Je me souviens, tu m'avais dit...

Je me souviens, tu m’avais dit que la réalité était si complexe que nos yeux seuls ne pouvaient réussir à la voir.

2019

Multidisciplinary installation commissioned by FIMAV

I remember a conversation I had with a friend from Helsinki. He told me that in his opinion the reality was so complex that perhaps our eyes were not able to fully perceive it. Perhaps there is a part of the reality that is invisible to us? This installation thus questions the notion of reality through mimicry, illusion. This work is very much inspired by a trip to Finland in 2017 when I went there for an artist residency program at Titanik Gallery in Turku.

Various elements:

- The tent-railer is a non-place, a temporary shelter to live temporarily in almost any space. The tent-trailer is like a house but with different operating rules. Here it is a little like a portal overlooking memories that are replayed all at once, in a disorderly way.

-Mushrooms give the impression of generating the sounds that are heard. However, it is a nearby brightness sensor (and connected to a Field Kit of the company Koma Elektroniks) that controls sounds generated by modular synthesis (3 x VCO module). These are hidden under the bench. A small speaker cone placed under the mushrooms plays the sounds.

- A reed suspended above a speaker cone is placed so that the tip of its stem is in contact with the membrane of the speaker cone. The sound of wind is played and the vibration of the membrane causes a slight tremor that spreads to the reed. Here, it is indeed the wind that moves the reed, more precisely its sound.

-A video recorded during a spontaneous excursion in an abandoned tunnel in Helsinki with the same friend mentioned above is played in an iPad on one of the beds. The soundtrack is not played on the iPad, it is rather heard in a small cupboard located at the entrance. It is as if the lived experience or memory had been encapsulated inside the cupboard, changing scale, shrinking. The video was intentionally worked to be destabilizing . One can hear my friend say, "Yes, we want to see it all, not only polished facades, we want to see the real, the raw".

-On the other bed is a black canvas on which rocks are arranged (these rocks come from another installation that I made in 2018 at OBORO, as well as some branches and reeds). Here is a memory of a trip to Japan last year that is at the base of my inspiration. I remember a house where there was a large black plastic tarpaulin on the floor, on which were also large, judiciously arranged rocks. I am inspired by adding small elements here and there: small son or filaments, organic elements or not are either fixed on the rocks or they are left at liberty. A fan blows on them, creating micro movements that visitors can contemplate under yellow lighting.

-In the sink filled with water, pink sand is set in motion by a small pump that blows air. I like the idea of taking an element of everyday life and modifying it, to make it do something unusual. In the case of this work, it seemed to me entirely appropriate to use it as well. It also refers to the Boiling Water Monsters we saw at night in the forest.

-Two napkins from the famous Finnish company Marimekko serve as a question-answer portal. As if the exchange of information could exist between these two elements. One can read on a "Have you seen?" And then on the other the answer "Yes".

-The modelling clay imitates natural elements, for example rocks. It creates the illusion of being a natural material in certain places and it sometimes acts as an unknown material, foreign, a strange substance that seems to invade the space.

- A ziplock bag containing various elements used during my exhibition presented at the end of my residency in Finland. These elements are now locked in their own reality.

-An asphalt rock that I picked up a few years ago when repairing a street near my home. I like to call it the Modern Rock because it looks like a rock but it is not natural, it is made by the man.

-The watercolors roughly represent large rocks that were located in the forest in Turku.

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I would like to thank FIMAV Festival and all of their team members, Pierre Paré-Blais for his precious help and mental support, Tuomas Lilleberg for those crazy moments we spent together and CALQ for their financial support.