Grabigouji, la vie de la disparition

Between Paris and New York, Brigitte Cornand talks with the woman who was a neighbour and an object of study before becoming a friend. Buying books and objects, filming her childhood flat: Louise Bourgeois invests these missions with all the obstinacy of an artist that trusts her intuitions. After Chère Louise (1995), C’est le murmure de l’eau qui chante (2002) andLa Rivière gentille (2007), Grabigouji bear little trace of the approaching absence (Bourgeois died in2010). The telephone mise en scene reveals anintimacy rooted in a shared mother tongue. Having moved to the United States many years before, the sculptress hasa jubilant relationship with French, despite some gaps. Her forgetting and and remembering of words reveal an inspiration caught between the raw materiality of objects and the incantatory invocation of a bygone age. Bourgeois says that her collections constitute “a defence against fear and disintegration”. The filmmaker could say the same of the many sequences she filmed over the years. At the end of the day, they bring back to life the artist’s youthful vivacity and inimitable grain of voice.