“Shit! This armchair at the entrance to the studio disturbs me!”

In today’s contemporary art world, Paolo Angelosanto’s work is a genuine encounter between individual and social realities. For several years, his research has been centred on a radical analysis of himself. This process, inherent in his work, is in tune with the outside world.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

A protagonist in performances that he calls “movements of painting,” Angelosanto plays, divides in two, changes, manipulates and restructures various scenographic proposals, becoming the subject of the represented events.

His interventions concern photography, performance, drawing, painting, interactive sculpture, photocopying, video and other mixed disciplines.

Looking retrospectively at both his present and past memories, Angelosanto draws a chart, a kind of contemporary postcard. In the performance Welcome (June 2001), for example, during the inauguration of the 49^th Venice Biennale, the artist set himself up among the visitors with a machine to produce cotton candy. The idea was to make a gift to the public of a biodegradable sculpture, a kind edible energy before they faced the long trip through the biennale. A welcoming gesture in which the viewer, by the mere fact of arriving, entering and observing, would thus create a work using his or her childhood memories.

Some of Angelosanto other works are directed at contemporary globalisation’s sensitive spot: incommunicability. There is the video the artist made during his sojourn at UNIDEE Citadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella (Italy) in 2003: Ten words for Love Difference. Ten artists at the residency were invited to recite ten words in the language of the host country in front of a camera. Likewise, in M’ama non m’ama (Love me, Love me not), in which several people of different nationalities close to the artist play she-loves, she-loves-me-not to the rhythm of the cantilena.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

While historically the artist’s profession has been a rather solitary one in which the artwork was transported from the studio to the exhibition space, and only then did it receive acknowledgement, which according to many, contributed to the work’s completion, for Paolo Angelosanto, this process is a transit between the studio and the museum and a form of reflection on the subjectivities confronted in this context. In accordance with these criteria, Angelosanto conceived of Interno 12 in 2004, offering a number of artists a place to elaborate a collective project, motivating them to produce a work. For one day a month, they would make the role of the protagonist public at an exhibition-encounter in a private space.

“I was carrying out work centred on my own image. I needed to exchange with other artists. I believe that art doesn’t have meaning unless it is seen, unless it has a social aspect or that the public can identify with it. I am not a gallery director, curator or critic, I only was thinking of work that would make me open up and communicate with others. My studio was twelve square metres, I looked for twelve artist from studios and collectives, I gave myself twelve months of work and there were twelve encounters with the public.”

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

This is not new in Angelosanto’s career. There was another in situ work presented in Canada titled Je me souviens. The project consisted in a performance presented in the Saint Roch neighbourhood of Quebec City. Exhibited there were a cement sculpture, two mural works and a video of a trumpeter player dressed in a uniform of the Louis XV era. This event was part of the residency that the artist had at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE in Quebec City in August 2010. The forms used and resulting from the cut out of a cement heart were converted into sculptural elements making up an exhibition in the gallery. This also included two paper murals of 150cm x 150cm. They both represented the flag of Italy, having on one, the text Je me souviens and on the other Qui a tué Pasolini (I remember and Who killed Pasolini). The local population was invited to meditate or to say the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of Italy.

“If all object is, in a some way, immanent to the cognitive subject, inevitable limit of knowledge at the same time as the unique possibility of knowing, what to say about language?” wrote Octavio Paz. “The boundaries between object and subject seem blurred. The word is man himself. We are made of words. They are our unique reality or at least, the unique testimony of our reality.”

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Words thus are transformed into symbols of differences between peoples and cultures, between experiences and representations of the world.

“My main objective is to develop new ideas and evolve as an artist, continuing my research both in the field of performance and in the visual arts. I believe it is possible to make public interventions, using various forms of communication.”

In his project, Je me souviens, Angelosanto tried to establish a relationship, a meeting point, a link between an aspect of his identity as an Italian artist who finds himself in an unfamiliar country and the work that he produced in Italy before leaving. Je me souviens contains all that he needed to elaborate his thoughts and concepts that have arisen since the first day of his residency in Canada.

