A breakfast table with a bit of a bowl in the foreground. Behind this a woman, Lili, her head isn't in shot and she's hardly in the frame, but she speaks. Her words are accompanied by the movement of her hands, making suggestive gestures, like a mime. The fingers in the centre of the image are nervous, the discourse is agitated – Lili is doing some private psychoanalysis. As is usual in the Bartoloméo, we come into the middle of a conversation, an exchange that confronts the soliloquy of a woman and the autism of a "man with a camera".

Lili: "[…] that's why, afterwards, men are afraid of women… do you understand the omnipotence of the mother … of the womb… it has everything in the womb, so why should the baby want to come out? … […] where suddenly its body is detached… where its body is in pieces! It isn't attached to the mother anymore … it needs someone to be there, the man in this case, to help it to make a complete break at the moment when the cord is cut, to tell you: now you're free, you're not attached to her forever…but no, they stick the baby back on the mother! But it hasn't got a chance after that in life…it's normal that he should hate women because he's never been able to get free… […] all men are the same; they've all been brought up in this thing…the Mother…you have to protect the Mother! The mother with a capital M! There are even some that make shitty works of art then! There's one …

Joël, a distant voice without conviction: Hoi! Stop…
Lili: […] there's one… no but when I think about it causes too much harm … simply… you've got to get a sense of proportion… it's funny, it's just by chance that I was in the museum, there's one who makes paintings about maternity… she sighs… they'll have to stop that, it's not all that beautiful!

An exalted Lili continues to talk about dependence on the mother, the loss of self-esteem and the paternity of men. A quarter of an hour where this piercing voice gets more and more like a whirling dervish, drunk with the need to communicate, she spins around, rambling, inebriated. In 1994, Joël Bartoloméo explained his works in these terms: "My point of view is, above all, aesthetic; I'm much less interested in what Lili has to say. I decide that there's always a beginning, a middle, an end, a fade to white or black and an epilogue, it's a slice of life." Lili finds her interlocutor "absent in himself" and continues to blather on. Sometimes she glances towards the camera, wearily, but this doesn't stop her flood of words: if the camera is also "absent in itself", at least it records, it "listens". She seems to liberate herself in front of the camera, personifying the role of woman, the mother, the muse and the actress, all at the same time. An everyday kind of schizophrenia, a sort of tacit game between the artist and his model; with naturalness, Lili could almost be posing.

Nevertheless, Lili is only ever approximately in the frame as if her physical presence were of no interest. Bartoloméo – out of time – films and tries to capture "souvenirs in the present". The camera makes 360° turns, a complete sweep through the kitchen, which stops for a bit on one of the protagonists, only to move on again. Joël Bartoloméo doesn't look through the viewfinder. It's the indiscreet view of a machine that searches through the intimacy.

In 1997, Joël Bartoloméo stated: "When I look back on these moments, we both operate on a personal deficiency: she has the impression of not existing and I have the impression of not being there." The camera makes its presence felt. Lili would even say: "It has changed my life. I've seen myself, that changes everything, you become aware of yourself." This awareness sometimes stops Lili's discourse.

First shot: Lili: Don't film, I don't feel like it. Joël: I'm not filming.
At arm's length, he turns the camera on its own as; Coline (their daughter) and Bartoloméo come into shot.
Third shot: Lili: you'll have to stop… I can't.
The camera sweeps through space.
Lili: Stop doing that!
Shot six: Lili: […] we also understand… No, can't you stop filming me, it's really pissing me off!… we also understand that in the bible, they said that men and women were separate – that's to say there was Adam and Eve … but in fact, that's false – we've got Adam and Eve inside us…

Despite this embarrassment, Lili keeps on with her discourse. On May 20th 1995, Joël Bartoloméo notes in his diary: "Lili feels like a fly in a glass bowl, and she wants to break the glass; I feel like a mechanism that records, I feel her extremely tormented, I'm scared she'll explode, she's like a scorched skin, an animal attached to a chain that's too short, it feels like I'm holding the chain" [1] At each of Lili's remonstrances the camera shifts, "cut the cord", it turns in space. Lili is constantly under the pressure of this omnipresent camera, which has an aesthetic presence that makes one think of a kind of automation of perception for home use [2]. A way of being contemporary with the spread of electronic surveillance, which never tires of watching for the unexpected and impromptu, things that might happen just like that, here or there, one day or another [3]. For Joël Bartoloméo, the crucial question remains: "What do we trigger and why?" We also ask about the presence of the artist, because his participation seems so tenuous. In these works, the artist regularly places himself out of shot and never just behind his camera.

Lili: And you, when you navigate from Coline to me, where are you?
Joël: Me, I'm recording… I'm recording this talking …
Lili: Well, where are you?
Coline he's in the middle…
Lili: You're absent. Finally, you're with neither of us…
[…]
Coline: …he isn't there, he's filming…
Joël I'm far away…

The camera sweeps through space… Lili is here and now. Joël Bartoloméo is lurking somewhere in the souvenirs of the present.

Lili: …you are absent … well, I mean absent to yourself… You are a prisoner in your mother's womb…

Dominique Garrigues

[1] Maintenant ou jamais, Joël Bartoloméo's diary, Paris, Alain Gutharc, 1997.
[2] Strangely, Lili's logorrhoea matches this aesthetic when she talks about education: "[…] there are good and bad limits when you're not centred …"
[3] Paul Virilio, La Machine de vision, Paris, Galilée, 1988.