Guess who is coming for diner ?

Work :Guess who is coming for diner tonight ?

Culinary and participative action aimed at updating  a contacts network on the scale of a city (Montpellier), through the organisation of a series of 16 dinners. The dinners gave rise to the ‘graffiting’ of 16 different segments of one painting. The participants were gathered to see the result as the 16 segments  were joined together and displayed on the first day of the exhibition.

Location : Montpellier 2006.

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Reference text :

Montpellier, one evening in June 2005,

I just cut one of my 2 m / 2 m paintings into 16 equal parts. Going down to my neighbors Thierry and Valérie, I suggest they invite a few friends to their house soon to have them perform on one of these pieces.
That evening, while the aperitif helped, the first piece of the puzzle was covered with drawings and messages scribbled in markers, I took the opportunity to encourage someone to take over and host the second “Rendez-vous” . Bénédicte and Marc agree to play the game by inviting around ten relatives to a “graffiti” session…
In the summer, I repeat the operation several times and things fall into place.
Through successive invitations, I set out to discover a vast network of knowledge whose ramifications spread out in order to better find each other. Thanks to my shared paintings, I access intimate territories which I then situate in the space of my city. By following the traces left by each person, I discover that they are so many radar echoes ending up sketching a colorful topography of social relations.
The contours are moving – moving – because we all evolve in this relationship to otherness like the formal result that will be the great final recomposed cartography. And it is precisely this mutation whose issues my approach seeks to expose.
Make no mistake, opening your door to a stranger is not a trivial act.
For the duration of an evening, the little social game that we play reveals in counterpoint a game of another nature: that in the cogs of a world which does not “go very smoothly”.
At a time when our suburbs are burning, fanned by a wind of populism and xenophobia, distrust and fear of the Other are gaining ground – Everywhere, the doors are closing. The healthy confrontation with a diversity of being and thinking is no longer self-evident. From the dreaded avian flu pandemic to the so-called « war on terror », real and virtual viruses sneakily insinuate themselves into our thoughts and our society to provide spectacle while in their shadow, the field of our freedoms is shrinking like nothing else. In a deadly tectonic, of security drifts into community withdrawals, the peaks of our imagination deflate until they are nothing more than annoying grains of sand stuck at the bottom of our drooping eyelids. However, this evening, I want to open my eyes.
In a brilliant reflection, I see the joined pieces of a multi-colored world. They mix and recompose themselves endlessly, they make me what I am.

You are the pieces of my puzzle. Thank you for being here…