In the artist’s own words, dansetremblenage is her most personal exhibition, as it bears witness to a dark period and her journey to recovery, during which she often asked herself: how and why should I continue making art? During this period, Hélène Bertin accumulated experiences that combined different artistic and healing practices in various geographical locations. The works presented in the exhibition emerge from these journeys, encounters and experiences, which are at once human, botanical, geological, artistic and spiritual.
After spending a year in southern Italy* – during which Hélène Bertin gathered small branches and danced traditional dances from the Vesuvius region, from which she produced her danseureuses sculptures- the artist lived for several months in the Bahia region of Brazil at the end of 2024. It was there, on the sands of Itaparica Island**, that the sketches for the future glass sculptures in the soigneureuses series were born. It was also there, in the mountains behind Bahia, that she explored different contexts and relationships with time and the body, and that she learned the trembling technique, surrounded by vibrant ancestral cultures. On returning to Europe, she continued her explorations in the Dordogne, at the heart of a collective living space centred around dance movement***. She then made another trip to volcanos, on the Aeolian island of Filicudi, where she experimented with self-narrative for the first time. Finally, she undertook a residency in Marseille**** to produce the pieces that make up the second series of sculptures in the exhibition, completing this great external and internal journey.   

Hélène Bertin’s two sculptural ensembles, presented at La Criée, are polymorphic, responding to and complementing each other. At once animal, mineral and vegetable, dance and writing, household goddesses and village totems, containing traces of intertwined realms, times and places, they bear witness to the revival of polytheistic and animistic spiritualities; they embrace the eco-feminist movement.   
A reading space/time prolongs the sculpture space, where visitors are invited to settle into hammocks or on stools to read one or more texts, chosen at random, in the form of a wheel of emotions. For the artist, these texts, which range from essays to poetry, have an oracular dimension.   

The dansetremblenage exhibition straddles the shifting line between rebellion and joy, theory and magic. It invites us to let our hearts and minds beat in unison with the living world. It invites us to learn, unlearn and relearn.
An ode to fluidity and vitality, Hélène Bertin’s art is an art of joy.  

Live. Again. Love. Always. And thus multiply the depth of the hours.