Domesticating the Nowhere

For many artists, the boundaries between the residential and the professional are perennially murky, more so for those whose lives are marked by various forms of precariousness. Artists improvise methods of journeying between realms. Sketchbooks, for instance, enhance mobility between the world under observation and the workspace, where these notations are further scrutinised and studied. The studio, thus, is not always the place of birth of an idea; rather, it is the site in which the idea manifests or assumes tangible or conceptual form. Julien Segard’s practice has always embraced this daring fluidity between sites of dwelling, dreaming, doing, and being. Ever since I have known him — since 2011 — he has always conflated the horizons between his bed and workspace. This is not unusual for artists. However, for Julien, the space between dreaming, art-making, cooking and bathing has often been highly compressed, separated by mere footsteps. His home, thus, always evolved into an archive of found objects: signifiers of his ongoing engagements and conversations with urban Indian materiality, and his fixation with objects whose being is laced with beauty — a clay pot, a glass jar — usually arranged in a manner that enabled his appreciation of it. His studio on the first floor of a building in the urban village of Shahpur Jat in South Delhi was full of metal trunks filled with various kinds of art supplies, previous drawings and sketches, and innumerable sculptural assemblages evolved from retrieved and repurposed material that sometimes felt like extensions of his drawings. The walls always bore witness to whatever was being momentarily considered and worked upon.

Intriguingly, Julien’s diverse bodies of work preceding A View from Nowhere have been the consequence of his meticulous, embodied engagement with Indian manifestations of urbanity. Julien has carefully cast his outsider eye to reflect on the structural peculiarities that inform public architecture in India. His previous shows have included his reconfigurations of spatial sightings; the liminal spaces over, under, and beside flyovers; his abundant collection of chairs in various stages of disrepair and use; and his chronicles of forms ubiquitous to cities, like smoke, mirrors, and pollutants, alongside loving meditations on characteristically Indian modes of communicating, from ways of counting to agreeing/disagreeing and gesturing through intuitive body language. One could theorise that his work reflects his personal and artistic attempts at domestication, at making India his home. I enjoy reading his works as accounts of his dislocation through his process of situating himself and his artistic practice within a challenging Indian landscape.

A View from Nowhere is exciting to consider within this personal historical background, because the work within the show relates to his attempts at domestication not within India but in his native France. It is doubtless intriguing to behold his expression of alienation and forced solitude within a property he had bought some years ago in the middle of nowhere that he refers to as ‘the cabin,’ a site I happened to visit and spend two nights in, upon his invitation in 2017. The cabin is a modest old structure that was possibly a chapel before it was used as a hunting lodge by the previous owner. It is surrounded by abandoned vineyards. The only jarring sounds from afar that arrive in its vicinity are two sets of church bells that mark the hour, one always a little earlier than the other. I was excited to witness Julien’s experiments in domesticating a space that had no electricity and no water supply. The indoor kitchen had a stove and an oven. It was equipped with well-stocked shelves and led to a narrow room which served as Julien’s bedroom. The abundance of outdoor furniture disguised the compact indoor surface area. Julien had been busy gardening and instituting various other small interventions to make the cabin more homely and welcoming. Once in two days, he would load up empty plastic cannisters in his car and drive to the neighbouring village to fill water from a fountain. Improvisation was his key operational strategy. Our first dinner together had him cooking pizza from scratch, using a headlamp to illuminate the outdoor table. A curtain at the back of the cabin denoted the bathing area. One used a bucket and a mug, very un-European. Hammocks were suspended between trees to offer an idyllic spot for reading or napping. The cabin was essentially like a permanently parked camping caravan.

All of these efforts at domestication notwithstanding, for Julien, India was the home in which he wanted to be. His practice relied on the dislocated architectural entities that were pervasive within Indian metropolises; the resilient buzz of life continuing despite challenging circumstances; and a uniquely Indian aesthetic that surfaced in hairstyles, street carts, chairs — things complete, incomplete, or undone by time. When the Pandemic paralysed the world, he happened to be in his cabin in France. He was unwittingly shut off from the environment within which he located his artistic selfhood.

