Le Dédale, art circuit in the public space
Belvès, Dordogne, France, 06/2016
When I was offered to participate in the Dédale in Belvès, I went strolling the street of the village to find ideas and ways to intervene in it. Used to work in cities, to create in the streets of such a charming and harmonious little village was for me a real challenge. Quickly, I noticed the presence of a lot of unoccupied houses with windows blocked with wooden planks. I had the idea to intervene directly on these planks and old shutters to highlight the buildings without denaturing them, without touching their stones. To paint on these ephemeral supports, marginal witnesses of an interrupted activity, provides them with a certain dignity and gives them back an honorable role in the city: support for a works of art.
Somerset House
London, U.K.
Exhibition curated by A by P
3 March – 2 May 2016
Footpaths
Four 15′ walking performances
Black ink on 285 g. FabrianoRosaspina paper 100 x 70 cm, 2′ video
Rules:
The participant of the action selects an area of public space and defines a specific time period.
The perimeter of this predefined space is then circled in a clockwise fashion.
When an outsider visible to the participant enters the perimeter, the participant must immediately attempt to reach the outsider’s point of intrusion.
If the perimeter is further breached during the attempt to reach the initial intruder’s entry point, this subsequent point becomes the new target.
Once an intrusion point is reached, the participant continues circling the perimeter until either a further intruder enters or the time limit is reached.
Finally a drawing is generated; a testimony to the footpath experience.
Generative and participative painting
Cité Brûlard (the “408”)
Besançon, France 03/2016
9 days and 125 participants – project organized by Juste Ici part of a CLEA (local contract of artistic education) with la Butte and la Grette schools.
Thanks to the whole Juste Ici team, to the volunteers (Fany and Sandrine), to the MJC Grette-Butte, to the 408 residents, to the teachers of la Butte and la Grette schools and most of all to the 125 children who participated in the painting.
I have been doing research around the idea of “creating while walking” for a long time now (see the Promenades Project I did in Beijing: www.eltono.com/en/projects/promenades), my last idea was to register friction during a walk and I came up with the idea of RUFO – RUFO is a typical dog name in French and also the name of a toy dog that was released in the 80´s. I decided the four letters would stand for “Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object”.
Basically, I wanted to drag an artwork along a defined path and register the way it decays. I was doing tests around this idea when I was asked to participate in Artmossphere Biennial in Moscow so I decided to do the first RUFO experiment in the street of the Russian capital. I painted 11 wood boards with bold colored graphics and one by one dragged them around the city on different paths I had selected earlier (around the exhibition space, in random neighborhood, around the Red Square, around the hotel…). Each walk was between one and two kilometers, except for RUFO #9 where I walked for 2,5 kilometers and the painting almost disappeared entirely. Having the artwork interacting with the outside was crucial – showing artworks in the state they came out of the studio doesn’t interest me – my idea was to “print” the city onto each board turning them into witnesses of a walk, an experience. On the back of each board I showed the map of the walk and all the data generated (date, time, duration, distance and name of the streets wandered) – note that during the biennial, I showed reproductions of the back of the boards on spare boards for the people to understand better the story.
Pictures by Natalia Solovieva – Thanks to everybody at Artmosspere and to the people from Codered.
The Promenades Project is about walking, observation and spontaneity. It’s about wandering in the city with no pressure, no time limit, no goal apart from walking and enjoying it. It’s about walking with total freedom of time and space to be able to do all that things that you always want to do but you don’t because you have no time. It’s about moving crosscurrent in the city with time for contemplation to be able to observe details that most people don’t notice.
Rules
Rule #1: Walk and, if possible, create something on the way. Rule #2: Only use material found during the walk – the only material I allow myself to bring is for
documentation (notebook, phone, camera) and a bag. Rule #3: Only execute ideas created during the walk – or a predecessor walk. Rule #4: Enjoy the walk.
This journal is a straight chronological transcription of what happened during each walk.
