« Les murs autrefois construits autour de la ville la parcourent maintenant
en tout sens, sous forme de dispositifs plus ou moins visibles dirigés non
plus contre des envahisseurs éventuels, mais contre des citadins
indésirables. »
Zygmunt Bauman
Boulders in the city have archaic characteristics. These deformed objects, scavenged from building sites have been laid down, pulled up, stabilized. Their shapes are drawn from ’nature’. With their inconspicuous, blink-you-miss-it air, these installations, which I call the watchdogs, are anti-elite. They speak to everyone.
I’m interested in the space these watchmen circumscribe. I call upon a world of contradictory feelings, of belonging and exclusion, of keeping safe and keeping out, of serenity and danger. I tease out the silhouette and the sculptural volume that makes each of them unique.
I find them clearly assembled in the outskirts, like milestones setting the limits of empire. I wonder if these watchdogs are an imaginary line of difence against savage dreams, or if, monoliths that they are, they are calling us back to a long-forgotten history.
Urban and urbane, these watchmen open the passage between two spaces, one temporal, banal, the other dreamlike.
