BASEMENT

Multimedia installation

2014-2016

In collaboration with Philippe Artières

I have, over several decades of professional work, experimentations and personal adventures, accumulated tens of thousands of photographs, numerous notebooks and documents, many hours of film and video that fills two basements. A small portion of them has been shown, published and sold, and can be considered my current artistic corpus. How to activate the rest of the archives and transform it into a discursive system? How to accommodate the principles of the archive – structural organization that leans toward a comprehensible totality – with the infinity of the possible editings? Under what kind of deployment this mass of documents and images constitutes an oeuvre?
I select, deploy, burn, scratch, cut, superimpose, and cast in resin, while photographing and filming the process. I test the many possibilities of installing those different elements in order to transcribe a certain relation to the word that goes from ontological to a reflexion on the relationships between personal and collective memory. The archives become the source of the production, creating an auto-referential loop unfolding like a dialectical movement between erasure and invention. The result is shown as photographs, videos and sculptural installations. Between invention and disappearing, I want to consider this archive as a subject and not as a ruin.