"Slices of Life" - 2000 - Exhibition at the Marcel Duchamp Gallery - Yvetot
Sound and video installation - 40 pieces of carpet = 0.70 x 2.00 m, cut in the center to form a seat and rolled backrest. - 1 CD player, a pair of speakers, 1 12-minute audio CD on a loop. - 1 12-minute video on a loop, "The Subject's Behaviors"
This installation takes the form of a "mattress" made up of colored carpet pieces. The central hollow forms a seat, and the backrest is created by folding and rolling the cut piece. Each piece of carpet could correspond to a "Slice of Life," a kind of sample taken from the floor of every apartment, house, or dwelling, whether one passes through or lives in it. The stacking of these pieces, like a mille-feuille pastry, forms an armchair as well as a mattress; it also resembles color or material samplers. An object of folding and rolling, it is in its unfolding that it takes shape. The video, installed opposite the mattress, presents a 12-minute film in which a character dressed in a yellow jumpsuit, "the subject," moves by jumping on the joists of a floor under construction (loss of balance). The sound, which plays continuously and independently of the film, is a grammatical refrain that expresses the different modalities of the grammatical subject's behavior (like the visitor in negative space and the character searching for stability in the structure (of the text) and the ground).