidering their artistic representation, a suggestion that each of the arguments in our volume reflects: "Dans le domaine de l'art, le paysage ne fait pas l'objet d'une explication, mais il éveille une émotion et donne lieu à une élucidation" (Béguin 74). In terms of what Pollock calls the spatial order of representation, the articles in our volume explore the refashioning of a range of media including photography, video and multi-media installation art, feature films, documentaries, short films, and the comic book. All the artists and filmmakers studied here are actively renegotiating the material spaces of expression precisely in order to open them up as opportunities for thinking otherwise. They also revisit and reshape the spaces of reception, often underlining the...