Marion Vasseur Raluy, Mimosa Echard: Blood on my beads (2020)

When I enter the studio, the smell of kombucha has enveloped the space. Mimosa Echard regularly feeds it black tea infused with sugar to keep it going. She taught me that when it dries it smells the strongest. These last few weeks the smell has been particularly pungent, heightened by the August heat. Echard often asks people if they would like to participate in 'Project Kombucha', in which contributors send in small objects, works of arts, or texts, which she then soaks and leaves out to dry. Occasionally, one can catch a glimpse of the objects through film, at other times they are swallowed whole. For some ten years or so, Echard has allowed accidents of natural and chemical fluids - emanating from both animate and inanimate beings - to transpire unstaunched in her practice. The inclusion of mould, mushrooms, dried mimosa plants, cherry pits, Barbie heads, elven necklaces and pearls that are common in her works all invoke an imagination that mixes memory, personal knowledge, and mainstream culture.
Some days ago Echard came back from Allègre, her childhood village where her mother still lives. She spent the nights there in a small bed she had set up in the garden. During her stay she began to string glass beads, or as we call them, 'pearls'. Her mother, sisters, and people of the village were also put onto the task. They helped her thread them into strands one or two meters long. Strung together, they form strange blood-stained membranes. That afternoon, after settling some administrative affairs, it was my turn to offer help to Mimosa. She wedged me between two overstuffed cushions in the studio and put on an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills while we got to work. The outcome is seven light-based sculptures of pearls that trickle down to the floor. (We gave them pet names like Kardashian, Chanel, and English Professor). They distinguish themselves by their colour, which, while remaining faithful to a shared palette, runs from dark reds to light browns reminiscent of blood, flesh and pus.
These works remind me of stories about times and places in which it is customary to drink the blood of the dead for regeneration, or mothers who have given birth to consuming their own placenta. At one time, our forebears would have made pearls from animals: teeth from foxes, hyenas, wolves, reindeer, bears and marmots, cut and drilled to be strung together in a necklace. The first evidence of the existence of strung beads - shells pierced by small holes were bound together to make jewelry - takes us back to 72,000 BCE, to the Blombos Cave in South Africa. The teeth, shells, and glass, refined from sand, were offerings that would later become bartering currency and lead to the birth of language. Later still, 'pacotilles' were exchanged for gold or ivory to colonise lands and enslave bodies. In some cultures, pearls are the tears of gods. Today we can find pearls and other gems dematerialised in video games: when one earns extra lives or goes to the next level, sometimes little pearls appear after jumping on the skull of the character as metaphor for their evolution.
Returning to her studio Paris, Echard made three new paintings composed of photographs printed on paper and fabric, and of objects: jewelry, empty pill capsules, elastic offcuts, mirror fragments, Xanax wrappers, vials containing medicinal plant juices, and containers of commercial body serums, from artificial tears and Vaseline, to hand sanitiser. The contents of each painting are secured with the help of natural binders, latex and resin from the dragon blood tree, as well as synthetic glues. The comingling of these fluids also leads to an aesthetic chemical reaction obscuring the various objects and images. On some of these new paintings we find faces of girls on smartphones exchanging their experiences, from painful periods to dreams drawn from an Instagram direct message inbox that Echard oversees, called 'Sister'. In one of the images we can read: 'I dreamed that I had to give a presentation on hard drives and I woke up and actually it wasn't a dream'; information exchanges that are just as much numerical as they are biological. Two 'eyelid' membranes frame the girls, leaving one to divine, by way of transparency, the multiple layers of Echard's ACCA installation, which recalls the numerous fluids secreted by the body and eyes.
From bartered shells and glass to the metallic taste of blood, from the materiality of objects to the dematerialisation of data, Echard's new works invoke exchanges of fluids and sometimes violent biological processes between humankind and the ecosystem in which it lives. Leaving the studio, I think that I would like my blood to be transformed into long ichorous strings of stone pearls in blood-drenched colors like Echard's sculptures. The carmin mucus that spreads in my purple underwear might then be magnified by her imagination, and for an instant, added to the other animate and inanimate fluids that flow through her work.