“Trying to define your work in words is maybe the most difficult to do. Although trying to define what you see, is maybe worse. ‘le journal d’un usager de l’espace’ is a sentence I kept in my mind when I was reading the book Espèce d’Espace from the French author George Perec. (…) For an ‘usager de l’espace’ is for sure living in a house, a building, a neighborhood, a city, a country… I am a user of the space and touch the limits of it.”

Brigitte Aubry (BA), Marie-Pascale Gildemyn (MPG) and Mira Sanders (MS) in conversation in L’Atelier 

MS. Although the scene is absent, its presence will make itself felt because the camera is installed in its place. The camera will rotate a full 360 degrees: a succession of fragments, all taken from the same fixed point, with fictive individuals that evoke a public, an imaginary people with specific characteristics.

BA. Is this work about the stereotype or the anecdotal? Is it a micro-society?

MS. Yes, a micro-society. I have also done a work on the anecdote. I like the idea that the so-called unimportant anecdote should contain a certain essence.

BA. It’s also what differs from the ordinary …

MPG. And links up with a kind of collective memory …

MS. I’ll be bound to forget certain persons.MPG. Which public is it actually about?

MS. It will be a copy of the public, both figuratively and materially … I take photos of the reality in which I walk and travel, or I take them from magazines.

MPG. Why did you choose Courbet’s Atelieras the starting-point?

MS. It’s a painting that has always intrigued me, even when I saw the original, because it is usually only known from reproductions.The idea ofreproduction, of images of the collective memory, is important in this work.

MPG. It’s the first time you use people. As if a longing for humanity …MS. I didn’t want an empty stage scene this time. A presence, even if it is only a copy of a human being, introduces a scale.

BA. Courbet regarded reality as a raw material to be transformed. There’s something of that in your work … You start out from reality – the history of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, the correspondence between Horta and Le Bœuf, facts, exchanges, identities, stereotypes – and you construct something completely original.

MS. Reality … it’s like the colour that you can mix on the palette to paint.

BA. But where you part company with Courbet is when he wanted to act as a catalyst on the history that was to come.

MPG. L‘Atelier is a ‘realist manifesto’.

MS. The tableaux are certainly asserting something, but they are not a manifesto.

BA. Do you want the ‘real’ public to question its own position as a public?

MS. It’s still too early for me to say.

MPG. For me, the public is a means of affirming that there is a tableau, a scene, theatre …

MS. And scale too. … 

Biography of Mira Sanders

°1973, Uccle/Ukkel 

Solo Exhibitions 

2007

–         By This I Send You Some Noise of the City I Am in, Chinese European Art Center, Xiamen 

2006

–         L’Union / De Unie. Picture This! Mira Sanders, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle 

2005

–         Welcome to Robin’s Land, an Archipel Under Construction, Comptoir du Nylon, Bruxelles/Brussel 

2003

–         courir les rues…, Bruxelles/Brussel  

Group Exhibitions 

2007

–         Variations. Invitation à Brent Klinkum pour Transat Vidéo, Galerie les Filles du Calvaire, Paris

–         Performance 1. (Se) mettre en scène, Festival Côté court, Pantin 

2006–         Silent China, Secondroom, Bruxelles/Brussel

–         deDonderdagen #11, deSingel, Antwerpen

–         Anspach Center, Anspach Center, Bruxelles/Brussel 

2005

–         In a Tall Distance with Mr. Reis, BAS, Istanbul

–         Ondulations, Transat Vidéo & l’Autre Café, Saint-Aubin-de-Terregatte

–         TELEGRAM, Rosa Barba’s Studio, Amsterdam 

2004

–         Bande Annonce, Galerie Aliceday, Bruxelles/Brussel

–         Les Art’sisses de la rue, Transat Vidéo, Caen 

2003

–         Chacun cherche son chat, Show Bedroom, Nantes 

2002

–         Kunst-Wet, une station belge, VKS, Toulouse 

2001

–         Project-i(s)les, St.-Michel, Bruxelles/Brussel

–         À l’écoute de Bruxelles, VKS, Toulouse 

2000

–         Rhizome, côté KaNal, Bruxelles/Brussel  

–         Silent China, Xiamen, 2007

–         Anspach Center, Bruxelles/ Brussel, 2006

–         La Comédie, Transat Vidéo, Caen, 2005

–         courir les rues…, Bruxelles/Brussel, 2003