“But on leaving Italy, one realizes that no matter where one goes, one carries everything within.” Memory, love, solitude, nostalgia for one’s home, for one’s country, the beauty of one’s cultural heritage: “Through this experience, I would like to be able to make a connection between my art and the place, establish relationships with the milieu, and create a synergetic collaboration here with critics, artists, organisations and institutions.”

Thus Angelosanto’s artistic production is an amazing interpretation of the intermediary spaces between things, colours and objects. He refuses the general description: the narration of a story is of secondary importance in his work.

The exhibition turned out to be a choreography of forms. A series of projects, ideas and concepts carried out in full at the last stage, acquiring a new presence.

The cut out of a heart leans against a wall: this is the heart that was pulled around in the streets of Quebec City. The form of this heart was modelled in cement, presenting the weight of this heart, the fragility of this love. Thus the wall sculpture became merged with painting. The artist, who exposed his body to bad weather, dragging this weight, attained a sculptural body language and expanded the work’s narrative. These works are distinguished from the two-dimensional nature of his work on the paper mural. The project concluded with another performance, a work stemming from the other: Je me souviens ends with Angelosanto sitting on a strange armchair, where he weaves a flag, intertwining the colours red, white and green. These colours give a maximum, meaningful tension to the gestures of the hands, producing mental landscapes that we carry along towards a romantic fantasizing. The work is a materialisation of ephemeral poetry, flesh and spirituality, fertile ground conducive to illusion.

In Italy, one calls Garibaldinos those who embark on a business without having infrastructures. Leaving Italy and bound for Canada, Paolo Angelosanto had wanted to represent someone having this type of character. The idea came from the need to play a character who could represent Italy, who as well would be know in North America, and who would coincide with his way of being or who would be able to establish a reference to his way of working. “I think regularly of my way of acting and proceeding,” he says, “I’m an artist who will do the impossible in order to produce my work.”

He arrived in Canada and looked for ideas and inspiration. He found himself in Parc de l’Amèrique Latine dedicated to Simon Bolivar, where there are numerous statues and flags in tribute to the liberation of the Americas. In this square, there were two pedestals without sculptures. He took over the place for a day with the intention of transforming it, in situ, into a genuine living monument, putting into play his own “I” to convert it ultimately into his alter ego, as part of a new social and cultural subjectivity, rebelling against language. He went out looking, searching until he found a place that had nothing to do with his concept of place, a virgin site set up with monuments and statues in which flags waved. But in his Italian way of seeing things, this place had nothing to do with a site that is commonly used to welcome people rather than aesthetic symbols. He succeeded then in reformulating a hypothesis, a process, a vision of the world and for this he “mimicked” himself. He added himself to where there were only the pedestals, placing himself in the foreground where there was an empty spot, where something was missing as a result of restoration or theft. It is a predicate without subject because he poses as a Garibaldino who is superposed on the issue of this solitude, from this perspective, in a site in Quebec City, thousands of kilometres from his city (Cassino? Roma?). Similar to Garibaldi in Montevideo one hundred and fifty years ago, saying to the world that there is a place without place that is nowhere and everywhere, because contemporaneity has been able to reformulate this start and this end as well, which is a new beginning, the concept of “here,” where everyone finds his or her origins.

“Precisely because the work of art and the adventure are confronted in life, they are the one and the other similar to the whole of life itself, such as it is presented in the short encyclopaedia and the condensed existence of dreams.”¹

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

This is the artist’s real and imaginary trip across the city and at the same time, an invitation to be confronted with social contradictions: a way of revealing the codes that efface meanings, accentuating the destabilizing effect.

I will chance a last thought: in his work, Angelosanto goes beyond the boundary between personal and collective space, reconfiguring a reality that in contemporary art appears definitely organized, thus inverting the nature of this quest for his own language. So his challenge is transformed into a defiance of art. As well, I say that the fact of going and producing cotton candy at the Venice Biennale is a gentle and perfect provocation. This has to do with love, in the most profound sense of the word.