A View from Nowhere offers a glimpse into his emotional landscape during this precarious time of loneliness and alienation. I imagined it as an inability to configure who you might be when you don’t have a say in determining where you would like to be at a given moment. Under ordinary circumstances, Julien would have been settling into his new studio in Goa. In these fragile times, his access to his adopted home severed temporarily, he was forced to take shelter in a place divorced from the support structures and communities he had built over a decade or so in India.

Speaking to me retrospectively from his studio in Goa that is presently surrounded by lush monsoon greenery, he was candid about how his relation to the cabin had changed. What he enjoyed before was the holiday mode he would find himself in whenever he was there. He used to fantasize about being in the midst of nature. However, within the nine-month span during which he was compelled to live there, he felt stuck. Focussing on domesticating the cabin further was his way of coping. He realised he didn’t need much to subsist. He filled his hours with intense making and re-making, enthusiastically applying his aesthetic sensibility as a way of exerting greater agency over his lived space. "I spent a lot of time gardening, planting trees, organising, getting water to fill the tank. I tried to make a vegetable garden but the soil was not rich enough, so I tried to collect sheep dung. I was convinced I could make the cabin into this Utopian thing. I could be self-sustaining," he told me. He rarely met people, had very few interactions and a restrained social life, which didn’t suit his personality at all. "Some people live like that. But I am a beast who needs the city. Everything suddenly became long distance."

As he delved deeper into solitude, Julien began domesticating his drawings, too. When he chanced upon a hunting lodge in a nearby field, he began to treat it with the same curiosity he applies to found objects. It became a structural extension of his residential domain. He spent time cocooned inside it, listening to what the interstitial gaps between wood panels suggested about its use, how it served as a strategic foothold for a hunter to observe his prey before making the final move to advance its capture. He began surveying the world outside through the holes he found that were possibly meant to discreetly hold a gun point, and wondered what it might take for someone to gratuitously kill an innocent animal. The soft-paletted Silent Spring is the result of this intense engagement with the lodge’s interiors. Silent Spring has a profound clarity that feels suggestive of a different way of looking, a totally revitalised portal through which to enter a space that seems both fictitious and real. Dusklight offers a more accessible glimpse into the same setting. The highly attuned and careful detailing is testimony to the breadth of time spent looking, internalising, sketching, and reforming. It is intriguing that Julien should be so focussed on capturing a site whose structural purpose was premised on surveillance, on hunting prey. The hawkish artistic eye transforms the violence of the act into something softer, filled with a different form of discernible presence. In the eponymous charcoal on paper series, one feels the weight of light as it is intercepted by darkness. The forms that either float or take flight are luminous and radiant, and carry the weight of celestial beings, bearing traces of the memory of the kind of imaginative play that comes from having time at hand. They seem, to me, like meditations on the sense of curious wonder we are losing, collectively, in the light of more and more advanced scientific discoveries and explorations, harking back to a time when it was possible to dwell in mystery.

A View from Nowhere is saturated with intensities. The precision of line and density of charcoal reveal the span of time spent at the site — studying, dissecting, transforming. It is haunted by undercurrents of solitude and dislocation, and the absence of distance from one’s work, a facet that Julien was never new to. But despite every other previous instance in which he lived amid his work, the absence of other gazes, like mine, that would have also seen, responded, and made observations, is compelling. The inability to switch off from domesticating both his lived space and his art ensured an eerie continual immersion that seems to have led to an intellectual and spiritual clarity. It is the work of someone who felt tested by fire.

Now that he is back home, he is already busy domesticating his studio in Bastora, in Goa. I wonder what will captivate his gaze, whether his memory is still inundated by views from nowhere or whether he still carries traces of the challenges of living in an urban village like Shahpur Jat. For Julien’s work has always been site-specific, just as his life has always been marked by his flair for inhabiting the domestic.

Rosalyn D’Mello (she/her) is a feminist writer, art critic, columnist, essayist, editor and researcher currently based in the Italian Alps. She is currently a fellow at the Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen Fellowship Program for Art and Theory (2021-22) and was a TBA21-Ocean Fellowship Mentor (2021).