Mineur Mineur: a carousel from which you cannot get off — onLife⁵
Bertille Bak tells us about child labor
In a moment like the one we are living in, when we are bewildered by the effects of the selfishness of a single individual crashing down on Ukraine, it is easy to fear that art has failed.
Failed in what is its educational and integrative function, as a universal language.
This is why today more than ever, it is essential to tell about those cases in which art has succeeded in giving a voice to those who usually do not have one.
The Merz Foundation offers me the opportunity to do so, which after the interruption of exhibitions for the Mario Merz Prize due to the pandemic, resumes with “Mineur Mineur” — “minor miners”.
Bertille Bak’s solo show, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, offers us a look at a reality that is as distant geographically as it is socially current, through five humanly honest works.
A densely poetic project, which has to do directly with the artist, who although she does not want to talk about herself, as if it were an ancestral reminiscence, collects the inheritance of her thirteen-year-old grandfather, a miner in the north of France.
As soon as you enter the main hall of the Foundation you will find a large carousel, “Le barceu du chaos”¹.
Curious we approach, when the music begins to increase in intensity and with it the speed with which the installation rotates.
As in an amusement park of horrors, we become aware of the fact that once we get on the carousel, it would be impossible for us to get off, at least without sacrificing our integrity.
We continue alongside seven cardboard structures equipped with ladders, “This mine is mine”², which take us up only to make us look down, inside them, among the fantasies of children who will hardly ever see them come true.
Perhaps for this very reason, despite the context of exploitation in which they will grow up, they will never become adults.
Bertille Bak’s gaze, similar to that of an anthropologist, studies, notes, interacts, and inevitably empathizes, even before reconstructing what she has seen, with the subjects of the story of “Mineur Mineur”³.
The work that also gives its name to the exhibition consists of five videos that run simultaneously on five screens, placed vertically side by side.
The images that could be surreal for us, tell of minors who daily go in search of coal, tin, gold, silver, and sapphires, respectively in India, Indonesia, Thailand, Bolivia, and Madagascar.
Everything seems more saturated and vivid than the circumstances they recount allow us to conceive.
The path ends, allegorically, making us descend towards the darkness of the basement, where the oldest work on display is repeated in a loop, “Tu redeviendras poussière”⁴, “You will return to dust”.
But once back to the light, what seems like a cynical fairy tale with no happy ending, at least some doubts must leave us.
Not so much on the privilege we accidentally received, which it will be easy to forget again, but on the inevitability of the destinies of those little diggers, who, after being told by Bertille Bak, no longer live in total darkness.
¹ “Le barceu du chaos”, Bertille Bak, 2022
² “This mine is mine”, Bertille Bak, 2022
³ “Mineur Mineur”, Bertille Bak, 2022
⁴ “Tu redeviendras poussière”, Bertille Bak, 2017