1. Heidegger, Martin. 2014, De l’origine de l’œuvre d’art. Paris: Rivage editions, 120 p.

Is it the case that people, places and things are only what we think of them? How can we put ourselves in the shoes of the Other? The artist Luis Armando García is interested in the role that tourism and criminality – as reductive as they are antithetical – have played in shaping the image of Mexico. In Viento del Norte, he sought to present another reality of his native country – far from stereotypes – that of ecology. However, it is not easy to abstract the violence that bears down so heavily on everyday life in the country. This violence poisons the climate, and is carried by the winds of the North. And so it was that, irrepressibly, dramatically, Viento del Norte changed shaped over time, and became Linea de Fuego.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

García’s extended residency at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE enabled him to explore his social, professional and personal identity from a range of viewpoints. It enabled him to understand, in new ways, the places from which people speak, and to reflect on the subjects of which people speak, and how they do so. As an interrogation on the nature of identity, appearances and communication, the substantial body of work that the artist produced during his stay expressed perfectly the fact that places, things and people are, to a significant extent, what we think of them, and what we make of them.

Viento del Norte was both a poetic and meditative installation that centered on the correspondence between the rigorous desert climate of the Zacatecas and that of the Quebec winter. Drought, as much as intense cold, influence social behavior and mood. Despite environmental differences, and differences in modes of adaptation linked to geography, in both cases tension plays a role in creating a form of anticipation and a particular means of naming meteorological phenomena such as rain and snow. A metaphor takes shape around this observation: that of the possibility to feel empathy for the Other based on one’s own experiences. This metaphor was translated with both sensitivity and efficiency in Viento del Norte by means of juxtaposing contrasts, albeit involving similar forms. Many visitors were amazed at how a Mexican, from a desert region, with no knowledge of snow, so clearly expressed the reality of the North, and furthermore with objects inspired by, or modeled after, forms used in arid areas to gather rainwater.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Such was García’s exploration. Beyond forms of prejudice that categorize people and destroy communication by affirming the differences between people and things, García seeks out that which is common. He identifies similarities, and based on these he extrapolates and constructs bridges that cross the divide between appearances and differences. This is no simple strategy, and it is one that has a precise effect. It endorses the artist’s discourse on the circulation and perception of identities, given that these are the very objects that he takes and re-stages in his creative process. The porous rocks that are used to filter and purify the all-too-rare water in the desert have featured in a previous group exhibition in 2002 in the town of Zacatecas. Once relocated to Quebec, they are replicated and molded, literally, on the local context. These water receptacles, chalk-white in color, cone-like in shape, whether in liquid or solid form, perfectly evoked both heat-waves and waves of cold. And so, that which travels, he who travels, is transformed, penetrating the universe of the Other, by means of his own experience. Given that we know both the heat and the cold, we can imagine the torrid and the polar. However, for those who have difficulty with one or the other, it becomes arduous to imagine living in such states on a daily basis. And for those who have never experienced frost, it is difficult to imagine that it can cause burns just as painful as those produced by fire.

The same can be said of violence. For those who have no real experience of such things, it is difficult to imagine the effect that it has on people. Imagining violence as a part of daily life is horrible for anyone who has experienced, even once, any kind of traumatic event. When the reality of the Other is too distant from one’s own, so there are obstacles to empathy, to the process of “approximation”, which gives way instead to indifference or contempt.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

As a Mexican citizen, representing his country, Luis Armando García is situated at the point of convergence between attitudes that he indicates he often encounters amongst strangers. These fluctuate between a conventional exoticism, the denial of responsibility (faced with the humanitarian catastrophe and distress of the Other) and moral judgement. He finds that younger people are often more open to, and moved by, the political content of his work, perhaps because they are in a process of self-discovery, they are more open to the reality of others. The artist’s experience of the gaze and the perception of viewers is noticeable, and his concern regarding the judgement of the Other often surfaces. He mentioned on numerous occasions his pleasure at walking the streets of Quebec City, without the fear of being attacked, and without the burden of the perpetual tension that is, he explains, palpable throughout Mexico. When fellow Mexican performers arrived in the town and asked whether he had any recommendations of places to go, he suggested that they, “walk around the city and savor this unusual feeling of ease.” He insists that Mexicans are no more violent than the Quebecois. Rather, violence has taken hold insidiously over the years in the country, in connection with crime, and often linked with corruption. What can be done, faced with the spread of criminality, which now operates openly, including in his home town? Barricading oneself in, becoming a prisoner of one’s own fear, is hardly a solution. In succumbing too much to the mindset of protection, there is a loss of belief in the possibility of change. And so taking a position and acting has become a necessity for García, and this is a choice that he makes both in his personal and professional life.

