cycles and projects
I work in contact with human realities. Some projects involve my moving through social, cultural, living, and working environments, opening up a field for creation through this experience. In this way, all sorts of data and objects specific to each context enter the creative process. A wide variety of materials are sampled, collected, inventoried, archived, arranged, reorganized. The people in the environments I explore participate in these processes.
Other projects are based more on situations that I set up in venues associated with art (museum, gallery, exhibition centre, art school), which I envisage as spaces for encounter and experimentation – shared exercises – by instituting a field for creativity around performative actions or presences: I blind myself, I count, I weigh, I burden myself, I carry, and so on. These gestures engage a form of exchange or participation, or they flow from gifts or other items received from participants. As a condition of the process, a sense of connection or reciprocity is established – whence the notion of shared exercise.
These approaches come together and intermingle, sometimes in a single project, fitting within each other like Russian nesting dolls. Indeed, the movement that I am talking about – of artist and creation in different environments – is a situation that may also be set up through an art network; this situation is often disseminated through that network and may give rise to works that are exhibited there. Similarly, spaces devoted to art – to its presentation, dissemination, conservation, and teaching – also constitute human environments to be probed in the same way as other environments.