CULTURE WILL SURVIVE, TRUST ME HUN, SAYS AN ANGEL OF ELECTRICITY AND TICKLES MY NECK. I LAUGH INVOLUNTARILY AND WAKE UP
mixed media installation, documents, objects, environments
Cour Vitré, Ecole de Beaux arts de Paris
2022
fragment of False Sun research process
Part of the False Sun research project, the installation sees culture as a hybrid object of transformation of myths, ideologies, disappointed hopes and out-of-context copies bearing the only memory inscribed on their skin. The installation traces a dialogue with existing plaster copies of Discus Thrower (the one who throws the discus) - and his dormant counterpart, Discus Thrower at rest - the one whose action remains potential. It also echoes the giant columns that previously existed here (also copies), which were removed from the main hall as a result of the May 68 revolution in France. Instead, its counterpart was found here from the northernmost point of geographic Europe - Vorkouta, from the ruins of the Palace of Culture; both spaces, although they lie in almost opposite corners of Europe - one from the former USSR, the other from antiquity, where Europe rooted its identity, seem almost as doubles.
The exhibition is a means of activating research documents, where the document can be a record of a failed sunset on the edge of a phantom empire, as well as an experience of the touch of the skin of the foot on the subagent.
The installation appears in response to the context both historical and physical - that of the space of Cour Vitréé, once a harbor for plaster cast copies of Antiquity statues. Consisting of documents, such as 7 channel video-installation, found objects, research atlas reminding that of Aby Warburg, as well as an environment that directs the viewers attention to certain rhymes and connections between different spots of the inside and outside of installation. There is also a dispositif of perception the plaster cast copy of Discus thrower at rest, a dispositif which translates distant vision into skin sensation which lasts depending on the viewers decision.
The present document is the result of a research trip by the artist to the city of Vorkuta in Russia - one of the six columns of the Palace of Culture. The city in the North, the easternmost of geographical Europe, Vorkuta is rapidly disappearing. Founded in the 1930s as part of the Gulag system around the coal mines, it has gone from being a concentration camp to a dream city, supported by the architectural discourse - that of the Stalinist empire, echoing the antiquity - to the ruins, still partly inhabited.
Between a ruin, a document and an uncertain object, while reproducing its real size in proportion to the given space, this column is lengthened according to the parameters of this same space, so that it fills its original height.