This is why the white and fresh energy of Viento del Norte gave way to the heavy and threatening atmosphere of Linea de Fuego. Whilst the concept of the first installation was clear to the artist prior to coming to Quebec, the second installation, whilst present, lay more dormant as a concept within him. Linea de Fuego was grounded in the deterioration of the situation currently in Mexico and the grief of the recent death of a friend, a victim of assassination. Following the first few weeks of his residency, and the completion of Viento del Norte, García was faced with the proposition of unsettling things and stating, clearly and with urgency, that reality is something other than what lays before us; that life is more than appearances, and that just as poetry can be violent so violence can give rise to poetry. Moreover, poetry can be laden with tension.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The second work staged by Garcia dealt less with violence than its consequences, those of feeling trapped and powerless faced with the unknown. A number of elements, as coherent as they were troubling given their unfamiliarity, coalesced to create a no man’s land, where it seemed that anything could happen, for better or for worse. A sinister bunch of chains stood out immediately on entering the space. These were suspended from the ceiling and anchored to the floor, a hanging form that moved almost imperceptibly with the action of a motor. Visible through these iron tentacles, a web of electrical wires clung to the wall, with small bulbs hanging from their ends, like the synapses of the nervous system. Projectiles hung in front of them, in mid-air, like lead lines, sounding out obscure regions of the human. A lugubrious noise brought shudders: water in a pool bubbled as, on the surface, archival footage depicted the words of a hostage, who was soon to be assasinated. It is clear, without explaining each element, what the overall effect of the works suggested and demonstrated.

Beyond this, a noticeable feature of the work, for those who had witnessed Viento del Norte, was Garcia’s reuse of all the elements of the previous work. In a manner of speaking, the artist had dislocated, dismembered, kidnapped so to speak, the constituent parts, the witnesses of his first work, torturing and disposing of them in a completely different fashion to say something entirely new. A number of works, presented as paintings, bore the traces of their previous incarnation: plaster marks, rust stains that, along with the spectacular cone-like forms that now dripped rust-colored water along their once-immaculate form, spoke of bloodstains.

On a final note, it was astonishing to observe that fragments of fractured concrete paving stones in the space were hanging by a bare thread, which seemed mockingly, to symbolize the fight against the chaos all around. Yet, one must intervene, act and gather together the pieces of that which is broken. Such a gesture is not naive. It does not pretend to repair. It is a form of testimony. It is a matter of taking position and, faced with the undeniable difference of the Other, not succumbing to cynical fascination, to comfortable indifference, or to moral condemnation. This is important, because in the end people are to a significant extent what we think and what we make of them.

What another has seen fit to throw away, you must examine, dissect, and bring back to life. A piece of string, a bottle cap, an undamaged board from a bashed-in crate––none of these things should be neglected.
– Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things¹

Object hunting: this is the task that awaits the Anna Blume character when she crosses the threshold In the Country of Last Things. As Paul Auster depicts it, objects occupy a central place in the world that is ending because they are very rare and consequently so precious that it becomes hazardous to throw anything away. Scavenging becomes a way of life and although Anna Blume could choose to keep the objects and pieces of things that she finds, she sells them instead to the city’s Resurrection Agents who convert them into new goods and sell them on the open market. If all kinds of things and all sorts of motives exists for collecting objects, if their gathering is at times carried out as a survival instinct or if it then becomes a form of expression, in any case, it indicates a state of being completely alert to the world just as it tells of a certain relationship to it.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

For Le poids des objets the project that Raphaëlle de Groot began in 2009, she gave herself the task of collecting objects that people no longer want and that are found at the back of drawers and at the bottom of cupboards for want of being disposed of. These objects then come from the private space and enter the world of the artist who makes a collection of them so that they can resurface in her work. Far from being a passive activity, the collection for Raphaëlle de Groot becomes a genuine performative act. This is because through her artistic practice, she “redefines” the accumulated objects and gives them a new context for existing. The collection becomes an entity in which things can happen, and is a place for actions and interactivity: ideas of the past, present and what is to come emerge freely through images and performances.

