Fanny Basque

In her art practice, the Acadian artist Fanny Basque draws on what is most deeply hidden within us; dreams and secrets are her sources of creativity. With photography and video, she conducts poetic and political explorations that form the basis for intimate documentary research. For her residency at Est-Nord-Est, she had the idea of exploring diversity capacity, more particularly mad culture and neurodivergence, in creation. During her two-month stay, Basque hoped to encounter the community in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli and probe the presence of mad culture in the region. Get-togethers and recorded interviews were to form the springboard for artistic creation.

In the end, the time Basque spent in her studio enabled her to refocus her research on herself: the environment of the residency was, indeed, propitious to an appropriation – or, rather, a claiming – of madness as an identity marker. Offering the possibility of being at once alone and in community with the other residents, the studio at Est-Nord-Est was a true living space, where she allowed herself to let things go badly, to accept the difficulty with explaining her work, and to develop methods that more closely matched her needs. Analogue photographs taken during strolls in the vicinity, books open to where she was reading, and a heuristic map linking the words “friendships,” “grief,” and others evoking her desire to have connections formed the portrait of an artist sinking roots ever more deeply into her diversity capacity. Finally, she accepted the time and space that her madness took up in her creative process.

Aside from her accumulation of photographs, much of Basque’s research involved automatic writing in a journal. This practice enabled not only the public but Basque herself to glimpse what took place during her residency. Both her daily life and the different emotions that emerge form the language with which she pursues her art practice. That being said, she is aware that madness is not a visual language: could this creative claim now show through in her work?

Although her stay at Est-Nord-Est was an attempt to untangle all these ideas, what surfaced from Basque’s work were questions about momentum, gleaning, automatism, and intuition as vehicles for mad creation that tends toward care. She hopes that the way art practices are exhibited will tend more toward a concern for care: care for divergences, people, their capacities, and their art. She admits that she has trouble separating her art from her personal life: care allows madness to be defined, beyond mental health issues, as a connection between an assumed life and an accomplished art.