Among the works featured in the solo exhibition dedicated to the artist by Le Grand Café art centre “Carré Octogone Cercle” (Square Octagon Circle) is It Was Restored Again, an installation for two slide projectors: an anthology of images and descriptions demonstrating the historical diversity of readings, witness accounts and stories composed around the lighthouse of Alexandria. The work offers a myriad of textual descriptions and iconographic representations, articulating mythical tales, archaeological evaluations and medieval accounts mixed with imagery elaborated from drawings, coins from Antiquity and diverse fantastical speculations. Slide after slide, the legendary beacon is insistently described; over-defined, the ungraspable monument slips from sight, buried under the weight of the polyphony of uncertain readings.

As a counterpoint to the linear nature of It Was Restored Again, the installation Four Thousand Blocks has three simultaneous video projections interweaving stories and metaphors, exploiting the complexity of a tripartite structure. The narratives play out on the central screen while the artist’s hands manipulate transparencies on a lightbox. She talks about her experience – of an artist lost in the meanders of her research – in a clearly detailed voiceover commentary retracing seven stories in which her point of view as narrator continually shifts. At the same time, Ellie Ga talks about moments of lived experience (dives, meetings with the archaeologists such as Jean-Yves Empereur, who she nicknames The Emperor) but also about the myth of the god Toth or historical translation of the Torah... The screens on either side are for their part symbolically given over to the construction of language: the typesetter’s case on one side for the written word and the darkroom on the other for the image, both intrinsically linked to the constant on-screen movement of the artist’s hands – an embodied way of interrogating history that characterises the work as a whole and strengthens the coherence and fluidity of its narrative style.