Ministère de la Culture
182, rue Saint Honoré, Paris, France
3 avril – 3 mai 2015
Périmètre au Sol est la mesure exacte de la ligne qui sépare l’espace public de l’espace privé autour du bâtiment du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication dans la rue Saint Honoré à Paris. J’ai dessiné la ligne obtenue sur quatre grands papiers (3,70 m x 1,40 m), chacun représentant une façade. Le code couleur utilisé est le suivant : deux couleurs chaudes pour les façades sud et ouest et deux couleurs froides pour les façades nord et est.
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.
Désolé, cet article n’est pas encore disponible en français. En attendant, vous pouvez toujours le lire en English.
Moscow, Russia
September 2014
RUFO – Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object
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.
Désolé, cet article n’est pas encore disponible en français. En attendant, vous pouvez toujours le lire en English.
Ongoing project
November 2013 – today
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.
Désolé, cet article n’est pas encore disponible en français. En attendant, vous pouvez toujours le lire en English ou en Español.
53 lines made of 5 points
Zestafoni, Georgia
October 15th – October 18th 2013
2,40 m. x 85 m.
This is the second time I ran this random wall painting experiment; it was executed for the first time – statically – in Bari, Italy and was called 8 Linee attraverso 4 Punti.
For this second attempt, the painting expanded to the right. Each line was made of 4 segments passing through 5 randomly positioned points on a plane (1,6 x 2,8 m. vertically centered on the wall). Once the X and Y coordinates were generated, the 5 points were marked on the wall, joined together from 1 to 5 and the segments were painted with one of the 8 randomly selected colors. Then the plane was moved 2/3 of its length to the right and the next set of segments was generated. In four days, we managed to paint 53 figures.
Panoramic animation (pass your mouse over the image to move it).
This project was made possible thanks to Zestafoni Ferroalloy Plant, Tamara Bokuchava (socialphotocaucasus.org), Nini Palavandishvili (geoair.blogspot.com) and George Okruashvili.
Panoramic animation (pass your mouse over the image to move it).
Based on the idea of a running frieze that would tie the neighborhood together, I painted each individual spot envisioning a design that would run from door to door. At first I thought we would ask the people and then paint, but actually the project turned out differently. The first door I decided to paint was the entrance of an abandoned house so we decided to paint it without asking permission. While I was painting this first door, locals who were passing by asked us what we were doing and started to spontaneously offer their own doors. At that point I decided that it would make more sense to just follow the flow of people offering their doors – that way I wouldn’t control the way the frieze was growing in and around the neighborhood.
Rustavi is the fourth largest city in Georgia. During the second half of the 20th century, the city was rebuilt by the Russians as an important industrial center with around 90 factories implanted on its territory. Chkondideli, the neighborhood where we worked, used to be a dormitory neighborhood for immigrants working at these factories. After 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, almost all the factories were closed down and the unemployment rate jumped to 65%. Today only two factories are still in use.
Pictures by Tamara Bokuchava and Eltono.
Thanks Tamara, Nini, Data, Manu, everyone who helped to accomplish the project and of course all the residents from Chkondideli.
In parallel with my participation in the Wooster Collective 10th Anniversary Show at the Jonathan Levine Gallery, I was invited to paint a huge mural on one of the side walls of the BQE in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
Panoramic animation (pass your mouse over the image to move it).
Process pictures:
(Click on the picture to enlarge)
Thanks a lot for the great help from: Mike “Little Kang”, Hope, Matt, Sierra, Mariana, Leila & Brian, Laine, Corina, Russell, Joel & Brad, Theresa, Tara, Mary Kate & Fede, Kym, Kathryn Yerg, and the photographer Daniel Greenfeld.
