The Inner World of Salomé
- Domino Leaha
- 59 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Salome. She's not only one thing ... she's a lot more. She’s a fairy
dream ...
A talented actress and artist who mostly lives in a “wobbly world,”
and maybe comes from another era, even if she's super young.
Talking to her felt like being in an old French movie or in a secret
garden from the 19th century, or like coming out of one of her
cabinets of curiosity.
A few words...
First, a poem:
I read this when I was in high school. I often think of the first
sentence,” lingering onward.” It quite speaks for itself.
A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky by Lewis Carroll.
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear —
Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?
Then, a haiku:
I wrote this when I was seventeen. It is engraved in my notebook I
always carry with me wherever I go.
rats,
dancing in the dark,
in a purple bikini
And about me ...?
Who are you right now?
Arg... A bit silly these days;
My totem would be an elf, maybe; “strong but swiftly passing passions, easily moved to laughter, anger or misery and as quickly calmed, insatiable curiosity.” Or, depending on my mood, “strange little girl” by The Stranglers, “les gens qui doutent” d’Anne Sylvestre, or “Behind blue eyes” by The Who.
I’m also always late, unorganized, talkative and smiling most of the time; Yep that’s me.
What is The most important thing in your Life right now?
Trying not to overthink things?
What is home for you ?
I am unsure how to describe home. Maybe home is an inner village. How I construct the void I live in. With who I construct. Where I put my affections, where I bring my affections.
I am very sensitive to the space I am in. When I was a child I never played with my dolls but used to spend hours constructing their homes, doing huge installations, most of the time in paper and tape. What stayed with me is the need to construct a bubble around myself. Often, when I sleep in a hotel, I reorganize everything in the room. Home is maybe a way of being at ease with the space I inhabit. Being surrounded with objects, materials, colors, but also people who I love. Lots of little fragments of my soul gathered as a village.
Where were you before Paris? Where is home for you in this moment?
At 18 years old, I got accepted at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Because it was a good school, I didn’t even think about the fact that I was moving to a different country. It wasn’t a conscious decision of “I want to move away,” just a simple consequence of it. I ended up in the Netherlands for four years. I felt truly imbalanced and quite sad, as if my roots were pulled out.
It’s the only time I truly lived away.
I was talking about the idea of home just before, and I think that Paris is that place for me at the moment.
Working as an actress, I will have the chance to move a lot, and live glimpses of lives in many different places I wouldn’t have thought about, and I like that. I like it because I know it's just a moment in time before I go home again. It has a lot to do with being close to my loved ones.
What are you doing in Paris when not working?
The frontier between working and not working is quite blurry to me. It is all mixed up in my daily life. I believe that being a curious, specific observer of little life banalities is such an important part of my work. The same goes for acting (looking at how people act in the everyday, listening to strange conversations in the subway, or just a gaze in a café), then creating pieces (how things are naturally placed in a room, an intriguing sound or color). But a more literal response would be: I walk a lot. I do everything on foot. I have a UGC illimité card that I always carry with me, so I go see a lot of unexpected movies on a hunch. I see my friends a lot. I very much like the serendipity of Paris, where you run into someone and end up staying all day and night with them.
Dream home - describe?
A little house that walks. (it would have little red shoes like in “The Wizard of Oz”), or flies, or both. A bit like “The Castle in the Sky,” by Miyazaki, but with a chameleon skin that adapts to the place it goes to, so I could go to different locations depending on my mood, and the house would adapt to it. In Paris, it would maybe look like the Farnsworth House from Mies van der Rohe (visited while in Chicago when I was 12 and fell in love with it). In the countryside, it would probably be all made of wood like Jean Prouvé’s house in Nancy. While flying in the air, it would become “the curtain wall house” from Shigeru Ban, with curtains flying everywhere, no walls, able to touch the clouds... The only thing that wouldn’t change is the enormous number of windows. Light is my number one need. Also, there would always be fresh coffee on the stove, pickles of all kinds, friends around for never-ending dinners, and an inherent ciné club every Sunday without exception.
Do you live alone?
I am moving alone for the first time in my life this month! I have been moving from one apartment to another every year for the past 7 years. First with friends, then boyfriend.. All my belongings have been in storage for a year now. It is quite weird not to remember what you own anymore, and to realize that you actually don’t need much. It is a bit as if I put all my past life in a box, locked it with a key and didn’t look back for a year. But it’s damn time for me, my movie projector, my ceramic monsters, my vinyl record player, my pajamas, and myself to move in together, all alone. It feels very grown-up, I guess.
