Déplacements

“40 Seals for Garlon L 60, Saully le Hameau, July 1999,” color photograph mounted on aluminum, 60 x 80 cm
text printed on offset paper, 21 x 29.7 cm

“Déplacements”

is an artistic project that has been underway since 1997. The question of our relationship to the dead-and to death in general in our contemporary society-was chosen as the starting point for a collective reflection (...) This project establishes a mutual commitment over time.

It is an open workshop, where each relationship gives rise to a unique response. The proposal is formulated as follows: a presentation of the project in the document made available to the public for one year, inviting them to become involved in the project

“The collaboration that best allowed me to highlight the political dimension of the project was the work I did with Riwan Tromeur in Burgundy. There was dialogue and mutual understanding, and the commission for about forty lead pieces to be installed at his home—visible in the photograph displayed at La Criée—was the result of a very elaborate process. The dead, chosen in an eclectic yet deliberate manner, come to replace the memory of workers worn down by the working conditions in a factory owned by the artist. This is a response to the danger of an ethnographic transformation of a factory listed as part of Burgundy’s industrial heritage: we did not create a memorial. We found a contemporary reflection of the ways in which bodies are exploited today—not in the workplace, but in the expression of social conflicts (racist crimes, sexual crimes, ideologically motivated homicides, political crimes, and exemplary suicides). In fact, I chose to include in the brochure published for La Criée the case of a political suicide—that of “Human Bomb,” Eric Schmitt, a hostage-taker at a preschool in Neuilly, whose mayor, Nicolas Sarkozy, was a minister at the time of the incident on May 15, 1993. Through his act, Eric Schmitt exposed his social failure as an unemployed computer scientist and attempted to hold politicians—who are subservient to market forces—accountable. His gamble was successful, as he was eliminated by the RAID on the orders of Minister Charles Pasqua. Eric Schmitt’s death was a tragic performance, subsequently downplayed by the media as a case of psychological instability.
I generally interpret the public exposure of a problem in this way whenever there is an act of violence, a crime, or a suicide. Any transgression of the law sheds light on the law itself. Terrorism strikes at random, and states orchestrate the exemplification of death. ”

Lena Goarnisson, interview with Larys Frogier

-- choose from one’s daily surroundings a dramatic event that resulted in the death of one or more people (…)

-- receive at home a lead object, a simple tablet in memory of this person or these people who died tragically.

-- agree to converse and correspond with the artist, and take the time to create one’s own associations of ideas and images, more or less directly related to this event.

-- reflect together on finding a form and trace of this relationship: either by developing a response derived from the content of the relationship itself or from everyday events that occurred during the course of that relationship.