Her collection is made up of a group of objects all more unusual the one from the next, as much for their origin as their history: handles, cabinets, cookie jars, tea pots, straw baskets, storage bags, record player, telephone, wooden shoe, plastic flowers are now her property. Each of the specimens carries its past with it. In fact she collects what people give her and does not screen her collection because the beautiful and the ordinary – if no longer of use – find their way to the artist.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

But for Raphaëlle de Groot, thing are not “exempt from the task of being useful,” to repeat the words of Walter Benjamin² for whom the collection became a permanent fixture that accompanied him wherever he went.³ With an intention other than that sought by the philosopher, the artist also makes her collection occupy all kinds of places and spaces when she transports them on her journeys and to her residencies. Her collection is permanently moving and no place contains it nor retains it. She literally puts it on and wears it, her body becoming the support and the vehicle. It is enough to look at the photograph 1273 petites choses inutiles to see the extent of it: the artist’s face literally disappears under the mass of tied up objects. The collection becomes image, so to speak. Just like in the video Porter in which de Groot, dressed up in her objects, walks around in nature, stopping to eat and rest and then moving again, continuing on her way always all loaded up. The artist continues to put herself physically to the test with the accumulated material – that becomes a language – and she seems this time to want to experience the very notion of collection through her wanderings, revealing how much this becomes an extension of herself. One should always collection oneself Jean Baudrillard already affirmed in his seminal work.⁴ The collector then should be his own collection and should change with it. But the version that Raphaëlle de Groot proposes shows instead how the collection adapts to her practice and closely fits her wanderings throughout the world. Notably when she passes through security systems when she is travelling, checking in at an airport with a suitcase containing 70 objects that have no apparent use, and to then have them wrapped up in cellophane tape for her return. This is what she placed in the centre of the gallery at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE in the winter of 2011, the bundle of objects presented as proof with its YUL ticket intact.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The artist thus directs our attention to the complex system of transactions with which she surrounds her collection. A new stage in her investigation however has taken form during her residency: that of research and indexing. A list on the wall gives an account of the comparison exercise that she began with the Museum of Civilisation’s collection. Here she draws a parallel between the objects that have been passed on to her – that are now her responsibility – with those that have been placed in the institution’s storage and that attest to the “daily life” of the Quebec people. She now is busy creating comparisons, detecting resemblances and identifying common denominators. A legend at the bottom of the list expresses her thoughts through coloured highlighting and reveals numerous similarities. The interest in each of her objects is communicated here through their association, as if the artist is endeavouring to reveal them to us differently. She emphasizes the uniqueness of each of her “specimens” and goes back to their distinctive features to study the details. Because the objects that she keeps “code” a human experience, she is now the guardian of this incredible ensemble that is lodged there. The storage space is now her new workspace.

Thus, Raphaëlle de Groot’s uses neither showcases nor display cabinets to exhibit her collection-work. Her presentation instead is repeated in each case, this being a matter of photographs, performances, videos, lists, bundles and collector cards. Through her research, she has shared the same burden as that of all museums: the possibility of understanding reality through preservation. No load seems too heavy for the artist who, relentlessly, composes with the proliferation of things and following the example of Anna Blume, becomes a ragpicker of leftovers and recyclable items.

