Visual Artist
INVOLUNTARY SCULPTURES
Involuntary Sculptures, the title borrowed from Brassaï’s series of photographs published in the 1933 Minotaure magazine, is a photographic series of daily objects recovered from the Seine river in Paris. These objects were twice carved, first by the maelstrom of water and then by the spotlighting. I arranged the objects in a specific way and built an on-location studio. These theatrical objects metamorphose into new sculptures before our very own eyes. These “New Bodies” become almost sacred as they have been baptized by water and then light.
However battered and mistreated by the surf and the swirl they are, these eroded and rusty objects recovered from the bottom of the Seine River do not seem to want to sink. We think of Paris’ motto, Fluctuat nec mergitur : « Tossed but not sunk ». This motto recalls the successive dangers that Paris has experienced (revolutions, crises of all kinds etc.) whilst expressing the idea of vitality, strength and perpetuity etc. These «New Objects», metamorphosed by aggradation, rise from the mud once again.
This ability to resurface from the mud and the cloaca, this capacity to transmute is called «resilience». The latter is defined as the ability to rebound despite shocks, disasters, hardships or traumas. The object that is abandoned to the Seine River is a metaphor for historical memory. Transformed by water, the object thus becomes an involuntary stimulus for the viewer’s poetic dreams, for abstraction and humor. These are the defense mechanisms and allow for resilience.
At the crossroads of the artist’s imagination and that of the viewer, the image becomes a “survival” image. A new dialectical and anachronistic object arises. New untimely forms spill over the boundaries of the frame. The surface of the image becomes a real visual unconscious “impluvium”. Walter Benjamin confers a magical value to these type of « survival images ». He also detects the presence of the invisible; even perhaps some sort of water sprite (undine) or some kind of «photogenie» as the French philosopher Edgar Morin has suggested.
INVOLUNTARY MEMORY
The Lost and Found Department in Paris is a unique place. Founded more than 200 years ago, it is the oldest department of this type in the world. The Parisians call it «rue des Morillons». I searched for and photographed the most incongruous objects from the shelves in the department’s basement using a Polaroid camera. My idea was to bring them back up to the surface, investing them with a new «soul». In other words, I tried to resurrect them (I’m using the word in its etymological sense). With the image, I wanted to create a link between past and present, as Aby Warburg did with his picture boards where the images are used as memory support and a place to confront past and present. I wanted to recreate a new emotional link with the spectator, as the original one (with the original owner) had disappeared. The Polaroid is a snapshot and a unique object. It replaces the photographed object. A trace or an impression is fixed. But it is an ephemeral object, subject to erasure with time. One could compare it to the allegorical disappearance of its origins. These images reconnect us to our childhood, our past and unconscious memory. The Polaroid camera and the image it produces are objects from a forgotten time and contribute to memorial reconnection. Using the Polaroid is also a way of producing a « mise en abyme », a frame within a frame that opens a window onto the past. These incongruous objects (human skull, blind man’s white cane, wedding dress, etc.) were thrown away or abandoned by an unknown and unseen individual. How was this object lost? By whom? What story lies behind it? These questions may be asked. They trigger the viewer’s imaginary world. The viewer projects himself into these objects guided by his own history, his fears, his desires, his memories, hence his own personal identity. Each viewer has a different imagination. The photographic image thus becomes, like Proust’s madeleine moment, an involuntary stimulus of the individual’s imagination and memory. These lost and found objects have lost their primary significance, their original sense of use. I decided to expose them to the public and reinvest them with a new expression thus turning them into witnesses of a nation’s history. The reflection of our society is in the accumulation that it makes of its own objects. They become the «silent witnesses» of our society’s memory.