I Was Seven The Day I Came Back Home Completely Soaked, Gilbert Hage

Artist Hage’s practice does not follow a fixed method; each project develops its own conditions of emergence. Human and non-human elements, nature and constructed settings interact within shifting configurations.

The project began with Danser sous la pluie (Dancing in the Rain). Although the title suggests movement and weather, the staging involved neither choreography nor real rain. Instead, each participant stood exposed to water under a shower stream. Through a series of encounters, the work gradually evolved.

It continued with I Was Seven the Day I Came Home Completely Soaked. Rather than describing a specific event, the title establishes a condition: exposure, return, and a body transformed by water. The work is situated in time while refusing a clear narrative conclusion.

The meaning lies less in what happened—running through a sudden downpour, stumbling, or falling into a pool—than in what persists when bodies are exposed to water. Water creates rhythm, resistance, surface tension, and weight. Skin becomes a membrane, clothing turns into weighted surfaces, and breath gathers above saturated bodies.

Throughout art history, artists have explored suspension and the fleeting instant—from chronophotographic sequences to experiments with movement, gravity, and bodily traces. Hage’s work resonates with these explorations while grounding them in a physical, sensory experience of water and duration.

In the installation, groups of men and women appear along the gallery walls, forming a kind of horizon. The work surrounds viewers without enclosing them. No shared rhythm unites the bodies; instead, their presence emphasizes distance and proximity at once. Encounters occur through water, and relationships persist through the space between bodies.