1. Auster, Paul. 1988, In the Country of Last Things. New York: Penguin Books, p. 36.
2. Benjamin, Walter and Peter Demetz. “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century” 1978, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 348 p.
3. For this see Jennifer Allen’s forward to Je déballe ma bibliothèque, Paris, Payot & Rivages, 2000, p. 7-31. The author tells of Walter Benjamin’s years in exile when he was obliged to leave Germany in 1933 because of the Nazi Regime. She relates how difficult the decision was for him to leave behind a part of his collection of books that his friends would endeavour to save from destruction.
4. Baudrillard, Jean. 1996, The System of Objects. London, New York: Verso editions, 205 p.

According to Peter Zumthor, the materiality of architectural space should be defined by the sum of the perceived space not the materials or objects in isolation. This also should exist in the collective effect of the visual and acoustic qualities of the built materials under certain conditions of situation and time.¹ Viewed in this way, the notion of materiality that plays a part in a given gallery space and that makes the visual and sound parameters interact is the occasion for revisiting Le long de la 20 en passant par la 15 an exhibition of Jonathan Villeneuve’s works presented at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE from March 17 to April 17, 2011. Although the artist’s two electromechanical installations are a physical construction of various material and technological components, they also propose the elaboration of a system of interaction and interrelation: the materials become the players in a network of exchange and dialogue among the works’ various parts, between the installations and the viewer’s experience. These interactive properties develop with the movement that animates the machines, creating vibrations and undulations: they provide the material with the potential for expression, a poetic dimension.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Through the various exchanges, a dialogue is carried out between materiality and immateriality. We understand immateriality here as the continuation of materiality, as Florence de Mèredieu states, citing Ezio Manzini, “The new matter from which to draw inspiration no longer has the physicality of tangible material; it is presented instead as a combination of possibilities and performances, as the possible that emerges from the producible in a technical system capable of carrying out still more subtle manipulations.”² Villeneuve’s installations propose a passage between these two states due to the notion of fragment and trace that they generate; and also, because immateriality is viewed as a material component of the works, which generates a sound environment.

Opening in the Materiality: Architecture as Fragment, Trace and Memory

Villeneuve’s works are structures in which the framework is exposed: the cogs that form its core are shown to the viewer and thus, the distinction between the inside and outside of the work is blurred. In other words, the frame that structures the installation becomes the work itself.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Villeneuve’s redefinition of the frame’s boundaries is revealed in Faire la vague (2009), one of the two structures in the exhibition that is both skeletal and colossal, constructed of solid material, in this case wood. This piece play on the boundaries of the support and act on the viewer’s perception, presenting a series of juxtaposed planks that move. Hence, the infrangible vision that this imposing wall could have generated is replaced with an image of instability, indeed material vulnerability, by cutting the material into beams that suggest a steady oscillation. Here, the architectural composition creates a fragility that is accentuated by this movement of the material. Both stable in its framework and instable in its movement, the work creates a paradox. The breaking up of this seemingly monumental structure displays, in fact, an animated materiality in which the whole gives way to fragmentation. The interstices make up the work: the openings, fractures or fissures form the core of the structure.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

This architecture that seems to deconstruct gives way at first to a visual opening, as part of the physical and then psychological space of the gallery, filtering into the mental representations of the viewers who can place themselves either in front of Faire la vague (2009), catching sight through its rifts of Mouvement de masse (2010), the second structure in the exhibition, or else to move inside this second installation composed of grasses so that one can discover the frame. One way or the other, the viewer has a simultaneous encounter with the two electromechanical displays that both carry out continual movement. While Faire la vague uses natural wood elements to distort the initial appearance, integrating them into an elaborate composition, Mouvement de masse artificially confines fragments from nature, regularly aligned plant stems and through a mechanical process simulates the wind’s movement. Plants and wood are in dialogue then to produce both the work and its structure. Following this idea of voluntarily showing the armature, the electromechanical installations present the raw materials transformed without ornaments or artifice. The use of this material within the gallery lets one see a sociological dimension in the works, demonstrating the submission of nature that is now manipulated, mechanised, even artificially reconstructed in the gallery space. It is controlled and given regular movement, as we have seen, but it is alienating as well, recalling manufactured or mechanized work.

