Verbal and Visual Materialities. Drifts in a Conversation with Monique Régimbald-Zeiber

Abstract

For over thirty-five years, Monique Régimbald-Zeiber has explored the registers of the intimate and the political through a singular body of pictorial and textual work, situated at the intersection of the visible and the textual. This interview, born of a sustained dialogue between Montreal and Udine, revisits the aesthetic and theoretical foundations of a practice that fully embraces the emergence of a new materiality grounded in language, in an age of digital saturation where the overproduction of dematerialized images tends to erode both vision and memory. Through an in-depth exchange, the Québécoise artist reflects on the theoretical underpinnings of her approach, shaped by a transdisciplinary background that has led her toward a dialogical and relational conception of creation, at the crossroads of visual arts and literary studies, where artistic practice unfolds through openness to the other. Her work, conceived as a space of transmission and sharing, brings forth a counter-history built from the layering of pictorial and textual gestures and from the voices of multiple women who reawaken fragments forgotten or erased from official historiography. Régimbald-Zeiber approaches her work first and foremost as a reader, drawing on her readings as a living source that she transposes onto her chosen surfaces. Through the act of copying, she extends and reconfigures the practice of reading; through the montage of testimonies and diverse voices, she weaves a network of unexpected and resonant echoes.