Contempt for Change

Grand Tour 2023,
HEAD—Genève
Geneva, CH  





2023

Site specific installation, water-filled steel urinal, embroidery on wet bath towel, facade of microperforated aluminum plates, black wax, blue carpet, ashes, wooden construc- tion palisade, concrete blocks, neon illuminated PVC sign, variable sizes
  


  
In a constrained space, a constellation of heterogeneous forms unfolds, whose interactions generate meaningful tensions. Through their arrangement, these elements materialize absence while making it operative: they open up potential narratives charged with affect and subjectivity, inscribing human presence not as a visible datum but as a structuring remanence. The space thus becomes the site of a mental projection that has undergone a form of alteration, traversed by a latent anxiety linked to the possible disintegration of bodies and the annihilation of places — symptoms of a contemporaneity haunted by the hypothesis of its own collapse.

This project is rooted in a reflection on the dynamics of erasure at work in gentrification processes, particularly within the context of New York City during the AIDS crisis. This period constitutes a nodal point where biopolitical logics of managing marginalized populations converged with a brutal reconfiguration of the urban fabric. Drawing inspiration from Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind (2012), this proposition aims to problematize power relations and mechanisms of spatial exclusion affecting minoritized groups, while interrogating regimes of visibility and invisibility in urban representations.

The installation functions here as a critical apparatus: by mobilizing hybrid strategies — documentary, fictional, and conceptual — it invests space as a site of conflictual synthesis between memory, narrative, and materiality. My approach generally operates at the intersection of media (sculpture, video, photography), fostering a narrative depth that enables a layering of multiple readings. This transversality allows for the activation of visual objects both as archives and as speculative assemblages of the real.

In this work, the objects — resulting from acts of reinterpretation, détournement, or recomposition — are constructed as heuristic propositions: they question the historicity of forms, the regimes of attention associated with them, and the conditions of their persistence. The built environment, as a site of political and social inscription, thus becomes a terrain for critical analysis of contemporary forms of domination, but also a lever for the elaboration of counter-narratives. Through this practice, the aim is to reveal the silent logics that structure exclusion, while articulating affective hypotheses on the possible futures of minoritized subjectivities.