Villeneuve’s structures evoke the urban and rural environment, presenting fragments of organic and utilitarian elements, as if they had become a trace of nature, an exterior place transposed into the limited space of the gallery. The exhibition title, Le long de la 20 en passant par la 15, indicates the artist’s wish of bringing the works together, recalling the various natural components that border highways. These works seem like evidence of a past linked to a personal or collective history. The reminiscence and memory of similar temporal and spatial moments are recreated then in the memory of the visitor who has had the experience and can imagine them again through this setting, this time in a fictional way, through the constructions that act as a deconstructed narrative display.

Acoustic (Im)materiality: Sound as Interactive Material

While the spatial configuration of the moving installations presents a critical dimension, the work takes all its meaning from the sound aspect the machines produce, which add to the spatio-temporal reality the viewer experiences. Villeneuve had already experimented with notions of light and sound in the electromechanical installation Trace (2007) in which the light source acted as an intrinsic element of the work, supported by a rhythmical sound frame. He expanded this sound dimension in Faire la vague, which gives the viewer more than just an auditory setting, adding the creaking noise of the cogs and the interstices that, as explained previously, participate in deconstructing and fragmenting the built structure. In fact the materials knock together and produce a regular rhythmical background sound. Mouvement de masse creates similar sounds that immerse the viewer and detach the work from any mimetic sound references to the initial grass environment, asserting more the mechanized transformation that has occurred.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The importance given to sound attests to its legitimacy as a material, as a “plastic ingredient,” and diverts any possibility of relegating it to an accompanying tool, subjected to visual constructions.³ The sound substance perceived as autonomous material, the result of the moving mobiles, enables both simultaneity and a succession of various acoustic elements that are organized or at least, are blended together. In this way, a temporal dimension is inserted within the installation work and is part of the work’s sound structure. From this perspective, “the sound is to time what movement is to space, a principle of organization and of disorganization,” according to Florence de Mèredieu.⁴

These sound environments that mechanical sounds produce are capable, here again, of activating the viewer’s mnemonic faculties, which may associate these noises with recognized sonorities and visual images. Combined with moving material that recalls urban or rural settings, the installations increase the dramatization and illustrate a more deconstructed narrative. The viewer’s phenomenological experience, in short, is that of an immersive environment that succeeds wholly by emphasizing the sound material that the mechanical installation produces, favouring continual movement over the motionless object.

Passages

Jonathan Villeneuve’s architectural installations create an “impression of immateriality” that the viewer experiences: viewed as a counterpoint to the physical elements, the underlying parameters such as time, sound and movement, when combined, seem to construct the very finality of this mobile spectacle.⁵ This vision can be supported by Bergson’s thesis according to which the formal composition constructed in its static state becomes passage. In other words, in the perception of reality, according to Bergson, the legitimacy of form is denied its actual immobility for mobility: “There is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition.”⁶ In this idea of instantaneity and mobility at the very core of exchanges, the boundaries between materiality and immateriality create ambiguity, they seem to become porous, indeed hybrids; the tangible and intangible elements merge to give the viewer’s experience its full potential.

1. Zumthor, Peter. 2006, “Atmospheres: Architectural Environments: Surrounding Objects” in Dagmar Reinhardt and Joanne Jakovitch, “Trivet Fields: The Materiality of Interaction in Architectural Space”, Leonardo, Vol. 42, No. 3, p. 217.
2. Manzini, Enzio. 1989, La Matière de l’invention. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou editions, p. 52 quoted in Mèredieu, Florence de. 2008, L’Histoire matérielle et immatérielle de l’art. Paris: Larousse editions, p. 483.
3. Mèredieu, Florence de. 2008, L’Histoire matérielle et immatérielle de l’art. Paris: Larousse editions, p. 548.
4. Ibid., p. 542.
5. Souriau explains that a material work may “try to give the impression of immateriality”. Souriau, Étienne. 1990, Vocabulaire d’esthétique. Paris: Presses Université de France, p. 910.
6. Bergson, Henri. 1929, L’Évolution créatrice. Paris: Alcan editions, p. 334.