Béatrice Didier

Would you take me on a walk to your favorite place?”

Béatrice DIDIER began her residency in Aomori by posing this question to local residents.

“Could you write down a few words on this leaf? I’ll write my own message on another leaf. Then we’ll exchange them.”
This suggestion to the four participants who collaborated on Didier’s project allowed the five of them to share with each other the things they noticed and felt during their walks together around Aomori.

The leaves exchanged between Didier and the four participants are displayed in pairs, with each pair corresponding to one of the four drawings of their respective walking routes, traced on the gallery floor. In the space opposite, across from short poems that Didier composed daily during her residency, video recordings are displayed along with the typewriter she used. Throughout her 15-plus-year career as a performance artist, the Brussels-based Didier has consistently utilized her own body and its experiences as important materials in her artistic creations. The pieces shown here can be thought of as the traces of her experience in Aomori, an experience that revisited the everyday act of “walking.” Each of these traces is organically connected, and together form an image which serves as a more tactile record through which we can vicariously experience the thoughts that passed through Didier’s walking body. (Tomo Setou, ACAC)