In 2011, the Travesías association set out to create an artwork exploring the transmission of culture and knowledge from grandmothers to their grandchildren. Through gesture, generations would (re)establish physical and symbolic connections, in collaboration with the Rennes Opera House, the Dance Museum and the Maison Internationale de Rennes.
Based in Brittany, Travesías aims to build an international network where artists, theorists and writers can meet and exchange ideas. Over time, the association developed a network of women who have been living in Brittany for many years, and since 2010 it has been working with their stories. Travesías wished to create an artwork centred on intergenerational transmission between grandmothers and grandchildren. Some of these women arrived in Brittany between the 1960s and the 1980s—following their husbands, fleeing political repression, or through personal choice—and are now grandmothers, many of them cut off from their roots. What memories of their own childhood can they pass on? Their experience also echoes a history specific to Brittany: a rupture with language that prevented Breton-speaking grandparents from communicating with their grandchildren.
Eternal Network suggested working with choreographer Pascale Houbin, who has been integrating sign language into her practice for over twenty years. Confronted with the possible language barrier between older women and the younger generation, Houbin proposed making a film about the transmission of gestures—carriers of culture, traditions and skills, but also of everyday actions.
From December 2011 to January 2013, the choreographer met with around fifteen grandmothers from diverse backgrounds (Brazil, Madagascar, Peru, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Congo, etc.). Through informal gatherings over shared meals and choreography sessions at the Rennes Opera House and the Dance Museum, they sought out gestures buried in the body and experimented together with bringing them back to the surface: “Le Geste exilé will be a poetic testimony to the infinite unfolding of everyday gestures—gestures fully inhabited by the elders and passed on to the young; gestures rich in humanity, opening onto a space of relation.” (Excerpt from Pascale Houbin’s statement of intent, October 2012).
