Squid
Solo show by Pierre-Alexandre Rémy
November 7 - December 6, 2008
Salle des petites colonnes, Friche la Belle de Mai, 13003 Marseille
Squid: a proxy server that accelerates internet connections by caching the most frequently visited pages. It collects, stores, filters, controls, blocks, and redirects searches performed on the network.
Squid: “… the most wonderful phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water; innumerable long arms radiated from its center, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, seemed blindly to gropingly reach after any object within reach. It had no face, no front…” – Moby Dick
In a kind of mimicry, three sculptures settle into this large hall with fantastical features that is the Salle des Petites Colonnes, once filled with industrial activity, now inhabited by its ghosts. Each of these elements uses all the spatial dimensions and structural components of the site — walls, metal beams, columns, floor — as support for its form.
In intimate proximity, the ensemble of artworks and the space nourish one another. Collecting, organizing, redistributing the data that shape its identity and claiming it as their own, these sculptures question the relationship between the viewer’s body and the space, by disrupting the regular and orthogonal layout of the hall, and by redefining within it a more circular wandering, made up of detours and obstacles.
How can a sculptural element, a strange and incongruous form, take on the very elements that constitute a space and replay them within its own logic?
It is the notion of territory — physical, historical, virtual — of what it imposes in terms of behavior and thought, and of the fantastical dimension that may emerge from what is other and unknown, that is at play here, in the midst of this portion of a temple-vestige of a metallic and industrious past.