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fragment

2015
Valais, Switzerland
As part of the research project ACA at the art school ECAV in Sierre

Insertions: locating and relocating
material: wood, wheels
dimensions: 2m x 1m x 0,5m
HD Video. Camera and editing: Eric Philippoz

excerpt from the conversation about the work' fragment'

'...the stage is empty and left behind, located and dislocated. It's called fragment. It has been to several places, finding a stage in these staged environment. It started when I went to Zinal. I had been looking into the valley from my bedroom window, opening the shutters in the mornings and wondering what does the end of the valley look like? So I went there, and it looked like a stage set, with few people preparing for the winter tourist season, but still empty. For me, it's also been about moving in this space and being in this space, physically, it's about still images and interaction, framing a view but also referring to the often quoted sentence by Richard Serra saying: removing the work is to destroy it. I'm interested in taking one work and putting it into different locations and to see what might happen, as it happens to me as an artist, too, being in one place and then away again. A stage. It's what the first part of the video is about.... Also, I like the humour in it, it doesn't work, when you look at this structure, it is far too heavy for me to pull it, its unmanagable when it's windy, how do you deal with unforeseen events, not everything can be planned?

So much these days is about drawing distinctions, about juxtaposing. The last years I've been struggling with finding and highlighting connections, trying to find ways to show how things interrelate and interact. It's not that this is the city and this is the rural area and remote, but that everything is interwoven, you can't draw a line inbetween.That's why I've chosen to photograph 'fragment' next to the river, in the orchard and in Zinal where the roads end, so it's all connected.

The idea that this is a window which looks like the typical local architecture, but also like a window that you move around, a set design. Is it the theatrical aspect of the Valais which conditioned and evolved in your project?

Yes, probably, and it is also the challenge of how much can you look behind surfaces when you come new to a place? I don't speak French, I understand some, but how much do you 'get' from a place? I cannot do much more than offering a new surface on top of it, or question it, it's a scratch on the surface.

One more thing is how it all got triggered,it was not just Richard Serra's quote but also from looking at archival material of the former nomadic lifestyle here, when you would move from your farm to summer pasture with your animals, that you could take your house apart and move it to another place where there was food. I got intrigued by the possibility of taking a fragment of a building and taking it somewhere else.'