Stay

I wanted to bring together three works, produced in 2009 and 2010, which all spoke of the same thing: travel, escape, the impossibility of "staying" somewhere. They are "One's mind", "L'Homme familier" and "Chaman". Literary in style, each work gives voice to a character who is, in one way or another, confronted with uprooting and wandering. For various reasons, none of them can find their "place". The word "Rester", which is the title of the overall project, represents for them an aspiration as well as a questioning. Formally, the grouping of these works took the form of a black cardboard box, with "RESTER" silk-screened in white on the lid. It contains a 24-page, four-color B3 booklet and a DVD. A limited edition of 200 numbered copies has been produced. The boxed set is distributed by making it available in places authorized to distribute images or writings (museums, libraries, galleries....). The boxed set is placed clandestinely, but according to precise conditions: it must not interfere with the presentation of other artistic works, nor disturb the use of the premises. The final fate of the box - destruction, archiving, re-circulation - is left to the chance encounter with the person who picks it up. This mode of distribution is the only one that is legitimate, coherent and in continuity with the three singular stories that are told in it, and with the impetus from which this work springs: the aspiration to an "elsewhere", an elsewhere where one can "stay" and which finally finds itself in the gaze of another, at the end of an unforeseen encounter. Part of the project focuses on the state of consciousness of the spectator who discovers the object. Curiosity, the attention paid to an incongruous or undesirable object, leads the viewer to a particular quality of gaze that is very difficult to achieve in a normal context where the discovery is announced and predefined. This brings us back to the idea of the "innocence of the gaze" referred to in "One's Mind".