DISTILLE, as the title suggests, is the distillation of an existing work into a new form—specifically, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a book that has been with Binion her entire life, embodying the conflicts of passion, religion, family, and fulfillment, brought to life through Flaubert’s extraordinary capacity for detail and linguistic rhythm. DISTILLE is conceived as a multilevel path for the viewer to navigate a contemporary reconfiguration of the book. It is not a recreation of the original narrative structure, nor does it use any of Flaubert’s language. Instead, it presents a constellation of images and scenes composed as an installation of evocative moments, impressions, and fragments—a remembering (re-membering) of the book in video, sound, photographs, objects, and scents, conjuring associations and poetic states without words.
DISTILLE was sponsored by Harvestworks with funding from the Dew Foundation.