Connections

Work : Connections

Participatory action which consisted in enabling the passengers in 10 railway stations to communicate via paintings.

A 2 by 2 meter painting was displayed for 10 hours in the hall of one of 10 chosen stations. The passers-by were invited to leave messages on it for the users of another station to answer on the same painting and in the same way. 5 different works traveled through 10 stations during the summer 2006.

Location : Occitanie, France, 2006

Reference text :

June 11, 2006, Perpignan, center of the world.

Inseparable from my relational practice, travel and, even more, nomadism – with what it entails of confrontations, renunciations and wanderings – is a notion to which I am very attached. How better to reflect this than by drawing inspiration from the way Monet did it almost 130 years ago? The “Gare Saint-Lazare” indeed masterfully illustrates his desire to go into the field to impress his canvas as some people at the time already did with photosensitive plates.
Going back in time once again, as busy travelers sometimes dream of doing, I also thought of those famous « lookers » of Duchamp who never stop « making the picture » and of « I is another » by Rimbaud who we summon all the time. In a used semantic accident that didn’t scream « watch out », I transformed it for the occasion into « Game is another ». Because I intend to play, or rather to make station users play, the drawer game of connections.
By giving them markers to write messages on my paintings to users of another station, I would like them to be able to correspond and match each other. And, through this mixture of texts and contexts which, as Derrida would say, makes them “enter into différance”, I would like the evolution of my paintings to represent those that they undertook on the railway network.
Finally remembering that the Perpignan station was, according to Dali, the center of the world, I looked at the way in which all the stations showed, in the most acute way possible, the issues of a being together contemporary is sometimes difficult. Symbolically transposed into my paintings, which I envision as a social space, I hope that the traces left throughout my stages by this crowd of travelers meeting by chance, merge into a eulogy of diversity and sharing. Thinking of the still smoking debris of the Madrid station, I hope to offer a moment of tolerance and openness.

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