SCULPTURE OF A DROWNING WAVE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN (IN WORKS)
Ecole Centrale Marseille
SCULPTURE OF A DROWNING WAVE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN (IN WORKS)
The burying:
I have been working on a sculpture of a Mediterranean wave for several years.
A short, stretched, crossed, crystalline wave.
Each wave is different in several ways: the wind, moon, temperature, depth of the water, salinity, distance from the coast, current, living
organisms, etc…
A wave from Greenland is heavy, thick, as if filled with earth, with silence; a Caribbean wave carries force for thousands of kilometres,
long, extremely powerful.
Hundreds of drawings, photos and collaborations with researchers are necessary for this piece.
The rejection of the object comes back to the object; time is needed to construct a representation of a small part of what continues to
captivate us: the Mediterranean.
The notion of unity in the Mediterranean is not known for legitimising a territorial strategy, more likely the opposite, the political
project is not the subject matter of learned discourse. The test of time is enough to disprove these simple hypotheses. Researchers tend to
put forward the idea that “the dynamic of a reciprocal construction where each one is the support of the other and then the informant.”
(cf. Barget)
We need to get away from this Braudél-ian hydra, the Mediterranean is a myth (cf. Kayser), but this is not fiction. Entire peoples die
there, drown there by tens of thousands.
So why place a sculpture of a wave, drowned in the depth of the sea, in the middle of the Mediterranean?
Searching for one’s geographic centre and centroid is to question several axes; political and geographic, physical, artistic.
Placing a centre is not sitting down at a table, whatever the terms of negotiation, it is laying the table.
Placing a centre in the Mediterranean is digging into the political question, it is talking about the region of the Mediterranean, which is
synonymous with conflict, it is hearing a sea which carries deadly migration, from Gibraltar to Marmara.
“The sea is beautiful. It ties towns through a network of a love relationship, and of war and love. Blue of course because everything is
blue.”
(Richard Bacquier)
