AB INTESTAT, 2011
intervention
wreck of a 205, mat paint for car body, stretching plastic film
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This work is the inhumation of a car wreck found on the side of a departmental road. The day after its discovery, after having loader the burnt vehicle in a semi-trailer and transported it in a garage, the carcass is given a succession of “post mortem” care in view of its burial. Transposing to the automobile the secular movements of the embalming, the vehicle is emptied of its ashes, cleaned using a pressure hose, tinkered briefly, and spray-painted to give the illusion of a factory new body. Accompanied by an announcement in the obituary a a local newspaper, the cleaned up car is then publicly exposed, before being wrapped up in plastic film and buried in a fallow a few hundred meters away from the place it was collected from.
For the anthropologists, the burial of the dead predates the concept of civilization. As the rites which surround it, they certify the value given to the deceased and enlighten the comprehension of the relation between men and the world, between death and the sacred. In this piece, the inhumation, which defies the scenario of a car destined to be scraped, is conceived as both a commemoration, the expression of an ultimate form of fetishism which retells the place of object in our society as a utopic invocation of the en of consumerism, at a time where our economic models appear more than ever uncertain.
Regional Contemporary Art Center of Languedoc-Roussillon (exposed at the CRAC from the 30th of September until the 2nd of October 2010). Announcements of deaths appeared in the obituary of Midi Libre (30th September of 2011).
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Photos:
1. the carcass the night of its discovery on the D612
2. retrieval of the wreck by a crane equipped truck
3-5. burial of the wreck with an excavator and bulldozer
