Reluctor et Emergo
Ludivine Thomas-Andersson

A flood is usually a terrible disaster. But
not for me! I’ve wished I had one all
my life. Until I was 30 when I was lucky
enough to be in the right place at the right
time. I was then the head of an art gallery
that we had just closed, a few weeks
before leaving France to settle in Sweden.
But then I regretted not having been
able to seize this opportunity to create a
submerged exhibition ...
« Don’t dream ».
I will never let anyone tell me that sentence once again.This is the promise I made to myself at the age of 10, little girl from a modest family of the modest suburban countryside of Paris where the sense of modesty forbids the idea of successful achievements. If being rational means this boring unexciting normality, I will be irrational. If nothing is possible, I will work hard with the impossible. If my destiny was a life of labour, my labour will be at least poetic. I will waste my time, waste my money and waste my energy in useless activities. I will not be efficient. I will not be productive. And I will never ever hope for result. All this may sound absurd. Dramatically absurd. As absurd as Sysiphus’ mythological life, the symbol of the human condition according to Albert Camus. The artist’s condition according to Joseph Beuys. The woman artist’s condition according to me.

Born in 1986 in the suburb of Paris, Ludivine Thomas-Andersson lives and works in Lesjöfors in Sweden where she settled in 2018. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts obtained in 2012 at the National-Superior-School-of-Arts-Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC) and since then works as an artist. The year 2016 marked many important events: she cofounded
the artist-run-space Tables.empty.workshop
with her companion Benny Andersson in the town of Montargis (France), it also was the first time she was invited to an institutional artistic residence by the teams of the Drac Nord-Pas-de-Calais within the Lens hospital, and then finally moved to Sweden. She became Art History Lecturer at the Örebro art school in Sweden in 2017-2018 and then moved to
Lesjöfors where she devoted herself fully to the
development of her art. Laureate of a FRESH-A.I.R grant offered by Berliner Lieben, she is currentlyspending 6 months in an International Creation Residency in Berlin.

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Text by Ludivine Thomas Andersson

Photos by Tomas Uyttendaele