CeCiL’s Box by Émilie Pierson

With the CeCiL's Box, the Cercle Cité supports local creation by presenting and promoting the work of emerging and young artists from the Greater Region in one of its shop windows in the Rue du Curé. This mini exhibition space, visible 7 days a week, day and night, offers a street-side location in the heart of the city to a series of original and ephemeral interventions from the plastic and applied arts, with the aim of arousing the curiosity of passers-by and questioning the collective imagination.

The 35th intervention, entrusted to artist Émilie Pierson, is entitled БЛАГОДЕНСТВИЕ (BLAGODENSTVIE) — PROSPERITY.

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“From my childhood, I remember the smell of popcorn floating in the air, enveloping strollers as they passed before the open-air theatre in Bourgas on summer evenings. The little popcorn stands lined up side by side on the square lit up the faces of the people waiting impatiently for their steaming cones. As soon as they’d been served, some continued their promenade along the paths in the park with cones in hand and puffed-up corn in their mouths, while others withdrew to a bench or joined the queue for the evening’s performance.”

Years later, in the ethnography museum in Bourgas, Emilie Pierson’s gaze was arrested by a kukeri — one of the masked characters in Bulgarian traditional rituals, dressed in imposing costumes and frightening masks. According to ancient belief, kukeri drove away evil spirits, and their dances and ceremonies brought prosperity to villages. This particular kukeri was wearing a collar of popcorn, as were other objects also adorned with garlands of puffed-up corn. In the absence of an immediate explanation, this popcorn resonated with her childhood memories, taking on a strange, humorous and absurd dimension that she could not understand in this context. The unexpected contrast between the ancient ritual and the popcorn awoke a curious nostalgia in the artist.

Popcorn is now an ephemeral pleasure associated with entertainment or boredom, consumed in the street and in cinema theatres. In Bulgaria, however, the popcorn garlands made for Badni Vecher (Christmas Eve) were formerly symbols of fertility, abundance and protection against evil spirits. They decorated the walls, Christmas trees and sometimes the tables of homes, conjuring up prosperity and testifying to a communion with nature. Nowadays rare, this tradition survives essentially in ethnographic contexts. By reappropriating this ancient custom, the artist aspires to revive a form of authenticity in which the act of donning puffed-up corn becomes a meditative ritual.

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We invite you to meet-up with the artist in front of the CeCiL's Box on Thursday January 16 at 12:00..

Share your images on Facebook and Instagram! #cecilsbox

Organisation: Cercle Cité

Programmation: Marion Vergin and Iyoshi Kreutz