Keyword Arts Plastiques

A young woman who has just started a job at an art museum writes an email to a friend she lived with until recently. The other woman, also young, works as an artist and has just moved to a new city. A narrator reads this email, but we don't know which of the two women the voice belongs to, whether to the sender or to the receiver of the message. Neither are we aware of the details of this relationship; but what we do know is that, in addition to their interest in art, they share a concern for the difficulties of carrying out their personal and professional lives in the present. By focusing on the peripheral or hidden details of some paintings in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, this narrator relates several stories linked to the social, economic and psychological conditions of the artists, both past and present.

Zou tells the story of a man with a missing leg who moves forward more intensely than an able-bodied man. The amputated leg, a phantom limb that he can still move in his mind, is the pivotal point of this story. At the same time a trace of the war that made him lose most of his family members and forced him to flee his country, at the same time a brake on his exodus that made walking painful and more laborious than any of his fellow travelers, it is also the fulcrum for his integration into a new territory.