Café De Spiegel
Annaïk Lou Pitteloud

The neon artwork Bar (Rotterdam) by Annaïk Lou Pitteloud has long played with perception: installed at Rib, yet reading “De Spiegel”, the name of the café next door, it sparked confusion. Was Rib a bar, or was De Spiegel an art space? Part of a series celebrating places of popular culture, Bar (Rotterdam) pays homage to bars as sites of storytelling. The work now shifts again for Het Zuid Manifest, returning to De Spiegel and continuing its cycle of reflection.

The same work had already been shown at Rib, in The Last Terminal, Volume 2, Part 1: The Tail’s Bend. The series of neon lights to which this work belongs pays homage to places of popular culture and to the specificities of the cities that host them. Bars are indeed essential markers of the topography and history of localities, to the point of becoming high places of historical narration, as well as the setting for many artworks; they are also the hosts of the stories of those who frequent them. Bar (Rotterdam) bows to the namesake establishment on the same street as Rib, which has hosted many an opening party.

In a previous part of the exhibition series The Last Terminal: Reflection on the Coming Apocalypse, namely Volume 1, Part 6: The Siphon, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud takes us to the bar, in a word-play with ‘Absentement’, a word that has been appearing and disappearing from the French language dictionary since the 14th century. It is primarily a legal term used to judge people who are not present at their trial. By extension the word then became a way of naming a state or state of mind of a person absent from himself or herself or from the world. It is therefore an active state of absence. The piece is titled Bar, in reference to the neon bar that constitutes it, as well as to the idea of naming a bar: let’s go to the absentement…