untitled (ma vie de)
2024
Working clothes, thread, glass, wood, metal. Natural bitumen, plaster, wood, mirror, rubber
Variable dimensions
During a period of residence in Clermont-Ferrand (FR) in early 2024, I carried out a site-specific research on the history of the neighborhood La Plaine, a district created starting from 1927 by the Clermont-founded tire manufacturer Michelin to accommodate, fidelize and patronize its working force. Due to its peculiar urban features, La Plaine was long time an isolated universe in which people were born, went to school, worked and paid rent to the same company they worked for. Borrowing concepts such as stratification and anisotropy from the geological and scientific spheres, I considered how culture and identity develop through processes of accumulation whose temporal component exceeds that of the individual and, in some cases, the collective.
The two main elements of the installation (both recalling the idea of dilatation of time relating it to social, geological and analytical-scientific processes) are a table-like object crafted from found working clothes, meticulously sewn and arranged to resemble a geological map where lines of synthesized information and layers of meaning overlap; and a photograph of a monitor displaying an archive photo of an old school in La Plaine whose the factory-like structure seems to raise radical questions about education, work and political life.
untitled (L’Univers)
2024
Diapositive, projector, digital print on plexiglass, wood, metal
100 x 150 x 30 cm
This contemplative piece (realized as well in Clermont-Ferrand) consists in a wooden box containing a slide projected onto a printed image of the universe. The first is part of a series of vintage visual educational materials from the French Ministry of Education and depicts an anonymous factory mechanism in rotational action. The latter was generated by NASA’s spacecraft WMAP after nine years of temperature measurements in space. Like a micro-teather, the piece invites the viewer to approach the wooden box to access the projection inside, reflecting on the idea of technical representation of out-of-human-scale scientific and social phenomena.
