BURN, 2011
performance (14 sept. 2011)
437 photocopies n/b format A4
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The “burns” are tire marks left deliberately on the asphalt by the back wheels of motorcycles or scooters, a modality of marking of an urban territory generally perpetrated during collective competitions and assimilated, as tagging, as a form of vandalism.
The burn is here a footprint of an arson of a parking lot for two-wheelers of which the artist was an accidental witness. One of the photographs taken during the event was reproduced on a photocopier, the copy obtain acting as original for the next one, and so on as to obtain the complete disappearance of the pattern. The impression, set up to minimize the loss of information (to produce the longest trace possible), will have required 437 copies before the image is “burnt” (before obtaining a white page). The photocopies where then deposited anonymously in the letter boxes of the apartments of the street, from the starting point of the fire until no copies are left a few apartments further, to constitute a street scaled burn.
This work of hijacking is a form of “recovery”, an appropriation of a vandalism act to give it a subjective restitution: fantasy exploration, evocation of the occultation and amnesia, but also escalation, which surrounds the outbursts of violence of a generation which, unable to be included in the group and take a part in the social construction, illustrate itself by its destruction.
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Photos:
1-3. exhibition format: the series of photocopies connected on cyma, list of diffusion of the neighbors of the street (transferred on wall)
4. one of the photocopies of the picture taken the night of the arson (Paris, 1st July 2011 at 4:12am)
