À LA RECHERCHE…

À la recherche… by Diane Giraud will be presented at Arte Fare, 1st Edition, curated by Trong Gia Nguyen at Chillala House of Art, Ho Chi Minh City, from 13–16 September 2026.

WITH LIVE TRANSCRIPTION
13–16 September 2026
Daily 4–4:30 pm — VIP
Daily 6:30–7 pm — General Public

À la recherche… is a series of works and an ongoing live transcription centred on a sustained act of copying: Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu transcribed by hand onto aluminium foil. A text concerned with the elusive nature of memory and time is subjected to a slow, physical process, accumulating as a record of repeated gestures and time spent.

The work emerged from experiments in Giraud’s Lisbon studio before developing as a continuous 12-metre roll of aluminium foil, progressively written across Paris and Brittany, France; Lisbon, Portugal; and, finally, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Born in France, Giraud is of mixed Vietnamese, French and Greek heritage. Her relationship to Vietnam has long been both intimate and distant, shaped by family history, absence and fragmented forms of transmission. In the months preceding Arte Fare, research in Paris into Vietnamese museum collections, developed as part of Partial Archives, Surviving Forms*, converged with her family archives and the story of her grandmother, Nguyễn Thị Trinh. Arriving in Vietnam collapses some of that distance, bringing what had previously been held apart into the same present.

Giraud arrived in Ho Chi Minh City with the transcription still in progress. Fragments were cut sequentially from the roll and framed locally, while the remaining length continues to unfold. Aluminium foil extends her interest in overlooked and everyday materials, including burnt paper, adhesive tape and painter’s plastic sheeting. Fragile and susceptible to alteration, it records the pressure of handwriting and traces of handling. Each act of writing and handling can leave a crease, indentation or irreversible mark, making the material itself a record of the time and physical attention invested in the process.

Throughout her presentation at Arte Fare, Giraud continues the transcription live, extending the final work displayed in a custom-made foil dispenser. The work therefore remains simultaneously in production and on display: a continuous text progressively gives rise to individual framed works while the roll from which they originate continues to unfold.

Moving between continuity and fragmentation, distance and proximity, inherited memory and lived experience, À la recherche… approaches copying not as faithful reproduction but as a form of encounter. As Proust’s text passes through handwriting, memory, material, place and time, different temporalities and geographies fold into one another. What is transmitted is not simply preserved, but encountered again from another place and in another time.

* Partial Archives, Surviving Forms was supported by Culture Moves Europe, funded by the European Union and implemented by the Goethe-Institut.

ABOUT ARTE FARE

Arte Fare is a rotating exhibition curated by Trong Gia Nguyen at Chillala House of Art in Ho Chi Minh City. Over 24 days, exhibitors take over four booths in successive rotations, using the familiar structure of the art fair as a format to reconsider relationships between making, exhibiting and presenting work.

Each iteration places artists directly within a structure conventionally mediated by galleries, while the curator operates as “fair director”, testing different approaches to exhibition and sales. Works selected from each rotation are subsequently installed on the surrounding gallery walls, creating a cumulative record of the exhibition as it unfolds.

Arte Fare — 1st Edition
3–26 September 2026
Curated by Trong Gia Nguyen
Chillala House of Art
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Arte Fare — Official Website

À LA RECHERCHE… is supported by