Gerard & Kelly Re-Inhabit the Iconic Villa Benkemoun in Arles
By Alexandria Sillo
During the opening week of Les Recontres d’Arles, Gerard & Kelly will re-inhabit the iconic Villa Benkemoun, filling its rooms with a project that revives the lives, rituals, and promises that the house once held. Titled On Time, the site-specific performance transforms the 1974 Émile Sala-designed modernist landmark into a living clock, with the speaking, movement, and rhythm of humans acting as the hands.
“For more than ten years, our films, installations, and performances have engaged with sites of modernist architecture, such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, or Eileen Gray’s E-1027,” the American-born, Paris-based Gerard & Kelly told Galerie. “Though iconic homes, none have provided us the chance to engage with the people who actually lived and loved within the walls. At the Villa Benkemoun, we created our project at the invitation of Brigitte Benkemoun, who grew up in the house and wrote a beautiful memoir of it. With the project curator, Raphael Giannesini, we reimagined a “re-inhabitation” of the villa with memories, movements, and a minimal intervention of performance and artworks, so the visiting public can experience, if only for a suspended moment, the spiraling intimacies of the family circle.”
For four days in July, On Time will be performed at 5 p.m., 6 p.m., and 7 p.m., once again giving life to the home designed by Émile Sala.
This article was originally published by Galerie Magazine.