JEAN-MAXIME DUFRESNE / EXHIBITION / EUROLAND

Opening reception : Wednesday, November 10, 2010

17h

“Welcome to EuroLand, a domestic system dedicated to inventorying material, spatial and transcultural production in Europe. Far from being exhaustive, EuroLand would rather generate its own incomplete geography, following the signs of human activity that reveal other, minor spaces with no apparent quality. EuroLand imagines a region shaped by variable realities in their membership of the constantly debated idea of a “new Europe”: the trinational condition around Basel and its area of influence, with Switzerland’s recent entry into the Schengen area; the urbanised regions of Barcelona and Madrid, in a context of economic crisis that currently affects nearly twenty percent of the Spanish population; the megalopolis of Istanbul and its plural realities in a difficult context of Turkey’s accession to the European Union; the undetermined status of wastelands in Berlin or the clandestine sales tactics associated with tourism in Paris, which in their own way challenge attempts to normalise space. During recent stays in Europe, I have adopted an accumulation strategy by building an inventory of images free of association, trying to take a foreign look at a “euro-zone” whose genetic code is constantly changing. From these snapshots, I imagine that there would emerge a material culture revealing its empire of signs and relationships where individuals, objects, places, urban matter and mobility phenomena would be brought together: a “traffic of influential singularities” in a globalized context of space production, mixing the generic with the specific. Would the frictions and instability evident in the sharing of this material be precursors to scenarios for rethinking and reinventing the complexity of the spaces we share and use? Borrowing from the reception hall of a terminal, the installation presented at Sporobole acts as a reading device and draws up a speculative landscape on these questions. Anomalies, infrastructures, adapted street furniture, reconfigured identities, street attitudes, informal economies, cross-border connections, intrusions at the intersection of design and technology: EuroLand records observations and transmits them in a burst. And requires that the reconstruction of these signals
is done elsewhere, at the home of the person who stays there. »

J-M D.

Crédit photo : Jocelyn Riendeau