This summer MOMO and I were invited to do our fourth collaboration together for the Bien Urbain festival in Besançon, North-East of France. We worked on two exercises: the first one, called Improbables, was an exercise about doing compositions with pieces of wood in unused gaps in the city. The second one is called Peinture au Cordeau Traceur (Paint Snap-Line) and is an adaptation of the traditional chalk line tool. The technique we developed allowed us to trace long lines on a building of almost any height using paint instead of chalk.
We came up with this idea after noticing a lot of small, unused spaces on walls all around the city. After collecting scrap wood, we loaded up our cart with the wood and our tools. Then, as we walked around the city, we installed simple wooden compositions in every gap we found interesting. All the pieces were put into place using only tension – no nails nor glue were used. The end result were 52 installations found all around the “Battant” quarter in Besançon. On an individual level, the pieces were quite discreet and often looked like some cheap repair work; but when people started noticing the series, they immediately realized that something was happening… We were amazed by how intact the pieces remained and how slowly they disappeared. The hardest part of this project was to try to make the installations NOT look like pieces of art.
Real inspiration...
Peinture au Cordeau Traceur
(Paint Snap-Line)
For this project, we used the traditional chalk line tracer tool as our inspiration and conducted experiments eventually developing a similar tool that enabled us to mark long straight lines on buildings with paint. After a few drawings, we came out with a design and using the material available to us in Bien Urbain’s basement, we built the artifact. We did three tests, threw paint everywhere and finally came up with a satisfactory result.
Pictures by Sierra, MOMO and Eltono.
Thanks to David, Lucile and to the whole Bien Urbain crew.
During summer 2011, I was invited to Leuven, Belgium, to participate in the first edition of Outomatic. This outdoor art festival was made possible by help from the M van Museum. Hans, the festival organizer, told me about all the empty flag posts visible throughout the city streets, and I instantaneously loved the idea to use them for a project. As I knew that MOMO was also participating in the festival, I asked him if he would like to collaborate with me using a process similar to the one we used during the PLAF project to design flags. We prepared 50 flags during the first five days and we hung them the sixth day in the afternoon. It took us a couple of hours to hang the flags and we worked without any kind of permit. This project is called Tiensestraat because it is named after the street where we put the flags. Today, while writing this page, more than a month after the installation, the flags are still flying…
Art Re-Public Festival
Yoyogi Park, Harajuku,Tokyo, Japan
May 5th 2011
My last visit to Japan coincided with the Art Re-Public festival organized by my friend Yusaku. Over the past few years this festival has taken place in the streets of Tokyo to celebrate “Kodomo No Hi” or Children’s Day, an annual celebration throughout Japan. This year however, the festival took place in Yoyogi park in Harajuku.
I was offered the opportunity to do an installation at the event and decided to take advantage of the presence of so many children to do an experiment with one of my automatic painting projects. Four stations were prepared where people (mostly children) could choose randomly between 9 figures, 6 colors, 8 orientations and 289 positions. This choice was determined through a series of simple games. The experiment lasted 5 hours during which 85 people participated and 86 figures were painted.
Video:
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This project would not have been possible without the help of Sierra Forest and the invitation and hospitality of Yusaku and his family. Thanks!
Nova Cultura Contempôranea
Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
March 21st – April 30th 2011 Project in collaboration with MOMO www.vimeopro.com/rojo/nova-rio2011
In April 2011, I participated in Nova Rio Contemporary Culture, an event organized by Rojo in Rio de Janeiro. My friend (and artist whom I greatly admire) MOMO was also one of the artists invited. The organizers suggested we work together to produce an installation that would be exhibited at the Parque Lage. I had visited the Parque Lage six years before and it always struck me as one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen in Brazil. So of course I was very excited when I heard that I was going to have the opportunity to create art in this amazing place together with (for the second time) MOMO!
We had access to a workshop in a building within the School of Visual Arts (which is located in a palace in the middle of the park) and a large amount of unused wood. We started thinking about using this wood in different ways, always keeping in mind that we would construct something non-static and movable. Then we started working on the idea of a modular sculpture that could change constantly. After various tests with different models, we manufactured 23 pieces of wood that could be joined together in a variety of ways. Each piece was designed to fit with any or all of the other pieces. However, we soon found that the possibilities were limited by the condition of the wood, so we tried all the combinations that gravity allowed in the vicinity of our workshop, the gardens and the park. After a week we left four sculptures in the jungle to spend time with the local fauna!
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Photos:
Um pais tropical!
Thank you very much David, the whole team and all the Nova artists.
Festival Of World Cultures
Dún Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland
July 23rd – 25th 2010
In June of 2010 I was invited by the Festival of World Cultures to reconstruct my Astillas instalation. It was first presented in La Culpable galery in Lima in June of 2008 (www.eltono.com/en/exhibitions/astillas). The event lasted 2 days and thanks to the constant public participation, the instalation was ever-changing and new compositions were created constantly.
The astillas arrived in three boxes from Lima.
All of a sudden a carnaval began in front of the instalation!
Back to Peru
In honor of the land where the instalation was first conceived, I decided to send one of the wood chips “back to Peru”…
:)
In these images below, you can see a selection of the compositions done by varios people throughout the festival.
10th International Artistic Investigation Festival of Valencia Museu de les Drassanes
Valencia, Spain
June 4th – June 27th 2009
I’ve been invited to participate in the 10th issue of Observatori festival with my interactive installation Coriandoli (I did this installation for the first time at Cripta747 in Turin in 2009: www.eltono.com/en/exhibitions/coriandoli)
Mexico City and Monterrey, Mexico
October – November 2008
Project produced with the great help of Nrmal
It was first presented during the Mutek Festival in Mexico City.
The Autotono is a mobile installation built in order to explore how people can interact with an artwork in a public space. My idea was to create a kind of puzzle with 3 designs mixed-up and observe how the people can change them trying to find the original designs (or not!). What I was interested in was not to see people completing the puzzle but to register all the intermediate compositions that were created without my control during the process. My idea with this experiment was essentially to observe and learn.
I was interested in observing the results of the Autotono in different situations, so we build it with wheels to be able to move it easily. We installed it, in busy streets, touristic squares, in parties, in a design fair, in a park, in a school…
The name “Autotono” states for automobile (“un auto” is “a car” in Spanish) and automatic (automaticly created compositions, without the intervention of the artist).
Thanks a lot to Ofimodul for letting us use their spare wood, their installation and for the great help of their workers. Pictures by Rafa, Lalo, Nrmal and Eltono.