Do you ever feel overwhelmed while at home?
I can easily become overwhelmed with my thoughts in general, but I wouldn’t say the feeling is linked to home, or perhaps a messy inner home. I get messy while hating the mess; so its a “snake biting its own tail” kind of situation where I suddenly get stiff as a rock, and want to throw everything I own away and live in an empty white space.
Dream diner table guests, alive or dead, and why?
A morning, “damn fine cup of coffee” with Dale Cooper. I've been watching Twin Peaks, and I am obsessed. Maybe then the right continuity to it would be a lunch with David Lynch, where we talk about weather. In the evening I would cook some pasta a la vongole and invite Chantal Ackerman, Marguerite Duras, George Sand, Francesca Woodman, and Francoise Sagan to have dinner. Then I would end the night dancing with all of “The Forever 27 Club” until early morning.
Oh! I suddenly thought about a dinner table seated with only ancestors of mine from different historic eras, so I can truly understand where I came from and analyze patterns. That would be fun.
Favorite book and film, and why?
I am super indecisive as a person, so asking what my favorite anything is rips my heart in two. There are some pieces that stay with me forever though, to which I go back to in any doubting time. Three books come to my mind (of course, I wouldn’t choose just one). The first book is Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, by George Perec. He is a genius with words, so inventive and playful; silly also sometimes, which is great. The book starts with a white page and ends with space, which I think is a beautiful metaphor of any artistic process. The second one is Letter to a Young Artist, by Rainer Maria Rilke. I go back to it any time I am a bit lost with why I do what I do and the way I do it. The third book is The Dance of Reality, by Alejandro Jodorowsky. This one is for when I lack magical faith in the world and need a little spiritual reminder. Also, I love the format of correspondence in general, especially written by people I admire. I also think biographies, or autobiographies, teach you the most wonderful stories.
Talking about things that last forever, I grew up watching Demy’s movies on repeat. I had this DVD edited by le Monde that had two sides: A. Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, B. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. I must have watched it 200 times. A real “Madeleine de Proust,” but generally I hate re-watching movies I have already seen. I work with retrospectives. I get obsessed with a director for a period of time, watch all I can until I start nauseating, and store
it in a corner of my head to remember (I hope) in another life moment. Lately I have been digging Alice Rohrwacher. Genius.
An imaginary world and why is it important for you in your practice?
Maybe I am a bit goofy, but I love playing. I love games. I love stories, myths, and fables. The crossover between the imaginary and reality. What we tell ourselves, the lies, the enhancement, the magnificent. I think we are often too serious. As an actress, I get to experience the physical embodiment of an imaginary character. Playing with myself as material, but in the specific way of being true to reality, plausible, and natural. As an artist, it is more a play with the unnatural, the hare-brained, the grotesque. Playing around with space or object as material can also be with myself, of course, but in an inverted process of disrupting the truth, moving my own memory around, playing with what scares me. I think that both really feed one another. And, in a way, my “physical Home”/my apartment, is where it all converges. It is the neutral space where fragments of me (Salomé), the characters I play, and the characters I create all meet up.
Heirloom/objects important for you in the process of becoming an artist.
I have been fascinated with Cabinet of Curiosities for a while now. Same kind of curiosity with religious iconography of altars, especially when there is a conjunction of bizarre little things put together by different people that would normally never have met each other. My home is made that way: it looks very random, but every singular object is chosen and placed extra carefully, next to another. The space between them is also chosen. Most of the time I associate things I made with things I found or that inspire me. A postcard, a note, a DVD, a ceramic, a little painting of a foot, a guitar keychain, or a lucky candle. I spend a lot of time just looking at them alone in my apartment. Depending on my current obsessions, I move them around, replace them, reorganize them. The stories behind objects are important to me. Notes that people leave, small attentions, family heirlooms, I believe in their magic powers. I imagine my work in the same way, in dyptiques, tryptiques or in series with different materialities and sizes. How they tell a different story when next to each other, how they complete each other. In that sense “home” is just an extension of the pieces I make. Or in another perspective, maybe the pieces I make are an extension of my inner home.
Talent: Salomé Rose Stein
Photographer: Anna Prudhomme
Curator: Domino Leaha
Producer: Elizabeth Bernet