Cédric Debeaumarché, “Post Partum”

A woman leans out of a train’s window. A building collapses. A drop evaporates on a heated element. A man and woman are absorbed in the darkness of a corridor. A field of yellow flowers swallows a woman in a yellow sweater as she walks into the distance. Debeaumarché explores post partum depression poetically, image after image.

“post partum is the general name given to the physical residue of birth itself, but also to the new mother’s consequent depression. Melancholy following euphoria. The movement from the fantasized anticipated act of birth to the inescapable reality of existence. To give birth is to abandon dreams and anchor oneself in the real. … More generally, post partum entails a shift from desire to fear for the future. Absence and loss.” – Guillaume Mansart, trans. Anne-Laure Tissut.

Cédric Debeaumarché lives and works in Dijon, France. Debeaumarché attended the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Dijon from 1999 to 2004. Debeaumarché has exhibited across France, and has shown work also in Sherbrooke, QC and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

About this series:
The Interior—that which lies between, the domestic, the inner life, the indoors, the inland country, a closed circuit, the inner sanctum…

In Canada, the Interior refers to the hinterland, sparsely populated resource-rich lands stretching out to the north of distant southern cities, typically described by outsiders as a ‘frontier’. Despite a southern population huddling mostly along the Canada-U.S. border, the soul of Canada is often said to be its north. With this loosely in mind, I put out an open call for submissions for videos that responded to 'the Interior.' Despite the subtle reference to Canadian geography, I wasn’t looking for fist-pumping Canadian nationalism.

In this series, six artists explore the Interior as an idea, a vast terra incognita stretching out across the land, the body, and the mind, a swath of territory defined apart, but intrinsic to the whole. Touching on both the literal and the poetic, these videos take me inwards.
Mark Prier.